Had this on my computer for a while. Decided to add it today being the 4th of July and all. Thought up most of these and quoted some I found off the internet. Feel free to add your own. 1. Life is not fair, yes, but that doesn’t mean that nothing can be done about it to lessen it. 2. Life is complex and there can be no one solution or answer to one problem without having to solve another one as well. 3. Try not to dwell on people who willfully refuse to change or willfully refuse to listen to anyone else. It’s a pointless endeavor. 4. Everyone thinks they know what the “truth” is. a. Disregard those who have to resort to violence to achieve their “truth.” b. Some truths are more potent than others. i. Some are based on facts and statistics others are based on emotion, ignorance and hearsay. 5. People are dumb, a person is smart. 6. Things change, sometimes not in the way you expect them to. 7. In times of grief, suffering or anger, your mind is your own worst enemy. 8. Life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but at the same token it’s not all doom and gloom. a. To get hooked onto one particular side is dangerous. 9. Some obstacles in your life are caused by your own stubbornness to change. 10. Change is constant and inevitable. 11. Control your impulses. a. They only last for a brief amount of time and if you doing nothing about them, you may see your life run by them. 12. Some people who give advice usually don’t believe they need some themselves. 13. Generalizations of people, persons, places or events are dangerous to hold (Refer to Rules 2 and 4 if necessary). 14. Tragedy is tragedy no matter who experiences it. 15. Suffering only lasts as much as you allow it. 16. Blaming other people and playing the victim is easy. Owning up to your problems is hard. 17. Happiness is a by-product of events in your life, not a goal. 18. Choose wisely or suffer the fate of others choosing for you. 19. Learn when to speak and be heard and when to shut up and listen. 20. Do the right thing even if you only do it alone. a. Or if people demean you for it. 21. Think ahead. a. One decision you make now could hamper your life or others around you in the future (Refer to Rule 12 if necessary). 22. Easy, happy, stress-free lives are ones devoid of humanity (Refer to Rule 18 if necessary). 23. Sometimes, advice is not the kind that we would what we want to hear. 24. “Peace” obtained by violence, torture and/or death is not peace to be followed. 25. There are pyschos out there. Be careful and be observant. 26. Try not to follow behind a hypocrite until they learn the error of their own ways before they ostracize others for them. 27. Sometimes, the loudest person in the room is the dumbest, the most insecure or the most narcissistic. Perhaps all. 28. Most people would rather find the easy way out than to push through and work something out. 29. Psychological, emotional, and verbal abuse can be just as bad as physical abuse. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 30. What might work for you may not work for everyone else. 31. If you have to hate someone, hate them for what they do, not for what they look like. 32. Try to avoid the herd mentality at all costs (Refer to Rules 5, 12 and 22 if necessary.) 33. Opinions shouldn’t be silenced, yes, but that doesn’t mean that they all should be agreed with or respected. 34. Free speech does not entitle anyone to be verbally abusive to anyone else under that pretense. 35. Don’t let your life be determined by TV or movies. Remember, those are fiction. 36. Rarely, if at all, do things come your way by doing nothing at all. 37. Sometimes, you have to do something you hate in order to get to do something you love. 38. Don’t jump to do something simply because you were in a good mood. Chances are that you won’t commit to it for very long once the good mood fades. (Refer to Rules 12 and 22 if necessary.) 39. Question everything, even the things you hold dear. 40. Even your idols have flaws. 41. Everything you know or live by could be changed or altered dramatically by tomorrow. 42. The person who is truly crazy is the one who decries that they are the only sane person on Earth. 43. What you do affects others around you even if you are oblivious to it or if you stubbornly refuse to accept it. 44. Violence is the answer at times, but not always. 45. Men can and do cry and they are not “less of a man” for doing so. 46. Sometimes you might just have to go with the flow. (Refer to Rule 38 if necessary.) 47. Most people don’t know how powerful they can be as a team. 48. Try not to base or sum up your life while on one emotion (See Rules 2, 4, 8, 9, and 23 if necessary.) 49. While it’s hard, be grateful for what you have now. Don’t wait for calamity or tragedy to force you to do so (Refer to Rule 42 if necessary.) 50. Try to forgive others. a. Hanging onto a grudge ruins what peace and happiness you could have had. 51. To find out who is in charge of you, find out who you’re not allowed to criticize. 52. Try to prepare for the worst. (Refer to Rule 42 and 50 if necessary.) 53. Try new things. 54. Have a laugh once and a while. 55. Get back up and try again even if you are afraid to fail. 56. Ask before you assume anything (Refer to Rule 14 if necessary). 57. Think mostly with your brain. You can never go wrong like that. 58. People lie. Some more than others and some more serious than others 59. Judging people defines who you are, not who they are. 60. You can never truly love someone or be happy with someone unless you love yourself first. 61. Everyone dies, most people exist, but few know how to truly live. 62. Money doesn’t buy happiness, yes, but it does buy options. 63. Life is never about us vs. them; it’s about us vs. ourselves. 64. The way to reach out to someone isn't to talk to them, but to listen to them. 65. Not saying no is not the same as saying yes. 66. We all want to hear what we want to hear. 67. We all eventually judge others by their actions while ourselves by our intentions. 68. If you can’t take criticism then you are not worthy of accepting praise. 69. Everyone has problems and the people who deny them are worse than the people who admit to them. 70. Sometimes you might have to hear the gruesome problem to conceive a perfect solution. 71. If you rely only on other people to feel good about yourself, then your happiness with yourself is in constant jeopardy. 72. Try not to not waste energy worrying over things that are out of your control. 73. Invest in something meaningful. 74. Never ruin a good apology with an excuse. 75. Kind words are free but worth so much. 76. The only people who never make mistakes are those who never do anything. 77. If someone doesn't enhance your life get them out your life. 78. Don't have a good day, make a good day. 79. You can never really know a person until you've seen how they grew to become who/what they are at the present day. (Refer to Rule 2 if necessary) 80. We usually hate most in other people that which we hate about ourselves. 81. Real life is never as simple as a 10 second news clip. (Refer to Rule 2 if necessary) 82. When you enter an argument assuming you are right, you have stopped thinking. 83. Raising your voice doesn’t necessarily make your views automatically correct. (Refer to Rules 8 and 10 if necessary). 84. Age doesn't automatically make you more correct than anyone else. 85. Judge people for who they are now, not who they were before. (Refer to Rule 51 if necessary.) 86. When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. 87. Some people have no idea what they are doing. 88. You cannot change what you refuse to confront. (Refer to Rule 11 if necessary) 89. Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. 90. Sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly. 91. No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying. 92. Making one person smile can change the world – maybe not the whole world, but their world. 93. The only normal people you know are the ones you don’t know very well. 94. Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it. 95. It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company. 96. As we grow up, we realize it becomes less important to have more friends and more important to have real ones. 97. Giving up doesn’t always mean you’re weak, sometimes it means you are strong enough and smart enough to let go and move on. 98. If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. 99. While you’re busy looking for the perfect person, you’ll probably miss the imperfect person who could make you perfectly happy. 100. You can’t learn from your mistakes if you deny them. 101. In life, if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything. 102. When you stop chasing the wrong things you give the right things a chance to catch you. 103. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come. 104. There isn’t anything noble about being superior to another person. True nobility is in being superior to the person you once were. 105. Trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. 106. You will never become who you want to be if you keep blaming everyone else for who you are now. 107. People are more what they hide than what they show. 108. Don’t listen to what people say, watch what they do. 109. Being alone does not mean you are lonely, and being lonely does not mean you are alone. 110. Learn to love yourself first, instead of loving the idea of other people loving you. 111. Someone else doesn’t have to be wrong for you to be right. 112. Be happy. Be yourself. If others don’t like it, then let them be. Happiness is a choice. Life isn’t about pleasing everybody. 113. When you’re up, your friends know who you are. When you’re down, you know who your friends are. 114. Don’t look for someone who will solve all your problems; look for someone who will face them with you. 115. If you expect the world to be fair with you because you are fair, you’re fooling yourself. 116. It’s better to know and be disappointed than to never know and always wonder. 117. If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. 118. There are things that we don’t want to happen but have to accept, things we don’t want to know but have to learn, and people we can’t live without but have to let go. 119. The strongest people are the ones who feel pain, accept it, learn from it, and fight through it. 120. It is very easy to dismiss someone else’s problem if you’ve never lived it. 121. If you have to yell to make your point, you've already lost the argument. 122. Usually, people who demand the most respect deserve it the least. 123. You’re not depressed because life has gotten you down, your depressed because you don’t (or won’t) know how to get yourself back up. 124. You don’t win an argument by being the loudest or rudest person in the room. 125. People are pretty bold when they think they are free of consequence. 126. Stubbornness is the first sign of fear. 127.
I'd be more comfortable if you were able to give citations/credit for the ones you found on the internet. I know, the person you're citing probably cribbed them from somewhere else already, but... I guess I feel like we should be even more sensitive to intellectual property concerns, since we're a writers' site.
Like I said this was years ago when I made this. I forgot all the sites where I got some of them from.
"A special snowflake is nothing in a snowstorm, but a snowstorm is nothing without snow." Paraphrased from a friend.
A lot of these seem to have been lifted from, and re-stated less succinctly than, Desiderata... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata. And I have to take issue with this one, which flies in the face of the Wisdom of Crowds... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
That's a very large post. It feels a bit like a breach of etiquette to put it all in one post. Most people aren't going to want to read a hundred quotes, I feel. But I'd say my main ones are; "Always try to imagine the other side", "Assume things are complex until you know otherwise", "The logical default position on any given notion is skepticism" and the accompanying "The burden of proof is on the claimant", "Caring is a constant fight against apathy and ignorance" and of course "Minimize harm".
Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away, and you'll have his shoes. — Jack Handey
Threats - make sure you take the right ones seriously. Treat electricity with respect. Plumbing is just bullsh*t. I like this thread. I'm bookmarking it.
You, yes, you reading this, share one incredible trait with every single person on this planet; you are utterly unique. Probably paraphrased from somewhere. Don't compare yourself with others. I have never met anyone who wasn't dissatisfied with some aspect of their person, either in physical appearance or personality. Maybe I've not met enough people, but I believe that statement holds true.
