Quotes About Priorities

My advice is to get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can't eat fame.

I'm not concerned about anything anymore. It's kind of in the shadows. There's been a sea change on all of that. Things that I felt passionately about, I just don't anymore. I think that goes ... I think that goes with just being older and having had the privilege of having a full and active life, and now just fading, fading--fading away, like General MacArthur said.

You know, one day you're being briefed on world affairs and asked to make decisions, and the next, you're in Crawford, Texas ... and the biggest decision is when do you go mountain bike riding.

I'm somebody who doesn't work with a stylist. I'll be honest with you, I'm a mom and it's just not something I want to put money toward because it's expensive to have somebody who helps dress you and I feel like I have to pay for preschool and so many things... so I don't have a stylist.

Life's too short for chess.

It has been left to our generation to discover that you can move heaven and earth to save five minutes and then not have the faintest idea what to do with them when you have saved them.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

I forgot that you are also one of my friends, and have the first right to my

sometimes we see things in animals that aren't really there. It's called transference, if that makes any sense. ...I think there are a lot of people who say they do things for animals when they're really doing it for themselves. They see things in animals that might not really be there. I think sometimes that hurts the animals in the end, and it hurts other people, too. ...There are people on both sides of the issue who think animals are more valuable than people are...

more time away from the family and additional

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

Feynman was adamant in avoiding administrative duties because he knew they would only decrease his ability to do the one thing that mattered most in his professional life: "to do real good physics work.

Who could justify trading a lifetime of stress and backbreaking labor for better blinds? Is a nicer-looking window treatment really worth so much of your life?

Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that "we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on." In

My author website doesn't provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn't own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—"you have to have a phone that works before our son is born").

The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: "Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry.

The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.

I've become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

As Gallagher summarizes: "Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

Put another way: minimalists don't mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

We justify many of the technologies that tyrannize our time and attention with some tangential connection to something we care about.