Things I Learned And Wrote At Age 35

•  The manner of your deathbed will reveal the validity of your worldview.

• You can tell if a person has the spirit of a scavenger by whether they are still around after the flesh has been consumed.

• False humility has an attention-seeking motive. So, false humility is still pride.

• The most transformative power in the world is love; the second most transformative power is pain.

• God does not require humans to be anything he is not.

• Death is marked even visually by homogeneity, and life is marked by contrast.

• Humility is the lampshade that will allow others to receive your light.

• Disrespect to parents is the elder brother of blasphemy.

• The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but the love of God is the end of wisdom.

• The determination to avoid pain in life at all costs has some correlation to low moral character.

• Pain is the nurturer of faith.

• Mothers are the foundation of the home, and fathers are the glue that holds the home together. That is why husband etymologically means house-bond.

• To acquire an addiction is to give up freedom for a measure of slavery.

• God the Father is perhaps the most misperceived of the Trinity. For that reason, God the Son always points to the Father. God the Holy Ghost, being a spirit, defies concrete definition. So, the Father is illusive, the Son is allusive, and the Holy Spirit is elusive.

• Everything that comes to you in life comes for one of two reasons:
1. So you can perfect it (responsibility)
2. So it can perfect you (refinement)

• There is no earthly force more powerful than humans in agreement.

• Humans are the only beings with whom God has bequeathed power to ruin his plans.

• Circumstances are never the reason you're not happy.

• Use your money to be close to your loved ones.

• The feeling of marriage is comparable to the joy of the most gratifying relief. The feeling of childbirth/parenthood is not comparable to another feeling. It is the discovery of a new emotion that has never been known.

• A bad teacher is a framer of minds. A good teacher is a farmer of minds.

• The mouth's proper default position is closed. It should only open to be filled, either with the input of sustenance or the output of wise words.

• Women judge overall beauty more profoundly and physical beauty more superficially than men do.
• Women judge the overall beauty of a person to incorporate the interior in tandem with the exterior,  whereas men tend to relegate beauty to the physical.
• Women judge physical beauty by presentation and cosmetics, whereas men judge baseline beauty by the underlying bone structure.

• Poor thinking is the spouse of legalism because the letter of the law provides the comfort of measurability, so that one need not stress oneself with thoughtfulness.

• If you live doing responsible things you don't want to do, it will feel like you filled your life with things you wanted to do. If you always do what you want to do, it will feel like you filled your life with things you didn't want to do.

• Anxiety is the opposite of hopelessness.
• Anxiety occurs when there are too many paths forward. Hopelessness occurs when there are no paths forward.

• Half of listening is done with the ears. The other half is done with the eyes.

• The price of learning is the death of pride.

• The heart is the control center for aims. The brain is merely the calculator.

• Hedonistic pleasures run high but not deep.

• The most irritating thing you can do to an annoying person is ignore them.

• When you are alone and still, all you can enjoy is what is in you.
• Solitude exposes the health of your soul.

• Self-hatred always produces hatred toward humanity.

• All that is necessary to inject hope into the world is to stop acting as though anyone were irredeemable.

• The greatest weakness of our society today is the dearth of intellectual hospitality.

• The best minds aren't known by good answers but by good questions.

• Don't let your ideals supersede your self-knowledge.
• If you give more of yourself than your patience can bear, it will not make you virtuous; it will make you bitter.

• There may be nothing in life more unattractive than delusion.

• Vanity is not merely a regard for trivial things because everything, even the trivial, is due its proper attention. Vanity is the prioritization of the trivial above the consequential.

• Reputation is the currency for interpersonal grace.

• A regret is only something you have to live with if you don't change.

• What turns us into the worst version of ourselves is conceit that we know enough.

• If you want something to be smooth, you need to put something rough up against it.

Quotes:

•  “Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency.” - Aristotle

• "Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves." - Gene Fowler

• "Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world." - David McCullough Jr.

• "It may be that you yourself are not luminous, but you are a conductor of light." - Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

• "Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire." - Gustav Mahler

• "What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving." - Adrian Rogers