Quotes

Quotes I've collected over time.

• "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better" - Abraham Lincoln

• Similarly: “You cannot both hate and understand someone at the same time.”

• On asking for permission: "Don't take no from someone who didn't have the power to say yes in the first place."

• On Masculinity:

  A man achieves happiness in life by delivering on his responsibilities. You have no idea how important this one thing will be to your mental health, your sense of self- worth, your relationships, and your ability to find meaning and purpose in your life.

  I'm talking about your responsibilities to your family, your colleagues, your teammates, your friends, your communities and groups, your country-and even to total strangers. (Yes, you have responsibilities to them, too.)

  But above all I'm talking about your responsibility to yourself. And when I say you owe something to yourself, I mean your higher image of who you should be.

  Living up to these demands is what makes a man happy. It's also what makes him manly.

  A real man goes out into the world and gets things done in order to fulfill these obligations. And this is where traditional masculine values come in-toughness, perseverance, endurance, vitality, ruggedness, and all the rest.

  If you figure this out, everything else will fall into place.

• "Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

• East of Eden, John Steinbeck:

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”