"You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon."
"Because here's another sneaky little truth about life. You can't be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others."
"Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what's truly fuck-worthy."
"In other words, negative emotions are a call to action."
"Thus entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
1. I'm awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment."
"Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else."
"It's easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure."
"We must intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don't fit in with much of the rest of the world, to stare our own ignorance in the face and concede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all."
"The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it."
"These are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up because they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They threaten the values that we've chosen and have learned to live up to."
"I say don't find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that's what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others."
"As a general rule, we're all the world's worst observers of ourselves."
"... beliefs are arbitrary; worse yet, they're often made up after the fact to justify whatever values and metrics we've chosen for ourselves."
"That's simply reality: if it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself."
"... Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture..."
"Entitled people who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they've always wanted."
"... we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we're given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we're aware of all the other options we're potentially forfeiting."
"Commitment gives you freedom because you're no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous."
"... I came to the startling realization that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything."
"... in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever."
"All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects."
