Misleading Guidance Quotes

...as for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink.

I allowed myself to be taken in by the intellectuals. I believed too much in the Polish intellectuals and followed their advice.

Watching well-meaning authors follow in the footsteps of someone going in the wrong direction breaks my heart.

One of the worst things you can give to your people is someone you're not.

Among the most disheartening and dangerous of . . . advisors, you will often find those closest to you, your dearest friends, members of your own family, perhaps, loving, anxious, and knowing nothing whatever . . .

When the fox preaches, beware the geese.

I think I might have a bad psychic advisor. When I asked her to contact the dead, she gave me Keith Richards' phone number.

False taste is always busy to mislead those that are entering upon the regions of learning; and the traveller, uncertain of his way, and forsaken by the sun, will be pleased to see a fainter orb arise on the horizon, that may rescue him from total darkness, though with weak and borrowed lustre.

The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on