wisdom | Logan's Website

Some Wisdom

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” - Matsuo Bashō

“I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.” - Wernher von Braun

“...a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death.” - Aristotle, On the Heavens 295b

“My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.” - Warsan Shire

“When the water basin starts to overflow, unplug the drain.” - anon

“...eat well, move more, stress less and love more.” - Dean Ornish

“Ambitious people would rather destroy the world than never amount to anything.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Each moment is completely fresh, it’s never happened before and it’ll never happen again.” - Pema Chodron

“If you want to enjoy life to its fullest, you must dare to feel the good, the bad, and the ugly.” - Assael Romanelli

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Human beings were invented by water [DNA] as a device to get from one place [generation] to another.” - Tom Robbins

“Inaction guarantees regret.” - Anon

“铁肩担道义 , 妙手著文章” (The iron shoulder carries morality and justice, and the skillful hand writes the article) - Li Dazhao

“The greater the variety of our experiences… the wiser our counsel.” - Elaine Aaron, The Highly Sensitive Person

“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.” - Khalil Gibran

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” - George Addair

“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood, that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.” - Alice Munro

“We see others not as they are, but as we are.” - The Talmud

“The robin will keep collecting twigs for her nest until the flood takes her, or fire, or a predator, or disease, without wondering if a different nest might prevent the flood or fire or predator or disease that is certainly coming.” - Meng Jin

“F-E-A-R has two meanings: 'Forget Everything And Run' or 'Face Everything And Rise.' The choice is yours.” - Zig Ziglar

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” - Horace Mann

“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.” - T. S. Eliot

“The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.” - Lincoln Barnett

“On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less.” - Plato (Socrates), Apology, section 38a.

“Everything we make is a reflection of a moment in time — a window in time.” - Rick Rubin

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” - anon

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.” - Stephen Hawking

Writing to a friend in 1754, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had just made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, "The Three Princes of Serendip." The princes, he told his correspondent, were "always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of. ... now do you understand serendipity?"

“When it comes to moral and political values, we’re never going to agree on anything. Rationality cannot give us that. But what it can do is mediate the differences between moral systems and allow us to be more tolerant of each other. You don’t go to war with another culture just because they value something you don’t. You can disagree, try to understand, the best you can, but you don’t think they’re stupid or evil just because they don’t do everything the way you do. The same way rationality can regulate the relationships between cultures, it can regulate the relationships between people of the same culture.” - Stephen West

“If [man] chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course. Reality confronts a man with a great many "must's", but all of them are conditional: the formula of realistic necessity is: "you must, if –" and the if stands for man's choice: "if you want to achieve a certain goal" - Ayn Rand (Alice O'Connor)

"In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners". - Ayn Rand (Alice O'Connor)

“It is hardly possible to overstate the value in the present state of human improvement of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.” - John Stuart Mill

“I do not want to die without understanding why I have lived.” - Mount Analogue

“You become what you give your attention to… If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest" - Epictetus

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." - Blaise Pascal

"I'm not sure I'm doubting myself enough." - anon

“If you don’t know who you are, others will decide it for you.” - anon

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” - William Blake

“If you’re paying attention, the thing that you are looking for is being either whispered or screamed at you in the outside world.” - Rick Rubin

“Living is an art to be good at.” - Dave Bixby

“…the curse of a compositional mind: creatures who are endowed with a productively combinatorial language of thought can form too many concepts, complicating the task of finding the right concept to use on any given occasion” - Elizabeth Spelke, Precis of What Babies Know

“Beauty is no quality in the things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind contemplates a different beauty.” - David Hume

“It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body.” - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“To live and to live and to live! No matter how you live, if only to live!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.” - Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception

“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

"You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope the train will take you, but you can't know for sure. Yet it doesn't matter. Now, tell me why?" "Because we'll be together." - Inception

Excerpt from the Dao De Jing

Humans are born soft and weak.

They die stiff and strong.

The ten thousand plants and trees

Are born soft and tender,

And die withered and sere.

The stiff and strong

Are Death’s companions

The soft and weak

Are Life’s companions.

Therefore,

The strongest armies do not conquer,

The greatest trees are cut down.

The strong and great sink down.

The soft and weak rise up.

“...anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself…” - Søren Kierkegaard

“What does a scanner see? I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly, because I can't any longer, these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.” - A Scanner Darkly

“...the simple proposition that skepticism, rather than credulity, is the highest principle the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.” - Lawrence Krauss

“Today and always, may you have the freedom to be who you are, the courage to believe in your dreams, and the faith to follow your heart.” - anon

“The day will be what you make it, so rise, like the sun, and burn.” - William C. Hannan

“Speak the truth. Seek the beautiful. Celebrate the good. Honor the brave. Teach the young. Share the load. Brighten the darkness.” - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“I am also other than I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.” - Simone Weil

“The sort of kids who write songs, or poetry, or paint pictures, are the sort of kids who feel too much at times, the sort of kids whose feelings can overpower them.” - Bono

“In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.” - William Saroyan

"Pay attention to what's meaningful, because you can see what that is. You may find you're terrified of it, because everybody has got this little secret wish: I really love doing... I don't know What it is, it's different for different people, but they've afraid to do it. to really do it. Because as soon as you do what you really love, then you expose your nakedness, [vulnerability] right, you say this is what I'm really like. Instead you say you just shove that under the bed and do something you don't care about at all and then if people judge you, it doesn't matter. But the problem with that is there's no life there. There's no force. There's no you. And without that, the suffering will do you in and you’ll become a bad person. And that's not a good thing." - Jordan Peterson

"In the spring landscape, there is nothing superior, nothing inferior. Flowering branches grow naturally, some short, some long." - Zen poem

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” - anon

“For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is a matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health.” - Xenophon

"Faith allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. And to crown all, the believer derives a sense of great superiority from this very cowardice itself." - Simone de Beauvoir

“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.” - John Roberts

“...what these individuals are capable of doing with vision and clarity of purpose.” - Jimmy Chin

“Rest your feet, rest your legs, rest your arms, rest your eyes, rest your mouth, rest your jaw, rest your mind. No more thoughts tonight, just stars in the sky.” - anon

“A good life is a series of good days.” - Joey Schweitzer

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” - Epicurus

“Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.” - Kahlil Gibran

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” - Jack London

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” -Xunzi

“We don’t experience the world fully unless we are willing to give everything away. Samaya means not holding anything back, not preparing our escape route, not looking for alternatives, not thinking there is ample time to do things later.” - Pema Chodron

“Everything we hear is opinion, not fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” -anon

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'

"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine. If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?" - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“The wise man looks to the purpose of all actions, not their consequences; beginnings are in our power but Fortune judges the outcome, and I do not grant her a verdict upon me.” - Seneca

“For the person, true freedom would mean a release from the bleak and suppressive expectations of our culture, like settling down, becoming a parent, being responsible and following a routine…” - anon

“Memetics sees ideas as a kind of virus, sometimes propagating in spite of truth and logic. Its maxim is: Beliefs that survive aren't necessarily true, rules that survive aren't necessarily fair and rituals that survive aren't necessarily necessary. Things that survive do so because they are good at surviving.” - Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar. 1999

Good Timber by Douglas Malloch

“The tree that never had to fight

For sun and sky and air and light,

But stood out in the open plain

And always got its share of rain,

Never became a forest king

But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil

To gain and farm his patch of soil,

Who never had to win his share

Of sun and sky and light and air,

Never became a manly man

But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow with ease:

The stronger wind, the stronger trees;

The further sky, the greater length;

The more the storm, the more the strength.

By sun and cold, by rain and snow,

In trees and men good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth,

We find the patriarchs of both.

And they hold counsel with the stars

Whose broken branches show the scars

Of many winds and much of strife.

This is the common law of life.”

“The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its own fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you ever make a fist? - Dan Gilbert

Six Big Ideas from Psychology 1: simple things make complex things, we are large and contain multitudes, all reality is virtual, ancestors don’t decide, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, college students have the 2nd best job in the world (professors have the 1st). - Dan Gilbert

“...Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A corporation isn’t anything other than a stack of papers in a folder in some attorney’s office. It in itself doesn’t have power. It is not a tall building or a group of people.” -anon

“If you want to kill yourself man, kill what you don't like. Kill Narcissus. I had an old self that I killed. You can kill yourself too. But that doesn’t mean you got to stop living. Kill the part that’s all about you and nobody else because that’s the part that makes you want to curl up and die.” - Archie’s Final Project

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This is the essence of all philosophy.” - Soren Kierkegaard

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” - G.K. Chesterton

“The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.” - Nisargadatta Maharaj

“If you do what you've always done you'll get what you always got.” - anon.

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” - Harlan Ellison

“I have overcome my nature only through meditation and long study of the way of the voice.” - Paarthurnax

“There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Is this it? Is this the end? What sequence of events brought me to this point? What aboard circumstances lead me here? Is this the cruel painful plan that was orchestrated by the malevolent of deity? Who am I really? What purpose did I serve in this life that was granted to me? I suppose I'll never know. If this is what my life lead up to, and if this is truly the end, then I'll accept my fate.” - anon

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.” - Albert Camus

“And can you offer me proof of your existence? How can you, when neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is? - Ghost in the Shell.

“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.” - Fight Club

“Every person that you meet knows something you don't; learn from them.” - Fight Club

“There was a lot that Billy said that was gibberish to the Tralfamadorians, too. They couldn’t imagine what time looked like to him. Billy had given up on explaining that. The guide outside had to explain as best he could. The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eye hole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe. This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation. The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped--went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.”” - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

“Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?” - Matrix

“But in order to do good work you have to eat well, be well housed, have a screw from time to time, smoke your pipe and drink your coffee in peace. I’m not saying that the rest counts for nothing and leave everyone free to do as he sees fit but I do say that this system seems preferable to many others to me.” - Van Gogh

“If you’re constantly in a state of satisfaction and happiness, then nothing is going to affect you deeply enough, so that you’ll become deep, and life without depth is, by definition, shallow and meaningless.” - Jordan Peterson

“Equation of happiness: Happiness greater than or equal to the difference between the way you see the events of your life, and your expectation of how life should behave.” - Mo Gawdat

“Happiness is what you think about what the world gives you, there is always something to be happy about.” - anon

Life in Reverse by George Carlin

In my next life I want to live my life backwards.

You start out dead and get that out of the way.

Then you wake up in an old people’s home

feeling better every day.

You get kicked out for being too healthy,

go collect your pension,

and then when you start work,

you get a gold watch and a party on your first day.

You work 40 years

until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement.

You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous,

then you are ready for high school.

You then go to primary school,

you become a kid,

you play.

You have no responsibilities,

you become a baby until you are born.

And then you spend your last 9 months

floating in luxurious spa-like conditions

with central heating and room service on tap,

larger quarters every day and then Voila!

You finish off as an orgasm.

I rest my case.

“To express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself—that, my friend, is very hard to do.”- Bruce Lee

The cause of all suffering is desire. So, don’t desire, but do so without desiring to not desire. - Gautama Buddha

“That which we have lived is nothing; that which we live is a point; that which we have to live is not yet a point, but may be a point which, together, shall be and shall have been.” - Giordano Bruno

“Only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” - Socrates

“Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.” -Socrates

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” - Plato

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” - Plato

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” - Plato

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” - Henry David Thoreau

“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” - Dalai Lama

“At your lowest points stay hopeful, and at your highest points stay humble.” - Lokai

“I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.” - James Baldwin, 1962

“Pushing my body strengthens my mind and my soul. It is not easy, I will hurt. I will sweat, I will suffer. I will bleed and blister and bend, but I will never break.” - Josh Bridges

“All know the way; few actually walk it” - Bodhidharma

“I do what everybody knows, but they don’t do: I pay attention to what I eat, I keep my activity level up, and I keep the stress levels down.” - Jim Morris

“A well built physique is a status symbol. It reflects that you’ve worked hard for it, no money can buy it, you cannot borrow it, you cannot inherit it, you cannot steal it. You cannot hold onto it without constant work. It shows discipline, it shows self-respect. It shows patience, work ethic, and passion. That is why I do what I do.” -Arnold Schwarzenegger

“We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.” - Amelie

“If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one and then to a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable, beautiful diversity. Thus, the accomplishment of hope remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.” - Franz Kafka

“What is the eternal and ultimate problem of a free society? …In short, freedom’s main problem is the problem of the individual who takes themself lightly historically.” - Norman Cousins

“The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside us while we live.” - Norman Cousins

“...the word dog is not a dog, it is a word. And there is no universally correct word for a dog, as you will discover if you try to buy one in a non English-speaking country. Likewise, God is not the correct name of the ultimate mystery of the universe--it is a word, one of many metaphors for that which is beyond names.” - anon

“If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction.” - Percy Shelley

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Alan Watts

“Once you’ve learned to think you can’t stop.”

“You do not know where your decisions come from; they pop up like hiccups.”

“Better to have a short life full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.”

“There is nothing we can do to be anything else than what we are.”

“We know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively, it’s gooey prickles and prickly goo, it all depends on your level of magnification.”

“What did you forget, so obvious: Who are you? Well I’m (name), that’s not true, that’s what people told you you were, they put that name on you and they taught you to identify with it and to behave as it was expected to behave.”

“...The more surely the future is known, the less surprise and less fun in living it.”

“Would you rather live a long life doing what you don't want to do, or live a short life doing what you want all the time?”

“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.”

“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… as if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.”

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

“Everything, of course, is fundamentally Yang and yin. If you understand that you really don't need to understand anything else.”

“Forget all that you ever were told and contemplate what is.”

“...in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.”

“This means that you’re not victims of a scheme of things, of a mechanical world, or an autocratic god. The life you’re living is what you put yourself into. Only you don’t admit it, because you want to play the game of ‘it's happened to you’.”

Simone de Beauvoir

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.”

“No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.”

Albert Camus

“I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.” - The Fall, Pg. 6

“Hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them to minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life beyond.”

“There is nothing but this world, this life, the immediacy of the present.”

“It [religion] teaches us to look away from life toward something to come afterwards, such religious hope kills a part of us, for example, the realistic attitude we need to confront the vicissitudes of life.”

“The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation” (Nuptials, 103).

“An unverifiable faith in God and afterlife [is just that: unverifiable.]”

“His writing aims to demonstrate what life means and feels like once we give up hope of an afterlife, so that in reading we will be led to “see” his point”

“The intense and glistening present tells us that we can fully experience and appreciate life only on the condition that we no longer try to avoid our ultimate and absolute death.”

“It is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none.”

“The absurd is the given, the unjustifiable, primordial quality of existence” (Sartre)

“There is no truth but merely truths.”

“What then is Camus’s reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus’s answers. This is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living.”

“Acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible.”

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana

“The purpose of vipassana meditation is nothing less than the radical and permanent transformation of your entire sensory and cognitive experience.”

“The purpose of meditation is personal transformation.”

“Meditation is egoless awareness.”

“And if you want to change something, the first thing you have to do is to see it the way it is.”

“The Dhammapada… says: “What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now. The consequences of an evil mind will follow you like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. The consequences of a purified mind will follow you like your own shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind-- no parent, no relative, no friend , no one. A well disciplined mind brings happiness.”

“You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion… It means that you continue to live a very normal-looking life, but live from a whole new viewpoint. You do the things that a person must do, but you are free from that obsessive, compulsive driveness of your own desires.”

“‘I’ is a concept. It is something extra added to the pure experience. When you introduce ‘I’ into the process, you are building a conceptual gap between the reality and the awareness viewing that reality.”

Mr. Nobody by Jaco Van Dormael

“There comes a time in life where everything seems narrow. Choices have been made. I can only continue on. I know myself like the back of my hand. I can predict my every reaction. My life has been cast in cement with airbags and seatbelts. I've done everything to reach this point and now that I'm here, I'm fucking bored. The hardest thing is knowing whether I'm still alive.”

“What was there before the big bang? Well, you see, there was no before because before the big bang, time did not exist. Time is a result of the expansion of the universe itself. But what will happen when the universe has finished expanding?”

“If you mix the mashed potatoes and sauce, you can't separate them later. It's forever. The smoke comes out of Daddy's cigarette, but it never goes back in. We cannot go back. That's why it's hard to choose. You have to make the right choice. As long as you don't choose, everything remains possible.”

“In chess, it's called Zugzwang... when the only viable move...is not to move.”

“Why am I me and not somebody else?”

“Every path is the right path. Everything could've been anything else. And it would have just as much meaning.”

Nemo age 5: “Why do we remember the past, but not the future? When you ask mommy, she says, stop asking why. It's complicated.”

“Daddy says you can predict exactly where Mars will be in the sky, even in a hundred years. But the funny thing is that daddy doesn't know what will happen to him ten minutes from now.”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“People in the past have believed certain things were done by god but science proved otherwise and gave an explanation, why would that not continue to happen?”

“While we cannot know for sure whether or not the universe has a purpose, the case against it is strong, and visible, to anyone who sees the universe as it is, not as they think it to be.”

“Big teeth with brains is surely better than just big teeth.”

“The greatest of people that have even been in society, were never versions of someone else.”

”Any answer to this problem must begin with a key realization: both time and space are contained within the universe and came into existence only after the Big Bang occurred. The cause of the universe must not include them”

“...you see objects and phenomena not as they are but as they once were…”

“The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate.”

“...embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.”

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

“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.”

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

“Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

“Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.”

“I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.”

“Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.”

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

“Dwayne was hoping that some of the distinguished visitors to the Arts Festival, who were all staying at the Inn, would come into the cocktail lounge. He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.”

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

Radnor Lake: Nahville’s Walden by John Egerton

“We need the tonic of wildness,

-to wade sometimes in marshes

where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk,…”

“Sky water. It needs no fence.

Nations come and go without defiling it.

It is a mirror which no stone can crack

whose quicksilver will never wear off,

whose gilding Nature continually repairs;

no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; -a mirror in which all impurity

presented to it sinks,…”

“…and, as the sun rose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed,

while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of a sore nocturnal conventicle.”

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

“Because people become fascinated with pictures and words, and wind up forgetting the Language of the World.”

“In his pursuit of the dream, he was being constantly subjected to tests of his persistence and courage.”

“The battles may last for a long time, perhaps even years. There are powerful forces on both sides, and the war is important to both armies. It’s not a battle of good against evil. It’s a war between forces that are fighting for the balance of power, and when that type of battle begins, it lasts longer than others--because Allah is on both sides.”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams…”

“When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I’ve known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I’ve discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.”

“Most people see the world as a threatening place, and because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.”

“Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested.”

“If a person is living out his Personal Legend, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

“Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.”

Sam Harris

“Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology and they missed the revelation... No matter how good they are, they are doomed...they will be tortured in hell for eternity.” - Sam Harris

“It is possible to be wrong and not know it; this is ignorance. To be wrong and know, but be reluctant to admit it publicly, we call this hypocrisy.” - Sam Harris

“You could've made the same comment by simply changing the word god to zeus or poseidon.” - Sam Harris

“If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a catholic.” - Sam Harris

“You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.” - Sam Harris

Christopher Hitchens

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” - Christopher Hitchens

“Religion makes morally normal people say and do disgusting and wicked things.” - Christopher Hitchens

“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.” - Christopher Hitchens

The Meaning of Human Existence by E.O. Wilson

“Scientific evidence, a good part of it accumulated during the past twenty years, suggests that we are both these things simultaneously. Each of us is inherently conflicted.”

“The Enlightenment quest was driven by the belief that entirely on their own, human beings can know all that needs to be known, and in knowing understand, and in understanding gain the power to choose more wisely than ever before.”

“The most successful scientist thinks like a poet - wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical - and works like a bookkeeper.”

“The creative writer, composer, or visual artist conveys, often obliquely by abstraction or deliberate distortion, his own perceptions and the feelings he hopes to evoke - about something, about anything, real or imagined. He seeks to bring forth in an original way some truth or other about the human experience.”

Picasso’s dictum: art is the lie that shows us the truth

“The French writer Jean Bruller (pen name Vercors) was on the right track when, in his 1952 novel You Shall Know Them, he declared, “All of man’s troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.”

“A classic synthesis of cultures made from the Human Relation Area Files in 1945 listed sixty-seven universals, including the following (selected at random): athletic sports, bodily adornment, decorative art, etiquette, family feasting, folklore, funeral rites, hairstyles, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, and the propitiation to supernatural beings.”

“Human nature is the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person.”

“So what is the meaning of human existence? I’ve suggested that it is the epic of the species, begun in biological evolution and prehistory, passed into recorded history, and urgently now, day by day, faster and faster into the indefinite future, it is also what we will choose to become.”

Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens

“…badges of identity used in opposition to others.” - TB

“get rid of religion and you’re not going to get rid of fanaticism and you're not going to get rid of the wrong in the world." - TB

"True religion is not about excluding somebody because they're different, true religion is actually about embracing someone who is different." - TB

"'They actually think of it as about how you fulfill your purpose as a human being. the service of others." - TB

"As long as you don't want your religion taught to my children in school, given a government subsidy, imposed on me by violence, any of these things, you are fine, by me." - CH

"...because they won't be happy until you believe it too." - CH

"The degree to which, as it were, you look at scripture, abstracted from its time, you pick out individual parts of it, you use those in order to justify whatever view you like, or whether, as I tried to do in my opening, you actually say what is the essence of that faith and what is the essence of scripture? And, of course, then what you realize... the prophet back then was somebody who brought order and stability... issues of that time... Christianity as a whole... explain scripture in a way that makes sense to people in the modern world." - TB

"Is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good? ...terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation... to insist that we are created, not evolved in the face of all the evidence." - CH

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

“It is the consistency of the information that meters for a good story, not its completeness.”

“The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. … Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”

“In particular, the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (and emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind.” “Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate.”

“…our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with “mere statistics.””

“Causal explanations will be evoked when regression is detected, but they will be wrong because the truth is that regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause.”

“Be warned: your intuition will deliver predictions that are too extreme and you will be inclined to put far too much faith in them.”

“Hindsight bias … leads observers to assess the quality of a decision not by whether the process was sound but by whether its outcome was good or bad.”

“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

“The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

“An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want.”

“…the Humans that psychologists know have a…view of the world [that] is limited by the information that is available at a given moment…”

“The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it.”

“Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble (they are risk averse) when the outcomes are good. They tend to reject the sure thing and accept the gamble (they are risk seeking) when both outcomes are negative.”

“Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance.”

“A theory of well-being that ignores what people want cannot be sustained. On the other hand, a theory that ignores what actually happens in people's lives and focuses exclusively on what they think about their life is not tenable either. The remembering self and the experiencing self must both be considered, because their interests do not always coincide. Philosophers could struggle with these questions for a long time.”

“A world in which firms compete by offering better products is preferable to one in which the winner is the firm that is best at obfuscation.”

Albert Einstein

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed.”

“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

“A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.”

“We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it, and that is all.”

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

Some Maxims

From The Four Agreements:

Be impeccable with your word

Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Don't take anything personally

Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

Don't make assumptions

Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama.

Always do your best

Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.

Other:

Everything is bearable

Difficulty is often a perception in the mind. Challenges are not impossibilities.

Listen to understand, not to justify or judge

Be present and really hear what is being said and what is not being said, that is compassion.

Do things your own way

Avoid mimicry and idolization. Find the courage to pursue your interests.

Don’t overthink things; don’t take things too seriously

Life is often not as complicated as we make it, so take a deep breath and have fun.