Always take your job seriously, never yourself.
This is what Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom.” When the external constraints are loosened, when a person can do what he wants, when there are a thousand choices and distractions, then life can lose coherence and direction if there isn’t a strong internal structure.
Change your behavior and eventually you rewire your brain.
Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future. People who look backward to see the heroism and the struggle that came before see themselves as debtors who owe something, who have some obligation to pay it forward.
Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.
You should ask certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? What do I want from life? What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me?
People become solid, stable, and worthy of self-respect because they have defeated or at least struggled with their own demons. If you take away the concept of sin, then you take away the thing the good person struggles against.
We really do have dappled souls.
As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t.
Thankfulness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, said, “is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.
The hard part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked.
Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing.
Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland.
For example, the early Girl Scout handbooks preached an ethic of self-sacrifice and self-effacement. The chief obstacle to happiness, the handbook exhorted, comes from the overeager desire to have people think about you.
Our society suffers from a crisis of connection, a crisis of solidarity. We live in a culture of hyper-individualism. There is always a tension between self and society, between the individual and the group. Over the past sixty years we have swung too far toward the self. The only way out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment – the things we most deeply yearn for, yet undermine with our hyper-individualistic way of life.
You did it instead because you reordered your loves, and as Augustine says again and again, you become what you love.
Individualism says, You have to love yourself first before you can love others. But the second-mountain ethos says, You have to be loved first so you can understand love, and you have to see yourself actively loving others so that you know you are worthy of love. On the first mountain, a person makes individual choices and keeps their options open. The second mountain is a vale of promise making. It is about making commitments, tying oneself down, and giving oneself away.
Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.
Montaigne’s example teaches that if you have realistically low expectations, you’ll end up pleased in most circumstances.
A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.