Some of my favorite short, pithy, instructive sayings.
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A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of an absent friend, or some other favorable event lifts your spirits and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to subvert people is to have more fun than they do.
– Bill McKibbon, ecologist & activist
The indigenous simply have a better time than we do.
– Jean Liedloff
For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost.
– proverb
You can’t better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy, to be effective, must be mechanically applied.
If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller
We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse
– title of a book by Micheael Meade & James Hillman
He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
To him who has much, more and more is given. But from him who has little, even that which he has is taken away.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.
– Jesus Christ
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It is useless to try to willfully change ourselves. We are much too entrenched in our own habitual patterns and in maintaining physical and psychological survival. In fact, sometimes the more we focus on trying to change ourselves, the more our patterns strengthen. But there is a way out.
– Purna Steinitz
My daughter will teach you our ways. Learn well, Jake Sully. Then we will see if your insanity can be cured.
–Mo’At the shamaness in Avatar
There’s always a purpose in nonsense. Don’t bother to examine a folly–ask yourself only what it accomplishes. (Ellsworth Monkton Toohey in The Fountainhead)
You’re free to change your course, but so long as you follow it, you’re not free to escape its logic. (John Galt in Atlas Shrugged)
– Ayn Rand