“Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination.” – Ruth Benedict

20 Maxims for Life 

When I first began collecting beer bottles, a friend of mine warned me that the experience of collecting anything is rewarding, seductive, and habitual. Unless I resisted its temptation forcefully, I’d end up with many collections and one day wish I would have kept to just the one.

He was right. Soon after I had lined my office wall with collectible beer bottles, I got into cigar lighters, rare coins, outsider art, vintage cars, fetishist carvings, Asian statuary, modern art, Central American art, and palm trees.

If I had stopped with objets, I might have had more time to actually enjoy them. But somewhere along the way, I began collecting ideas, too. Every day, for example, I find a word, a fact, and a quotation that I like and add each to my idea collection. I’ve accumulated thousands of them so far, with no clue as to what I could do with them.

And then I thought of the perfect thing: Share them with you!

So here’s a sampling of my “idea collection” – 20 of my favorite quotations that have to do with living a rewarding life.

 1.- Lao Tzu on contentment: “When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

 2.- Socrates on contentment: “He who is not contended with what he has would not be contended with what he doesn’t but would like to have.”

 3.- Louis Nizer on art and craft: “A man that works with his hands and brain is a craftsman. A man that works with his hands, and brain, and heart is an artist.”

 4.- George Orwell on communicating: “If you simplify your English… when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”

 5.- Frank Lloyd Wright on the heart: “The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.”

 6.- Martin Luther King on love and hate: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

 7.- Pearl S. Buck on joy: “Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”

 8.- Leonardo da Vinci on learning: “Learning never exhausts the mind.”

 9.- Zig Ziglar on learning: “If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.”

10.- C. S. Spurgeon on anxiety: “Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.”

11.- The Bhagavad Gita on entitlement: “You are only entitled to the action, not its fruits.”

12.- Epicurus on wealth: “Self-sufficiency is the greatest form of wealth.”

13.- Ben Franklin on education: “The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.”

14.- Brendan Behan on critics: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.”

15.- Charles Darwin on ignorance: “Ignorance more often begets confidence than knowledge does.”

16.- Saul Bellow on ignorance: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.”

17.- George Washington Carver on a purposeful life: “No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.”

18.- Bertrand Russell on manners: “The essence of good manners consists in making it clear that one has no wish to hurt.”

19.- Alan Simpson on integrity: “If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”

20.- James Clear on making decisions: “If a decision is reversible, the biggest risk is moving too slow. If a decision is irreversible, the biggest risk is moving too fast.”

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