“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.”

“Whenever I’m about to do something, I think, “Would an idiot do that?” And if they would, I do not do that thing.”

“Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
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“I fear for anyone caught between what they know and what they don’t yet know that they don’t know. ”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. ”

“You wouldn’t care about what people thought of you if you realized how seldom they do. ”

“
Besides, the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

“Did you see the sky today? Talk about blue! ”

“Not all treasure is silver and gold mate.”

“We laugh at honor and are shocked when we find knives in our backs. We follow those that cheat and steal. Look in my eyes! You won’t find your way back! Our only compass smashed under our own heels, under our iron will. The Abolition of Man is within the reach of science, but are we so far gone that we’ll try it? ”

“Self + Close People + Strangers = 100%”

“Imagine you’re walking through a forest one night and you come to a clearing and you find an eternal fire. It’s the perfectly sized fire and it doesn’t need anything from you. You dont have to put wood in it - it just burns and burns. And you can spend your whole life seeing by its light and being warmed by it and so on. I think that’s an awesome fire and if you find one you should be grateful, but imagine that you dont. Imagine that on your travels you never come across an eternal fire.  In that case you have to build a fire and find fuel to keep it going and sometimes it’ll go out and you got to start a new fire. And in some ways that’s worse but in some ways it’s better because, unlike the eternal fire, you understand how and why it works. Point being, I would argue that the light and heat from both fires are equally real.”

“
We all have some crazy urges from time to time. You just can’t act on them. You have to bury them way down deep inside. You have to say ‘Get out of here you crazy urges! You are not welcome in this brain of mine!”

“She could not carve out exceptions for her moral convenience.”

“Turn the light out, say goodnight / No thinking for a little while / Let’s not try to figure out / Everything at once ”

“What have I been telling you since you were a boy? Whenever something bad happens to us, something good happens – often to someone else. And that’s The Good Luck of Right Now. We must believe it. We must. We must. We must. ”

“Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind.”

““Here’s what I mean by building your own little subculture,” Morrie said. “I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things - how we think, what we value - those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone - or any society - determine those for you. ”

“Perhaps the satisfaction is in the journey of questioning.”

“Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don’t wait.”

“Wisdom over correctness. ”

“Remember that it is we who torment, we who make difficulties for ourselves – that is, our opinions do. What, for instance, does it mean to be insulted? Stand by a rock and insult it, and what have you accomplished? If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective?”

“Shallow are the souls who have forgotten how to shudder.”

“Belonger > Believer ”

“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? ”

“See us through the riddles of our individual lives and help us see the beauty of our…perpetually stumped nature. ”

“Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”

“Discipline is making the choice between what you want now and what you want most. ”

“A good name is rather to be had than great riches, and loving favor than silver and gold.”

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. ”

“Turn around and quote a well-known psalm: Don’t you worry about the wicked, don’t you envy those who do you wrong. And your innocence will be like the dawn while the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun.”

“Fairness is more than deciding the best way to distribute the positive. We also have to determine how to allocate the negative. ”

“But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside.”

“What you aim at determines what you see, and what you see is what there is. ”

“We’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?”

“I’m allergic to choking hazards.”