“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Pirkei Avot (2:21)

While I’m not religious, this Jewish quote resonates with me. The “work” is never truly finished, we can all do more to make things better, both for ourselves and our community.

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.

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.”

Making fun of the weak (poor, minorities, etc) is easy because they can’t fight back, that’s why the best comedy is the one that upsets the powerful.

If it takes only two minutes, do it right away.

“Let go, or be dragged.”

It’s simple, yet so meaningful.

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

Never do anything you would be afraid to explain to the paramedics.

Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

It a saying from Ubuntu (the philosophy not the operating system) “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” in English it’s “I am because you are” It’s a simple and concrete way of saying how we’re not judged by how we treat others but we are who we are through our interactions with others.

Honestly I’ve only browsed through a bit of philosophy and I’m sure I missing a heap but it really struck me.

If the penalty for breaking a law is a fine, that law only exists for poor people.

Seek to understand, then be understood.

“Things in life aren’t always quite what they seem, there’s more than one given angle to any one given scene. So bear that in mind next time you try to intervene on any one given angle to any one given scene.”

I used to think of myself as a complete pacifist, but these words haven’t left my mind since I heard them:

You think you’re better than everyone else, but there you stand: the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs and your rigid pacifism crumbles into bloodstained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns.

Of course this only applies to defense, never to offense (especially “preemptive defense”), but I can’t really argue against it.