Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
Thomas Jefferson
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
Buddha
If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you will never enjoy the sunshine.
Anon
Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.
Mark Twain
Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble.
These are important to me so I can keep myself from slipping back into the narrow-minded pit that I crawled out of.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates
“There are no facts, only interpretations.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.” Fredrich Nietzche
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” Voltaire
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices” - William James
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A man does not look under the bed unless he has hidden there himself.” - French proverb
I’ve discovered that there are a thousand other situations to which that proverb applies, besides the infidelity scenario. For example, a boss who thinks her employees are always goofing off when she’s not looking probably at some point spent a lot of time goofing off when her boss wasn’t looking. It’s basically pointing out the fact that most of us expect other people to behave the same way we do ourselves.
We have the same proverb in Dutch. “As the host is, so will he trust his guests”.
My Dutch/English dictionary says the same proverb exists in Engelish: “Ill doers are ill deemers” .
You know, I thought it was Voltaire but I thought I remembered looking it up and it was some unexpected person. I once used it in an endcap display on totalitarianism in the science fiction section when I worked at Borders. (it was a fun display, I had 1984, Farenheit (oh, god, it’s not 911 but that’s what’s stuck in my head now), Brave New World, etc.) But looks like it’s sorta Voltaire: cite.
"Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people. "
“He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.”
“The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.”
Life’s not fair—my dad
Life’s not fair: do you think we deserve all the good luck we’ve had?—me to my family
There’s not a heart that ain’t been broken
a lie that ain’t been spoken
a shattered dream that brand-new love can’t fix.
I’ve been burned
I’ve been cheated
but this ole heart’s still beating
Don’t look back
it’s just whiskey under the bridge.—Brooks and Dunn
