Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find.

A handful of things you can actually retrieve beats a library you cannot. Knowledge only helps at the moment it is needed, and at that moment you will have access to whatever is already in your head, not to what is filed somewhere. This is why people who have read enormously often behave no better than people who have read a little and remembered it. Availability beats volume.

Pick three ideas you genuinely want to run your life by and learn them properly, to the point where they arrive unbidden. Keep the list short enough to recite. Add a fourth only when one of the three has become automatic.