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41 Random Quotes

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
— Orson Welles
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
— Henry David Thoreau
So I find the likelihood that mind fucking turns you into an irrational, postmodernist fool quite high … If we wanted to prevent people from getting stupid, perhaps we should start with the most harmful idiot-drugs of them all: TV and religion.
— Eloquence «kuro5hin.org»

No matter where you go, there you are.

— Proverb in #laughing & #teaching
Pain does not create a long-lasting memory, but the memory of luxury exerts itself for ever.
— Paul Theroux «“The Happy Isles of Oceania”»
Schooling converts us from humans into slaves for the global economy by cutting us off from nature and natural thinking.
— Manish Jain «Dumbo Feather, Issue 63»
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life, as much a they are looking for the experience of being alive.
— Joseph Campbell
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
— Aldous Huxley
Chewing is for herbivores.
— Amber O'Hearn
Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.
— Leopold Kohr
A people without an agreed-upon common basis to their actions is neither a community nor a nation.
— Bill Mollison

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

— Socrates «

actually Kenneth John Freeman

» in #laughing
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big successes, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.
— William James
I just spent a billion dollars educating you; I’m not letting you go now!
— Thomas Watson «

via In Memoriam: Frederick P. Brooks

» in #failing, #teaching & #working
Bogons: Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators (and supportinators) absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again.
— Charlie Stross «The Atrocity Archives»
Nothing impresses clients like a gazebo. Not even a lizard garden.
— Bert Harris
I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
— Anaïs Nin
He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.
— T.E. Lawrence

Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

— Socrates «

via Plutarch Moralia, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry

» in #eating
Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
— Kevin Kelly «68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice»

People can be stunningly unobservant.

— Stephen King «

Mr. Mercedes

»
Blanket characterisation of anarchism as 'violent' on the basis of […] the occasional use or recommendation of violence, is not just a caricature, it is also a tad hypocritical coming from a king, a capitalist, a socialist or any other representative of the system.
— Darren Allen «Anarchism at the End of the World»
We are trying to make the world a better place, but that is not necessarily what we accomplish. Many of the problems which preoccupy us are basically insoluble.
— George Soros
Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets. Trying to find you.
— Hafez
Dilbert: Stupidity is like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil.
Wally: Also, you don't want to get any on you.
— Scott Adams

You never gain something but that you lose something

— Henry David Thoreau in #breaking & #making
Human beings are not our enemy. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit.
— Thích Nhất Hạnh «Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames»

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

— Oscar Wilde «

An Ideal Husband

» in #crying, #laughing & #reflecting
Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.
— J.R.R. Tolkien «The Fellowship of the Ring»
You make it up to the top of a mountain, and what's left for me but lightning?
— Rodney Mullen «(mis?) quoting Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Until the Wheels Fall Off»
I want to increase people's ability to analyze and evaluate for themselves, not force ideas on them. I want to work toward enlightenment, not push my propaganda. This is how society will change.
— Chen Hongguo «One Seed Can Make an Impact»
Listening is a very deep practice. You have to leave space in order to listen … especially to people we think are our enemies — the ones we believe are making our situation worse. When you have shown your capacity for listening and understanding, the other person will begin to listen to you, and you have a chance to tell him or her of your pain, and it’s your turn to get healed. This is the practice of peace.
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
Evil turns out to be rigorously applied stupidity.
— Bill Mollison «The Permaculture Show»

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

— André Gide in #crying, #laughing & #teaching
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson in #crying & #laughing
Batman is a billionaire who could solve child poverty in Gotham with a stroke of the pen, but prefers to dress up in latex fetish gear and beat the crap out of poor people …
— Charlie Stross «Dead plots»
Be a good animal, true to your instincts.
— D.H. Lawrence «“The White Peacock”»
Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it.
— Penn Jillette

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.

— Alan Watts in #loving
Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
— Brian Eno «Oblique Strategies»

Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the great kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed by a single day. Nay, he who has said "a day" has granted too long a postponement to swift-coming misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires! It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works, if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca «

Letters to Lucilius, 91.6

» in #teaching & #working