“When the truth hurts, create a better truth.”

“مسئولیت زادۀ توانایی نیست، زادۀ آگاهی است و زادۀ انسان بودن.”

“If the phrase ‘there are many ways to kill a cat’ is a fact; please confirm cancer is on the cat list; there is a moral responsibility for the man in the mirror holding the solution to unveil it, for the sake of Gods creation.”

“It is often contended that the belief that a person is solely responsible for his own fate is held only by the successful. This in itself is not so unacceptable as its underlying suggestion, which is that people hold this belief because they have been successful. I, for one, am inclined to think that the connection is the other way round and that people often are successful because they hold this belief. Though a man’s conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most benefi cial effects on his energy and circumspection. And if the smug pride of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.”

“You’re responsible for your journey in life, no one else. You have to know the destination to go there. Others can help show you the way, but no one can take you there.”

“Work-life balance” seems to have become the best excuse for many people not to take responsibility for their professional and personal growth. But this “balance” that all of us love to talk about is not something conceptual. It is achieved by strategic, focused, hard work. It doesn’t come by default or when we say the magic words. That’s why many of us are leading lives far from our potential for success and fulfillment — because we wait for balance to happen, and it never does. I’ve been there, and it sucks.Most of us haven’t taken a single hour of our lives to think about what work-life balance means to us. Needless to say, we put zero effort into planning about it, working for it, living it. Open your calendar and show me what your work-life balance looks like. In 99 percent of cases, it’s not there — it’s nowhere to be found.”

“The only parts that really matter and take commitment in wedding vows are; worse, sickness and poorer. Better, richer and healthy is pretty easy to deal with.”

“Religion ist nichts anderes als die Lehre davon, wie man frei von Erkenntnis gehorcht […].”

“There comes a time when you finally realize that no one but you is responsible for your life and your destiny. That is when your true life begins.”

“When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it’s not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.”

“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There’s no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man’s debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.”

“I am blind and limited. I would be a fool think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart.”