The Reading Leads

Start being kind to yourself. Nobody’s perfect. Stop demanding perfection from yourself and everyone you know. Your best on any given day is enough.
If you lower your expectations and try to accept or even celebrate imperfection, you will experience so much less tension and your life and job will go way more smoothly.

"Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
​Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation — or any nation so conceived and so dedicated — can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
​But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract. The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.
​It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

__Abraham Lincoln

Practice the pause. When in doubt, pause. When angry, pause. When tired, pause. When stressed, pause. And when u pause, keep calm.

True worth is in being—not seeming—
In doing each day that goes by
Some little good, not in dreaming
Of great things to do by and by.
For whatever men say in their blindness,
And in spite of the follies of youth,
There is nothing so kingly as kindness,
And nothing so royal as truth.
— Anonymous

La Rochefoucauld, the French philosopher, said: ‘If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.’

"It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery but the friction."
— Henry Ward Beecher.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay ‘Self-Reliance’ stated: ‘In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’

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