88 Important Truths I’ve Learned About Life. Everyone gets drilled with certain lessons in life.
Sometimes it takes repeated demonstrations of a given law of life to really get it into your skull, and other times one powerful experience drives the point home once forever. Here are 88 things I’ve discovered about life, the world, and its inhabitants by this point in my short time on earth. 1. You can’t change other people, and it’s rude to try. 2. 3. The Most Important Thing I Ever Learned. If you read Raptitude you’ll see me talk a lot about moments.
By the end of this post you’ll understand why I use that word so much. I grew up thinking the word moment referred to specific instants in time, usually where some significant event occurred. There were historic moments, life-changing moments, poignant moments, tense moments, touching moments, Kodak moments. They were events to be remembered, reminisced about, or photographed. Whatever they were, they held you captive. As for the rest of life, it just seemed to be the normal, steady current of ‘stuff.’ When I was twenty, desperately leafing through some forgotten self-help book, I came across a peculiar line.
Life unfolds only in moments. Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t a moment in action. So if you think about it, you may picture life as a whole stack of moments, like a stack of photographs that show what happens in your life instant by instant. Well, not really. Try this: Photos by Adriano Agulló and copyriot. 4 Brilliant Remarks From History’s Wisest American. If I have a hero, it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He represents to me humanity’s potential: wise, self-reliant, honest, unencumbered by conformity, and able to enjoy every little detail of life as if they were all miracles. He possessed the hallmark of a human being ahead of his time: he was hailed as a genius and simultaneously reviled as a subvert. His views were radical for his era, but his wisdom could not be denied, even by his detractors. Even Herman Melville, author and professed Emerson-hater, later described him as “a great man.” I am convinced that all of the secrets to personal peace and freedom reside within the ideas recorded in Emerson’s essays and lectures.
Perhaps this is why he is so widely quoted and so scarcely read. It’s worth the effort. “People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character A person’s opinion of the world they live in really seems to be a foolproof litmus test for their strength of character. “I hate quotations.