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“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not here to live up to mine.”
--Bruce Lee
"Act with kindness, but do not expect gratitude."
--Confucius
“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.
Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers."
--David Cain
“Typically, people who are complaining don’t want a solution; they just want you to join in the indignity of the whole thing. You can almost hear brains clink when six people get together and start saying, ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ This will damage your brain even if you’re just passively listening. And if you try to change their behavior, you’ll become the target of the complaint.”
--Trevor Blake
"How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them."
--Benjamin Franklin
“Each of us has our own set of patterns, our own bridges to cross. Some of us are stuck in habitual ways of seeing ourselves as vulnerable, incompetent, lonely, unlovable, stressed, or tired. Some of us see others as threats or competitors. Some react adversely to circumstances as varied as traffic jams or weather conditions. Some of us see ourselves through the lens of chronic illness or physical or emotional abuse. I don’t diminish for one moment any of the responses we face when we arrive at a particular bridge and are frozen by a particular pattern that prevents us from stepping across. I only want to point out that it’s possible, after recoiling from the first step, to pause for a moment, examine our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and ask ourselves whether or not the things we accept as fact are true.”
--Tsoknyi Rinpoche
"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
--Maya Angelou
“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
--Hunter S. Thompson
“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
--Blaise Pascal
“Eliminate gossip. Making assumptions is a setup for suffering because usually we gossip about our assumptions. We make assumptions and believe we are right, then we defend our assumptions and try to make others wrong.”
--Don Miguel Ruiz
“The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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