Love

You want my opinion? We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.

~ Robert Fulghum

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Which are necessary

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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Then you read

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was reading books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. An artist is a sort of emotional historian.

~ James Baldwin

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False dichotomies

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; A world where we are always moral and our enemies immoral.

~ Saul D. Alinsky

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Age-old struggle

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle—the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.

~ Douglas MacArthur

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Together

Humanity has begun to understand that we will all rise or fall together—that we are bound together, as we live together. People are listening more and more to the voice which speaks this inside of us.

~ Lucy Malory

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Real change

Change—real change—comes from the inside out. It doesn’t come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior with quickfix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the root—the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential paradigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world.

~ Stephen Covey

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Virtue

The simplest, quickest and surest means to becoming known as a virtuous person is to work on yourself, to actually be virtuous. Examine each virtue, and you will see that they all were achieved with work and exercise.

~ Socrates

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Drawbacks

The very shortcomings which make others difficult and unbearable mean less in yourself. You do not see them, and when you speak of other people having these drawback, you do not notice that you are describing yourself.

~ Jean de la Bruyère

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Mistakes

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

~ Thomas Carlyle

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In the bricks

The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: Posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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Self-reliant

Being self-reliant is critical. To make yourself less dependent on others and so-called experts, you need to expand your repertoire of skills. And you need to feel more confident in your own judgement. Understand: We tend to overestimate other people’s abilities—after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing—and we tend to underestimate our own. You must compensate for this by trusting yourself more and others less.

~ Robert Greene

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Clever

If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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