I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

Because I love proverbs, true rules, teaching stories, secretive adulthood and aphorisms,

I'm writing my own book of aphorisms, and I'm also collecting my favorites written by other people.

One of my very favorite aphorisms is the writer Marie von Ebne-Echenbach, who lived from 1830 to 1916.

As with all my favorite writers of aphorisms, I don't always agree with what she writes,

but I find her observations to be extremely thought-provoking.

Here are some of my favorites. See what you think.

You can sink so fast that you think you're flying.

It takes less courage to be the only one to find fault than to be the only one to find favor.

The moral code which was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for our children.

Power is duty. Freedom is responsibility. That has special meaning for me because when I was growing

up in Kansas City, my school had the motto, Freedom with Responsibility. So that really resonates with me.

People for whom we are a source of strength give us our support in life.

In most cases, as far as a young talent is concerned, the family is either a hot house or a

fire extinguisher. It is easy to bear the severeest blame if we feel that he who blames would rather

praise. My friend Kim Scott wrote a terrific book Radical Candor and she makes this point as well.

A lazy person and an industrious person cannot live together well. The lazy one despises the

industrious one too much. The ambrosia of earlier centuries is the daily bread of later times.

As soon as a fashion has caught on, it has outlived itself.

Where can one find two things which are so opposite and yet so closely related, so dissimilar

and yet so often indistinguishable from one another as modesty and pride?

I have thought about this one a lot. What does it mean to be modest? What does it mean to be prideful?

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