Andrew Wk Quotes

Words are living symbols of expression.

The suffering of anyone else is the suffering of ourselves. And to understand that as an idea is one thing, but to develop the ability to feel it and believe it is another - and it is dangerous, and it is risky, because that is a lot of suffering to take in. It is a lot of pain to feel. Most of us, including myself, are probably not capable of feeling one tiny fraction of 1% of the world’s suffering. But we must try to go there.

Reinterpret your stress, nervousness, worrying, and anxiety as all just natural reactions to the excitement of having a life worth caring about. If someone asks if you're stressing out, just say, "No, I'm just totally enthusiastic about being alive." The whole point is to allow ourselves to feel everything, including stress, but just keep on going anyway. We don't fight to "let go of stress", we take the feeling and reform into something useful and empowering. We keep our eyes on the prize and don't let fear or any other intense feelings stop us.

Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature's tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82]. A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality. The "Broken Window Theory" has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.