“If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.”
– Chinese Proverb

“Money can’t buy you friends but it can buy you a better class of enemy.”
– Spike Milligan (1918-2002)

Nomatter how much money you have or don’t have, there will always be people around that look down on you or will want to bring you down. With less money, most people will consider you worthless to them. With more money, most people will despise you and will find ways to knock you down so that they can look better. If you give in to these social pressures, you’ll never win.

The fact is that money, riches and material possessions will come and go. They’ll constantly arrive and depart from your life.

Your internal sense of self-worth, however, is destined to be permanently wealthy – focus in on that, so that regardless of what you receive or lose in your life, you continue to take action from a place of love, friendship, appreciation and compassion.

“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.”
– Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, pioneer of international postal flight

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.”
– William of Occam (1300-1350), originator of “Occam’s Razor”

“Named must your fear be before banish it you can.”
– Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor; author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”

“These individuals have riches just as we say that we “have a fever”, when really the fever has us.
– Seneca (4 B.C.E. – 65 C.E.)

Wealth comes to you due to the past punya karma that you bind. This is a consequence of your actions from the past that bind these karma.

However, when wealth does come, by becoming consumed by money and material objects, rather then using them for your own development, you become a slave to riches. Wealth will go as quickly as it comes, and it will come as quickly as it goes.

So avoid trying to hold onto it too tightly, or thinking that it’ll stay with you forever – because it’ll keep coming and going.

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.”
– Mark Twain

How much conflict are you experiencing each day, and really, how much of it is just in your own mind? What are your most pressing problems right here, right now? Which of those are real in your experience, and which of those are only illusions within your mind?

“I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
– Herbert Bayard Swope, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize