When you ask a guy, 'Are you gonna take a fight if your opponent doesn't make weight?' Is it really asking? Does he really have a choice? When you back them into a corner like that, is there really a choice to be made?
I think that you really don't have a choice, when you see that things are wrong the only choice you really have is to just do what you can to make it better.
No matter what choice you make, it doesn't define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there's ever a choice you've made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.
We've forgotten to respect clothes and consider who made them and where the material came from. We've been encouraged to buy things and, if we don't like them, bin them. When I grew up, we'd repair things or alter them.
I'm a strong believer that you have to have an equal opportunity to fail and to try things that are hard. I always tell my students, "Don't just take things that are easy for you. If you're really good at math, don't take just math. Take classes that make you write. If you're a really great writer, but bad at math, take math and make yourself work your way through it."
I think there are a couple of key lessons that come from Judaism that shaped my life. One of them is the idea we have a duty to repair the world, and all of us should play a role in our lives in trying to repair the world and to make the world better for the next generation.
I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
I have a point to prove. Sometimes you have to repair things, and maybe I have a little bit that I need to repair.
The road to ruin is always in good repair, and the travellers pay the expense of it.
So many people are willing to sleepwalk through things and fall into the not human, not interesting choice. To make the really interesting choice, you have to fight.
He [my father] didn't have a basement workshop as such, but I know that he did build things, construct things, repair things. My mother, likewise, was sewing and doing activities that often take place in a household.
Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to “good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl's unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself.
I don't know if I approach choice any differently than the sighted people do, but what I am very cognizant of is that choice does have limits and because of that I really try to take advantage of the domains in which I do have choice.
The first definition of gross negligence that comes up when you take out the legal dictionary is being extremely careless. The minute you say someone is extremely careless you are saying they're grossly negligent.
I think of choosing as a... both a fun and an effortful activity and I think of choice as something that in order for you to really get what you want out of it you have to put a lot into it and so I'm only willing to do that for a few different things and for the rest I really just try to either satisfy, come up with a simple rule or let somebody else make the choice.
God and the devil are inherent in each of us. It's our choice to make: you can take the road to good, you can take the road to bad. Well, we have a choice.