Just some stuff about me.
Here’s a list of quotes I like.
Often the most critical aspect of frequently being correct is immediately admitting when you’re wrong.
If you can’t beat fear, just do it scared.
“But how can a man be brave if he’s afraid?”
“That’s the only time a man can be brave.”
It’s just a bad day, not a bad life; we’ll try again tomorrow.
The only way out is through
~ Robert Frost
Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Fuck it we ball.
Years ago, I was working for a man named Russell, proper bastard. One night I fucked up and I had to call him, he said “Listen, I don’t care how you got yourself in trouble. I care about how you’re gonna get yourself out of it”.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
~ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“Sometimes I feel like giving up, and then I remember I have a lot of motherfuckers to prove wrong.”
~ Mick Kremling
As a child, during the worst days of my life, I really clung to the idea that I can end my life if I want to. It sounds horrible, but the comfort of simply knowing I had the option, made me feel like I can get through the present moment. It made me feel some semblance of control over myself and what happened to me, in a situation where I felt an extreme lack of control and power over myself, my body, and my life. I could end it if I wanted to, that was enough to keep me going.
It might pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.
The grass gets trampled when elephants fight. Civilians pay the bill that extremists write.
I’ve been fascinated by David Cain’s idea that your life is always just beginning for a while. Think about how every movie starts with a moment where the scene fades in from black and you slowly come to understand the situation the characters have been placed in. There is no time in the story before that moment, and in the audience (or as the storyteller, for that matter) you don’t really think about what happened “back then” except to understand how the current scene will work. The story now takes the past as given and works from there. The thing is, that’s your life, right now, every moment. The past is gone and your next story starts right now. This is the first moment you can control. You can take advantage of this idea by pretending that you didn’t live the last however many years of your life. Instead, you just got plopped into your body and woke up right now, with your current situation and memories, and you take the story from here.
~ Soren Bjornstad, Don’t Measure the Quality of Your Life Using the Temperature of Your Nachos
“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass”.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“Do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“When most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. They’re talking about intimate things, family things, love things,” that nice old lady said to me. “Dr. Hoenikker had all those things in his life, the way every living person has to, but they weren’t the main things with him.” “What were the main things?” I asked her. “Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.” “You don’t seem to agree.” “I don’t know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.”“
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“It posed the question posed by all such stone piles: how had puny men moved stones so big? And, like all such stone piles, it answered the question itself. Dumb terror had moved those stones so big”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“See the cat? See the cradle?”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it’s unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away“
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
“I was grateful to Newt for calling it to my attention, for the quotation captured in a couplet the cruel paradox of Bokononist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it. Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks, For he knows a man’s as big as what he hopes and thinks!”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Lasher, Paul realized, was the only one who hadn’t lost touch with reality. He, alone of the four leaders, seemed unshocked by the course of events, undisturbed by them, even, inexplicably, at peace. Paul, perhaps, had been the one most out of touch, having had little time for reflection, having been so eager to join a large, confident organization with seeming answers to the problems that had made him sorry to be alive.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“I hold, and the members of the Ghost Shirt Society hold: “That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God. “That there must be virtue in frailty, for Man is frail, and Man is a creation of God. “That there must be virtue in inefficiency, for Man is inefficient, and Man is a creation of God “That there must be virtue in brilliance followed by stupidity, for Man is alternately brilliant and stupid, and Man is a creation of God. “You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man’s being a creation of God. “But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress—namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it.” “I don’t follow. Isn’t his brother happy?” “Utterly and always happy. And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dreams, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“And another nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing. See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn’t be righter. You could of been a heller at home and made a lot of people unhappy and all, and been a dumb, mean bastard, but you’re king over there—king to everybody, and especially to yourself. This above all, be true to yourself, and you can’t be false to anybody else, and that’s it—in a hole, being shot at and shooting back.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“The men from the boys—that’s what they used to say in the Army, Sergeant Elm Wheeler would. Memphis boy. ‘Here we go, boys,’ he’d say. ‘Here’s where we separate the men from the boys.’ And off we’d go for the next hill, and the medics’d follow and separate the dead from the wounded. And then Wheeler’d say, ‘Here we go, here’s where we separate the men from the boys.’ And that went on till we got separated from our battalion and Wheeler got his head separated from his shoulders.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.” “If someone has brains,” said Anita firmly, “he can still get to the top. That’s the American way, Paul, and it hasn’t changed.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Brains and nerve, Paul.” “And blinders.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
A lot of time in modern life, we confuse autonomy for agency. Autonomy is the freedom to choose, but oftentimes you can have autonomy, but your choices are limited. It’s like when you have a kid and you’re like, “Well, do you want to wear this thing or this thing?” Well, you’re helping your kid be autonomous, but they don’t really have agency because they didn’t get to construct the choices. And a lot of modern life is, we feel autonomous ’cause we get to make all these choices between what we watch on Netflix and the newsletters we subscribe to and yada yada, but often it strips us of our agency because we’re just given these choices. Like a parent gives choices of what color of cup you’re going to use.
The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.
~ Elbert Hubbard
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth. There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“For anybody else it was a mistake, but if you think it was a sin - then it’s a sin. A fella builds his own sins right up from the groun’.”
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“Anybody can break down. It takes a man not to.’ We always try to hold in.” She folded the quilt neatly about Grampa’s legs and around his shoulders.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?“ “No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much - livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Says, when I was a kid my ol’ man give me a haltered heifer an’ says take her down an’ git her serviced. An’ the fella says, I done it, an’ ever’ time since then when I hear a business man talkin’ about service, I wonder who’s gettin’ screwed. Fella in business got to lie an’ cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That’s what’s important. You go steal that tire an’ you’re a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
It’s a free country. Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Well, California’s a big State. It ain’t that big. The whole United States ain’t that big. It ain’t that big. It ain’t big enough. There ain’t room enough for you an’ me, for your kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn’t you go back where you come from?
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
That man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin’ man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an’ not do no murder.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.“ “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property’s doing it.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Thinking about stuff like that don’t feed the kids. Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids. You got no call to worry about anybody’s kids but your own. You get a reputation for talking like that, and you’ll never get three dollars a day. Big shots won’t give you three dollars a day if you worry about anything but your three dollars a day
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you’re wrong there - quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I didn’t sign up for an earthquake, but it happened.
~ Suzanne Strisik
Think of your thoughts and emotions as clouds in the sky. The Sky is always the same even if it is obscured by clouds, but the clouds will always pass; there is no such thing as a continuous never-ending storm in the same area forever. It will always pass and the Sun will shine again one day.
You are not your emotions. You are an awareness who observes them.
Before you gained consciousness, the 13 billion years before you passed by in the blink of an eye. Close your eyes. Count to one. That’s how long forever feels. The hundreds of thousands of trillions of years after you die will also pass in the blink of an eye. So make the most of it before you blink.
Failure is not an end state unless it is where you choose to stop.
Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
Honesty is the most powerful tool you can use to define yourself. Admit your mistake, frankly and honestly. The truth always comes out in the end no matter how big or small and it doesn’t get better with age. You can give back something you steal, you can help those you hurt but once they brand you a liar, its all you will ever be.
Carpe diem - memento mori.
Per aspera ad astra.
初志貫徹
十人十色
There are so many things that we constantly do for the efficiency of the following days, assuming we make it to see those days.
Should I get upset about this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive.
Sam Kriss, The internet is already over
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
~ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Experts agree, you should be in a state of worry right now and at all other times.
~ Ramin Nazer
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
Each piece of knowledge requires an experience. Experiences are transferable within the organism of society. Experiences can be lived with a lower intensity, from which you can derive experiences with a higher intensity.
A person has the right to their own lessons and experiences. We have no right to enter someone’s life and become their preachers and moralists who want to fix things. We do not know the solutions for other people. If you can affect someone’s life in a way that will be the most acceptable and suitable for them in that moment, do it; otherwise, go away. And leave them alone in both cases, don’t pressure them and rob them of their experience.
Stop showing up for people who are indifferent about your presence. Stop prioritizing people who make you an option.
The way the world is constructed today is no longer legible, politically or technically. Objects come and go under mysterious circumstances. Cars and trains either run or someone else fixes them. The objects in our lives are shipped to us from faraway lands, and they work until they don’t. Discarded, they get hauled away in the early morning by stinky trucks.
To remain where you end up, you have to keep doing exactly what it took to get there.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary effort. Most times are ordinary. Make an ordinary effort.
15 minutes a day is 1/60 of your time. If you spend 15 minutes daily for a year, you will have spent 6 days (or 12 full-time work days) total; for 60 years, 1 year total.
~ Soren Bjornstad, The remarkable compounding of small amounts of time
Μηδὲν ἄγαν.
~ unknown
Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.
~ Death’s End by Cixin Liu
Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human.
~ Death’s End by Cixin Liu
It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
“Oh, but we’ve plenty of off-hours.” “Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the fourwall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense.’”
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’ he said to me. ‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that.’
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.
~ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
~ 1984 by George Orwell
The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.
~ 1984 by George Orwell
A lot of people are waiting to have a good idea before they have an idea, that’s why they don’t have any ideas. The key to having good ideas is to have lots of ideas.
~ David Allen
As soon as you have to motivate yourself, you’re not. Might as well throw in the towel. True motivation happens when the word ‘motivation’ never occurs to you. You just have to do it to get back to an internal standard that you’ve set. People say you have to discipline yourself…only long enough to change your standards. The biggest barrier to all of this is your addiction to stress. Addiction meaning: if you start to get rid of the stress you’re accustomed to, some part of you unconsciously will feel uncomfortable, and will go do whatever you need to do to get yourself back to that level of stress that you’re so familiar with. You can learn to speed up the process of changing your internal standard using imagery: that’s how you can use an affirmation.
~ David Allen
If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
~ Nikola Tesla
Everybody has the right to make a mistake.
Unfortunately, none of it really matters. Fortunately, none of it really matters.
A person who draws a single line is more likely to draw another line. A person who has drawn a few lines is more likely to draw even more. A person who has drawn a form is more likely to draw other forms. A person who has drawn half a piece is more likely to draw a whole piece. A person who is almost there is more likely to actually finish. A person who is finished is more likely to keep on going. Play the first note.
Work without play breaks is breathing by only exhaling.
Don’t spend time on it, spend time in it.
“To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.”
~ Murray Bookchin
What was the human world like in the eyes of the mountains? Perhaps just something they saw on a leisurely afternoon. First, a few small living beings appeared on the plain. After a while, they multiplied, and after another while they erected structures like anthills that quickly filled the region. The structures shone from the inside, and some of them let off smoke. After another while, the lights and smoke disappeared, and the small things vanished as well, and then their structures toppled and were buried in the sand. That was all. Among the countless things the mountains had witnessed, these fleeting events were not necessarily the most interesting.
~ The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
“But can we truly be happy when all humanity is unhappy?” “My love, your responsibility when all of humanity is unhappy is to make yourself happy. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that.
~ The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
How are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations. You probably know that the American government just refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. The entire human race is the same. As long as civilization continues to develop, the swallows I want to save and all the other swallows will go extinct. It’s just a matter of time.
~ The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Your experience of life is not what happens to you, it’s what you pay attention to.
Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.”…They were ready to do me violent harm, until they felt we were part of the same tribe, and then we were cool. That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.
~ Born A Crime by Trevor Noah
We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.
~ Born A Crime by Trevor Noah
Even were the time to come when there would be neither poor nor rich, yet there will always be wise and stupid, sly and simple, for so there have ever been and ever will be. The strong man sets his foot on the neck of the weakling; the cunning man runs off with the simpleton’s purse and sets the dunce to work for him. Man is a crooked dealer and even his virtue is imperfect. Only he who lies down never to rise again is wholly good. Already you may see the fruits of that goodness, and those who have most reason to bless it are the crocodiles of the river and the gorged crows on the temple roof.
~ Sinuhet, The Egyptian by Mika Waltari
It is almost a certainty that you will be forgotten within one generation of your death regardless of who you are or what you accomplish in life. While on the surface that seems depressing, if you dig a little deeper it can be freeing, because that also means you are under no obligation to accomplish anything or be anyone. If we can let go of the part of our ego that tells us we do need to be significant and make some mark on the world, an immense amount of pressure that comes from that obligation is relieved. You don’t need to do anything, just do you.
Just because things could have been different, it doesn’t mean they would have been better.
Criticism and advice are two sides of the same coin. If you wouldn’t go to someone for advice, why take their criticism?
“If we was in town we’d have a fine funeral…But we ain’t in town. There’s nothing you can do but kick your horse.”
What people say is often a reflection of themselves, not you.
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
~ Captain Jean-Luc Picard
When you are wrong, admit it. When you are right, be quiet.
If you buy things, you’ll have things, not money.
Nobody is more impressed with your stuff than you are. People look at the Ferrari, not at the driver.
“Being vegetarian or non-vegetarian need not be black or white…sometimes eating meat for nutritional purposes, but all the time not necessary. Sentient beings are killed even for a vegetarian diet. When land is cleared to make space for crops, the natural habitat is destroyed, and many smaller beings are killed. Then crops are planted, and pesticides are sprayed, killing many thousands of insects. You see, it is very difficult to avoid harming other beings, especially in relation to food.” “But from a compassionate point of view, if you have to eat the flesh of an animal, wouldn’t it be better to eat a being like a fish?” “I understand what you’re saying, but there are some who would say that eating a cow is better, because a single cow can provide more than one thousand meals. A fish, only one meal. Sometimes it takes many prawns, many sentient beings, for only one meal…Before we eat any meal, vegetarian or meat, we should always remember the beings that have died so that we can eat. Their lives were just as important to them as your life is to you. Think of them with gratitude and pray that their sacrifice will be a cause for them to be reborn in a higher realm – and for you to be healthy, so that you can quickly, quickly reach full enlightenment in order to lead them to that same state.”
~ The Dalai Lama, The Dalai Lama’s Cat by David Michie
In fitness, it’s easy to say “I want to look like this person,” and idolize their look. In finance, you can see when someone’s rich, but you can’t see their wealth. Emulating their richness won’t make you as wealthy as them.
If believing these things makes me a better and happier person, does it even matter if they are true?
Do you know what a happy person needs? Nothing. Because he is happy.
~ Wim Hof, The Wim Hof Method
The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength, whereas in truth resistance cuts you off from Being, the only place of true power. Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness. So the ego exists in a continuous resistance-mode and plays counterfeit roles to cover up your “weakness,” which in truth is your power.
~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Stories aren’t for children to fall asleep, but for adults to wake up.
Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes — with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
“But you do have a peaceful planet here.” “Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments — like today at the zoo. Isn’t this a nice moment?” “Yes.” “That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.“ “You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” said Billy Pilgrim. “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
“Why me?” he asked the guard. The guard shoved him back into ranks. “Vy you? Vy anybody?” he said.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
Wherever you go, there you are.
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”
~ Mary Anne Radmacher
Don’t believe everything you think.
You can’t blame a blind person for being blind…you just don’t let them drive your car.
Use what talents you possess - the woods will be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
~ Henry van Dyke
If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
We are our choices.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Assume whoever you’re listening to knows something you don’t.
When you’re the ocean, you don’t have to be afraid of the waves.
You’re going to make a lot of people mad doing what’s right for you.
Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
~ probably Cocteau, Brynner, and Boyle
Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, in Breakfast Of Champions
Comparison is the thief of joy.
~ Theodore Roosevelt supposedly, but who knows who said it first
Every time you decide to solve a problem with code, you are committing part of your future capacity to maintaining and operating that code. Software is never done.
~ anonymous
It’s not a matter of what if, it’s a matter of what now.
~ anonymous
Build a man a fire, and you’ve kept him warm for one night. Light a man on fire, and you’ve kept him warm for the rest of his life.
~ Olin Shivers, my Compilers prof. (actually by Terry Pratchett, but it was quite fitting for Compilers)
Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.
~ Terence McKenna
You control your thoughts, don’t let your thoughts control you.
~ anonymous
There will be a moment where the pain of staying where you’re at outweighs the discomfort of change
~ anonymous
Hammers don’t know whether they are striking metal or flesh.
~ anonymous
The middle ground gets attacked from both sides.
~ anonymous
War does not determine who is right, only who is left.
The only person you should compare yourself with is who you were yesterday.
My technique is, don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
~ Terence McKenna
…this is supposed to be your hobby and something you love and you are stamping around cursing the world…
~ anonymous
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.
An airplane needs resistance to fly.
Theory is when you know everything, but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In my class, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why.
Writing a TOK essay is like constipation. It hurts like hell and you produce crap very slowly.
~ anonymous
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
~ George Carlin
I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.
~ George Carlin
If things go wrong, don’t go with them.
~ Roger Babson
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
~ Cyril Connolly
La música expresa aquello que no puede decirse con palabras pero no puede permanecer en silencio.
~ anonymous
Lyrics are probably the least important part of making a hit. If the emotion is there you could be speaking Elvish.
~ anonymous
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
~ Bernard Baruch
Grammar - the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.
Not giving a fuck and not giving a shit may seem similar, however, they are two completely different things. Not giving a fuck is very good – it helps you be who you are regardless of what others may think of you. Not giving a shit, on the other hand, is not so good – it is a negative outlook on life, it’s blowing off school or work because you don’t care enough. In some cases not giving a shit may be easier than not giving a fuck, but not giving a fuck makes you happier and will make society a better place. Just remember: start giving a shit, stop giving a fuck.
What you were doing is always a mystery if you delete that browser history.
If life gives you lemons, mix them with some tonic and rum and enjoy the ride.
You’re not a failure, things just failed. Every breakdown has an opportunity to be a breakthrough.
~ anonymous
You don’t get another chance, life is no Nintendo game.
~ Eminem
Here’s all you need to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.
~ George Carlin
Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
~ Mark Twain
Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary…that’s what gets you.
~ Jeremy Clarkson
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself… The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time.
~ Fred Brooks
I’ll see you in another life, when we’re both cats.