I am really surprised to NOT find this quote here already. I could have sworn that I posted it a few years ago. I posted a different version it on FB in 2023. It's from David Foster Wallace

"Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness. Heidi Priebe

“The bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.”- Karl von Frisch

"When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete."

From War of Art by Steven Pressfield

"It is not your job to develop your spouse into a person of integrity." - Dr. Joe Beam

A paraphrase from something I read in a forum today:

"Usually I like to deal with people on a principled basis, but if you show yourself to be unprincipled, I will deal with you practically."

This strikes me as a very reasonable idea and I don't know why it's not my habit. Like, I have stuck to principle even when it was to my own disadvantage. It's hard for me to put my own advantage over principles. I think in part because I, as a child, saw my mother be so grasping and unscrupulous over and over, and determined never to be like that.

I am trying to compromise with myself by remaining cautious but principled, and then booking the hell out when someone acts crazy or unprincipled themselves.