These are fragments worth carrying.

Contents

Begin Where You Are

On urgency, starting small, and refusing to defer the good.

“Do the good that’s in front of you, even if it feels small.”
—Sharon Salzberg

*“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”*¹
—Karen Lamb

“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
—Doris Lessing

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”
—Pablo Picasso

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
—Arthur Ashe

*“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”*²
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Choose With Courage

On decision, direction, and the shape of a life.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
—Mary Oliver (The Summer Day)

“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes…”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

“…choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.”
—Nicholas Hobbs

“There is just one life for each of us: our own.”
—Euripides

*“The Law of Serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries."*³
—Barbara Oakley

“Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
—Steve Jobs

Build Yourself First

On character, discipline, and becoming.

*“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”*⁴
—Will Durant (summarizing Aristotle)

“The first and best victory is to conquer self. To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile.”
—Plato

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want…”
—Charlie Munger

“I will prepare and some day my chance will come.”
—Abraham Lincoln

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
—Viktor Frankl

“We are not born with the virtues that make a good human life possible; we acquire them, if we acquire them at all, by hard work.”
—Martha Nussbaum

Think for Yourself

On knowledge, reason, and freedom from tutelage.

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
—Charlie Munger

“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage… Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’”
—Immanuel Kant

“I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another man’s.”
—William Blake

“It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.”
—Virginia Woolf

“Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected.”
—Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
—Haruki Murakami

Keep Seeking, Keep Studying

On inquiry, imagination, and the habit of study.

“…happiness extends just as far as study extends… And so happiness will be some kind of study.”
—Aristotle

“Some mathematician has said that pleasure lies not in discovering truth but in seeking it.”
—Leo Tolstoy

“A cultivated mind… finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it…”
—John Stuart Mill

*“‘Ancora imparo’ (I am still learning).”*⁵
—Attributed to Michelangelo

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up…”
—Charlie Munger

Act in Service

On helping others, leaving a mark, and acting with integrity.

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
—Horace Mann

“I think you should try and make your money in this world by selling other people things that are good for them.”
—Charlie Munger

*“I shall pass this way but once… let me not defer nor neglect it…”*⁶
—Anonymous (commonly attributed to Quaker tradition)

“Never globalize a problem if it can possibly be dealt with locally.”
—Garrett Hardin

“You are not required to carry the whole burden—nor are you permitted to put down your share.”
—Howard Buffett

“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself.”
—John McCain

“Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.”
—Albert Einstein

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction.”
—John Stuart Mill

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

Build for the Long-Term

On persistence, patience, and building toward a larger, enduring goal.

“Society is a partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
—Edmund Burke

“When we build, let us think that we build forever…”
—John Ruskin

*“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”*⁷
—Attributed to Bill Gates

“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.”
—Wendell Berry

“The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.”
—Barack Obama

“What survives the moment of action is what is built into the world—the lasting work, the stable structure, the foundation for others.”
—Hannah Arendt

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Last updated: April 10, 2025

This page evolves. New fragments are added. Old ones may be recontextualized. Like any ethic worth living—it lives.

Footnotes

  1. Widely attributed to Karen Lamb; no primary source found.
  2. Paraphrased from Goethe’s Faust; widely quoted, but not verbatim in the original German.
  3. No verified source in Barbara Oakley’s published work.
  4. Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), interpreting Aristotle.
  5. Commonly attributed to Michelangelo, but not found in his writings.
  6. First appeared in print in early 20th century, anonymous.
  7. Frequently attributed to Bill Gates, but no confirmed source.