Shoe Dog

He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.

Vienna, that momentous, coffee-scented crossroads, where Stalin and Trotsky and Tito and Hitler and Jung and Freud all lived, at the same historical moment, and all loitered in the same steamy cafés, plotting how to save (or end) the world. I walked the

You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then.

hated war, but I loved the warrior spirit. I hated the sword, but loved the samurai.

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself,

Perfection in the art of swordsmanship is reached . . . when the heart is troubled by no more thought of I and You, of the opponent and his sword, of one’s own sword and how to wield it. . . . All is emptiness: your own self, the flashing sword, and the arms that wield it. Even the thought of emptiness is no longer there.

self is the obstacle, the enemy.