I’m going to list some quotes I try to live by. I copied and pasted these over time into an Evernote document, so I don’t have sources / citations for a lot of them.
Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life. – Robin Sharma
I’d accuse a lot of my family members of this. I want to travel and live a varied life. I want to go to new places and be constantly learning / exploring / changing things up.
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
Guilty. Done this. Both with friends and boys. Actually I’m still guilty of this with one of my old friends but I’ll get over it. I think I actually sent him this quote when I found it and yelled at him.
IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: I just searched Giphy for “boys” (lol). Also, THIS GIF IS FROM THE O.C. Which incidentally, is the show that made me want to move to / live in California, and the show that made me realize I was gay. So like. The emotions.
You spend your whole life stuck in a labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. – John Green
This kind of hit me in the face when I read it. I think I spent a lot of high school / early college dreaming of living on the beach / in California / being happy. And then I realized that I wasn’t seizing the day (CARPE DIEM) or being happy now. So I decided to try to be unapologetically me and take steps to improve my life now.
And I just decided I’m going to try to use GIFs of The O.C. whenever possible.
Sometimes you forget how little you have to do to influence someone in a positive way.
Love this. It hasn’t happened to me often, but I’ve had people come up to me after a conversation of meeting and tell me I said or did something that really impacted them. I try to tell people whenever they have this effect on me; I think there was a TED talk about letting people know when they’ve helped you…this might actually be from a TED talk.
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
Love this. It kind of goes with some previous quotes, but I think it’s an important step to actually living your life. I definitely used to think my goals were something that I’d achieve in the future and then be happy, but really I enjoy learning and living as I take steps towards my goals.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
This has kind of been what’s fueled my insanely busy college years. For one thing, I’ve found that keeping myself busy helped me with concealed depression. Another is that, ironically, the more things I started juggling, the better I did in most (maybe all) of them. For example, my GPA went up after I got involved. My social life became more active. I was happier with my friends. I started working out more. Somehow I actually started getting more sleep. And I was generally just happier with myself. I guess one of my fears with moving to DC is that I think adjusting to being not-insanely-busy all of the time will lead to a decrease in my quality of life. I’m hoping I can find new things to get involved in / new friends to prevent this from happening. Also, I’m now very cognizant of it. So I’m not that worried.
A candle loses no light when lighting others. Build others up whenever you can, support those close to you and help whoever you can – you never know when the tables will turn!
I think this goes very well with Ohio State’s “Pay It Forward” motto. I don’t want to say that I didn’t used to have this perspective…but I’ve definitely made a more conscious effort in the last few years to help others whenever I can, with hope that good karma will come my way when I need it. I’ve only told one person to this, but I always buy a newspaper from Joe in front of Starbucks whenever I want something good to happen in my life. So far it’s worked ;).
P.S. I think I’ve found that my true calling in life is blogging / finding GIFs. It’s addicting and fun. In other news, I have two papers due in 24 hours so I should probably stop procrastinating on them…