Quotes
Some of my favorite quotes. My current favorite might be the one by Anais Nin, which I recently learned from Tim Ferris.
Anais Nin:
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Alan Watts:
We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen…
Edward Snowden:
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Epictetus:
Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
Tell yourself first of all what kind of person you want to be, and then act accordingly in all that you do.
Seneca:
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
It isn’t short and sweet but; Think of every human interaction you’ve ever wanted but didn’t get, a father figure to be there for you, a friend to confide in, someone to bring you breakfast in bed, someone to give you a hug, someone to do something embarrassingly hilarious to brighten your day, a stranger to say “Don’t give up, you matter.” Then, when the opportunity arises, BE THAT PERSON, do all of those things for others that were never done for you. You can’t go back in time and do them for yourself, but today you CAN do them for someone else. Try your best, because what you do matters, YOU matter.
TLDR; Don’t just Pay It Forward, start the cycle.
That boy looks up to you, I really hope you’re as good of a person as he says you are.
Marcus Aurelius:
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.
You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
David Goggins:
Be more than motivated, be more than driven, become literally obsessed to the point where people think you’re fucking nuts.
When the ending is unknown and the distance is unknown that’s when you know who the fuck you are.
Oh you’re doing it, these motherfuckers don’t know me son. One day you can be walking, one day you can be on your back but you come back from that shit, you come back. That’s what is all about. I’m back motherfuckers, you thought you had me, you thought you had me down, only for a second, I’M BACK!
Samuel Becket:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Viktor Frankl:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Stephen M.R. Covey:
We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.
Rosa Parks:
No.
Yoda:
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
Mark Twain:
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed. (Note: Mark Twain might not have said this.)
Thich Nhat Hanh:
When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment, he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.
I first read the quote above when reading one of Thich’s books. It was either The Pocket or The Other Shore, the quote is in both. I read the first sentence and immediately looked for the cloud. I saw no cloud, was there a misprint? I then read the rest of the quote and by the end of it I had shivers. It is simply written and it’s not a groundbreaking out-of-this-world thought. This idea has been the focus of many talks. Yet, it still moved me.
Nietzche:
Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster, for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Steve Furtick:
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.
Kurt Vonnegut:
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
David Benatar:
It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.
Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake.
The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing.
Shakespeare:
Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none.
George R. R. Martin:
When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.
Frank Herbert:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
This is a quote from Dune, written in 1965. Very prescient.