“Never pass up the opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”

– Canopyflyer’s Mother circa 1982

“Work smarter, not harder.” - Scrooge McDuck

It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.

• Jean-Luc Picard. In Star trek: The Next Generation s2e21

“This too shall pass”

Attar records the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled wise men to create a ring that will make him happy when he is sad. After deliberation the sages hand him a simple ring with the Persian words “This too shall pass” etched on it, which has the desired effect.

I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next  one.

-Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

We evolve, beyond the person that we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance with each turn. That’s how a drill works!

Simon, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

“We don’t care what music you kids love, so long as you have music to love.” From the Hopeless Savages comic

The one that’s keeping me going nowadays is Samwise from The Movie:

Sam: It’s all wrong By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

• Be excellent to each other
• If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried
• If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment
• The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.” - Abraham Lincoln (or honestly a like a dozen different other sources…this one has many different variants).

I’m going to butcher it, but it’s something like: The more you learn the more you realize how little you know.

“To strike another blow for freedom allows a man to walk a little taller and hold his head a little higher. And while he can, he must.” - William J Brennan, former justice of the US Supreme Court. I keep it taped to my door to remind me why I’m here.

With great power comes great responsibility

Serenity Prayer:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

I’m not religious at all, but you can just kinda omit the first 3 words and the meaning is the same.

It’s pretty much the basis of Acceptance Commitment Therapy - which is an effective way to manage anxiety and depression.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”

“Comparison is the thief of joy”

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” - Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”

Great quote. But sometimes I think “twice” was overly optimistic.