Two quotes/ statements from a book named “The Midnight Library” ;

• “If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise”.

• “Never underestimate the big importance of small things”.

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

“It’s not your fault, but it is your problem.”

I honestly love and repeat this line way too much

Just because you weren’t the cause doesn’t mean it isn’t something you need to worry about/fix. I learned this one from my high school English teacher when a student was late and tried to get out of it by blaming traffic lol. The traffic was not their fault, but it ended up being their problem.

Every person dies alone.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

When my dad was teaching me how to ride a bike, I kept falling.

He noticed that I was paying so much attention to the road that I couldn’t focus on riding the bike.

Finally he picked me up, looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You rule the road. Don’t let the road rule you”.

Somehow that phrase immediately gave me the ability to ride a bicycle.

I have shared it with other people learning to ride a bicycle after they have fallen down at least once.

It freaking works.

Hurt people hurt people.

This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

I don’t think it’s really profound but ‘perception is reality’. How a person perceives something is what they think is true and real, even if it isn’t.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Used this against my controlling mother, who liked to lay BS at my feet and make me think it was my responsibility to fix. When it was HER that caused the whole thing. The look on her face when I hit her with that phrase and just turned around and left was priceless.

There a LOT of things that are just flat not your problem, even if someone else tries to make it yours.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics.

“Know your worth.”

I’ve struggled with self-worth my whole life and I’m finally taking a stand for myself both in my professional and personal life. It feels great tbh.

What you do when you don’t have to, makes you who you are.

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.