12 Rules for Life

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.

It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended.

What you aim at determines what you see.

You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.

Disciplinary principle 1: limit the rules. Principle 2: use minimum necessary force. Here’s a third: parents should come in pairs.

It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing.

Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs—not even you.

The pleasures of such self-pity should not be underestimated.

Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, perhaps, as well as mere static existence—and to become is to become something more, or at least something different.