Brandon

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not? How can we live and think that anyone has trouble – piercing trouble – and we could help them, and never try?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow feeling with individual fellow men.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“We have seen several times that stopping is the biggest barrier to success. There are various explanations why people stop working so hard – they have families, they get tenure, they have changing interests, they have made their money, their accumulated expertise stops them from experimenting, maybe even laziness – but anyone ambitious enough to want to change their lives or work on big problems can advantage themselves simply by not quitting.”
― Henry Oliver, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life