Aug

23

I have been emailing my 8-year-old grandson a daily quotation or one-line advice (about sports, learning or life in general), which he seems to enjoy.

But I am running out of quotations and pithy advice relevant to a young person. Does anyone have either a good source of these, or some particular favorite quotes or advice?

Many thanks,

Dan

Ralph Vince writes: 

Here's some for you Dan. You may want to edit them for a younger mind, plus, you may not agree with all of them, but these are some that come to mind as I sit here and thing about it:

1. Don't try making sense out of it. You're in an insane asylum – things are not going to make sense, people will do things that don't make sense, that they cannot adequately explain. People don't know what makes them tick, only that they tick.

2. Happiness, of course…is all in your head. If you don't know that, if you haven't come to that realization, you will never be happy.

3. The Bull Market Syndrome. People, when they are met with success, take personal credit for it (bull markets breed geniuses), and when they are met with failure, blame luck.

4. Actually, luck is responsible for both! If you can only die by being struck by lightning, eventually, you will die by being struck by lightning! Conversely, if a man were to live forever, and bought a lottery ticket every week, eventually, he will win the lottery, with a probability that approaches certainty. Just stay the course, keep doing today what you must do today. As Woody Allen says, "Fifty percent of success is just showing up."

Luck Trumps Brains. To get luck, keep showing up each day with your shoes on.

5. Creativity trumps money every time.

6. Fortunately in life, you don't have to succeed at everything you do, only a few things. One success often justifies all prior attempts.

7. You can buy great a education – you can not buy brains.

8. The Oswald Principle: Usually, the best course of action in life, is to take no action (and usually, the best thing to say is nothing!). The guys in jail or there not because they didn't do anything. Usually, you should just sleep in! If nothing really bad happens today, as my friend Oswald said to me in eighth grade, it's been a good day!

9. You don't have the problems you think you do. Actually, the only real problems are health and criminal problems. Everything else is just a frivolous, meaningless nuisance.

10. Never say never. Everyone, however righteous they may claim to be, however upstanding they say they are, will, under the right circumstances commit the crime. A cold morning, wet, hungry, tired, angry….they'll do things they never dreamed they would!

11. Everything is going to be OK. It always is.

12. You never know what's going on in someone else's life. Before you do or say something nasty to them, realize this. Perhaps they have just gotten some awful news of some sort. You never know what is going on in someone else's life.

13. Don't pressure yourself. Just take care of today's things today, and relax…we got all the time in the world. The proper attitude in performance of anything, be it athletic, mental, etc., is a kind of relaxed, aware, confident attitude. You see it manifest in sport all the time (Ali, Ramirez…..or hitting a gold ball).

14. Don't complain and don't explain.

15. Don't react or engage emotionally with others. There is great power in stoicisim, in a cold, blank, stare back when others are trying to engage you in a fight.

16. Similarly, if it is someone you love or must live with, trying to engage you in an argument, practice avoidance. Just try not to be around them, to avoid them. Go out for a walk.

17. Live "in the tunnel," but think outside of it. In other words, deal with the mundane, immediate issues at hand, think as out-of-the-box as you can.

18. You can always "lift" more than you think you can.

19. Women will be as bad as they are allowed to be.

20. You should pray for your enemies — you need them. You need to have some enemies to keep life interesting.

21. Treat those you love as though they were going to die at midnight.

22. Your body is a record of how you have cumulatively cared for it.

23. The easiest way to learn things in life, is through observation. Sit back, watch all the ways everyone around you will figure out to how to screw up.

24. There are two ways to learn something. The easy way and the hard way. With the easy way, someone tells you something and you learn it. The hard way is the way we usually learn things, and we usually don't learn it the first time through. So the easy way, you see, is the equivalent of a windfall. (note to teachers – you can cause the easy way in others if you can convey a different perspective on a problem, a manner wherein the person learning thinks, "Ah, I see it now."). The moral here is that there is no point lending money, time or advice to help people out if they aren't going to listen to you, if they are going to insist on remaining on their own vector, unchanged by your advice, wherein they are going to learn their lesson the hard way with or without your giving them time, money or advice. So don't give it unless they are going to incorporate it.

25. Do not succumb to the suffocating culture of comfort. If you are comfortable, you are in trouble, you just don;t see it heading towards you.

26. Remember – your best trades are ahead of you.

A commenter writes: 

The time to abandon is when you have to step UP into the lifeboat (or raft). Any other time is premature. 

Vincent Andres writes: 

Hello,

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

All philosophical con games count on your using words as vague approximations.

A refusal to vote represents a definite expression of political opinion, a rejection of the candidates & the programs offered.

Credit is not…a magic piece of paper that reverses cause and effect, and transforms consumption into a source of production

if men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose.

Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. he is a contractual animal.

and many more from A. Rand here.

The highest laws of the land (America) are not only the constitution and constitutional laws, but also contracts - H Arendt

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. - H Arendt

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it. - M Friedman

"Governments never learn. only people learn." - M Friedman

"Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance, of the paternalist."

It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

The average man doesn't want to be free. he wants to be safe.

Sorry if not all quotes are appropriate for a 8 years old.

There are many specialized twitter accounts who deliver 1 or several quotes per day. There is one for Ayn Rand.

Anonymous writes: 

Try to always practice good manners; be particularly polite, deferential and prepared at bars, gas stations, convenience stores and parking lots for these places are fraught with others over-valuing matters and ready to imprudently defend their claim.

There will be fights, unavoidable fights, they will find their way to you, you don't need to look for them.

Paolo Pezzutti writes: 

It's not how to achieve your dreams.  It's about how to live your life. -Randy Pausch

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.  -Ayn Rand 


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