If it takes only two minutes, do it right away.

What is better: to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?

“Everyone has what they deserve”

Choosing means losing a little, said by a teacher in highschool when I was struggling to decide what to do after I’d graduate, still remember it 12 years later

No matter where you go, there you are.

• Buckaroo Banzai

This can be applied to anything, but the quote as I read it in a book by Piers Anthony (I know, gross, I was in middle school), was:

Power is a means to an end. Don’t let the means become the end.

I often think of it as:

Money is a means to an end. Don’t let the means become the end.

“Freedom is not a goal, but a tool”.

-Reiraku (Downfall) By Inio Asano

“Don’t work yourself out if a job.”

My pops told me this after I told him how much more work I had been doing than my coworkers, and how fast I got all of my stuff done. This was like 15 years ago. I immediately started pacing myself, and I’ve since been infinitely less stressed at work.

There’s this quote attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

There are two lessons here. First - the best way to affect meaningful change is to start local. Rather than spending a lot of time agonizing over national politics, get involved in your community - your neighborhood, your town, your apartment building, even just the house you share with your family. Your community will take better care of you and the other people that you care about than any national government ever will.

Second - ultimately the only person whose behavior you can change is your own. Don’t be too harsh with other people when they don’t behave the way that you believe they should. Be a more stringent judge of your own behavior.

But temper that with this:

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much. Or berate yourself too much either.

Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Baz Lurhmann

“Sometimes. at the end of a sentence, I come out with the wrong fusebox. And the thing about saying the wrong word is a] I don’t notice it, and b] sometimes orange water given bucket of plaster.”

I think we can all take something away from that.

Bill Nye: “Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t”

My Uncle once told me that the most important thing you can learn is where to find more information.

Seriously though:

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. — Douglas Adams

You can’t help people that don’t want help.

Goes for people who are going through mental/physical health problems or substance abuse issues. If they don’t want help you have to accept that and be there for them when they do.

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe