A popular Reddit thread by u/internallyskating recently asked:
“What’s a quote that permanently changed the way you look at things?”
Perspective shifts can be SO illuminating and freeing; and while I personally usually roll my eyes at “inspiring quotes”, even I have to admit that some of these are top-notch.
1. Zen Proverb
“Let go or be dragged” and old zen proverb I heard at a meditation class. Really changed the way I let myself worry about things.
2. Listen or Wait to Speak
“do you listen or just wait to speak”
3. Reactions
I had a professor in college he called it the 10/90 rule. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. Changed my life.
4. Comparison
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.
5. Why take criticism?
If you wouldn’t take advice from them, why would you take criticism? – some dude on youtube. I just never thought of it that way before, and I stopped spending so much energy trying to get people to like me.
6. Honesty
Honesty without kindness is brutality. Kindness without honesty is manipulation.
7. Peaches
“You might be the sweetest peach on the tree, but some people just don’t like peaches.”
This helped me get over my lifelong desire to be liked by everyone, and allowed me to focus on becoming someone I actually liked.
8. Mark Twain
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life. Most of which never happened.” – Mark Twain.
9. Past, Present
My therapist once told me that living in the future is anxiety, living in the past is depression. Only good way is to live in the present moment. Good luck. Ha.
10. Lower the bar
Long time ago I was meeting two women on the sidewalk and just as we passed each other I heard this one sentence from one of them:
“You don’t notice your progress in life because you are always raising the bar.”
11. Think.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
12. Just thoughts
“Don’t think of any thoughts as being negative because they are just thoughts. Who told you it was negative, it’s just a thought, you’re making it up, maybe you like it maybe you don’t. If you think of it as just a thought it has no power, however if you think of it as reality it destroys you.”
13. John Steinbeck
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
14. Bamboozled
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan
15. Fools
“It’s easy to fool someone,it’s hard to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
16. Courage
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” -Maryann Radmacher
17. Believe it
When people show you who they are, believe them. – Maya Angelou
18. Don’t carry it!
That mountain you’ve been carrying, you were only suppose to climb.
19. Carrie Fisher
“Be afraid, but do it anyway.”
20. The Axe
“The axe forgets; the tree remembers.” —Zimbabwean proverb.
People don’t forget how they were treated; that’s why it’s so important to be kind.