David Cain

If I had given the angel on the other shoulder a chance to rebut, she would have explained the foolish tradeoff I was making. I gain twenty minutes or so of low-brow pleasure.

As I’ve often said, “Insight is not enough.” We’ve all had breakthroughs in our thinking, but they only make our lives change if they make our behavior change.

Don’t sell your time to someone else’s purpose. You can do better. Be poor for a while if that’s what it will take.

Out of all your sexual experiences, how often were you doing it simply because you wanted to make a baby? The vast majority of people use birth control. We try to minimize baby-making but we’re still highly interested in sex, and so for humans sex obviously serves another extremely compelling purpose.

I want to write down what I’m going to do the next day, and actually do it.

At first, you will probably experience some angst at the thought of abandoning what you were going to say. Drop it anyway, and see if your life suffers. (It won’t.)

So much of our lives consists of conditions we’ve fallen into. We gravitate unwittingly to what works in the short term, in terms of what to do for work and what crowd to run with.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

Love is bigger than you. To love someone is for their happiness to be the same as your own.

A good nine out of ten bad things I’ve worried about never happened. A good nine out of ten bad things that did happen never occurred to me to worry about.

Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking.