To test if you are worrying too much about looking good, observe how you feel when you find out you've made a mistake or don't know something.

More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn't give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.

Sometimes we forge our own principles and sometimes we accept others' principles, or holistic packages of principles, such as religion and legal systems. While it isn't necessarily a bad thing to use others' principles - it's difficult to come up with your own, and often much wisdom has gone into those already created - adopting pre-packaged principles without much thought exposes you to the risk of inconsistency with your true values.

Watch out for people who think it's embarrassing not to know.

Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.

I learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them. I learned that there is an incredible beauty to mistakes, because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle, and a gem that I could get if I solved it, i.e. a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future.