As always, this is a place to say/ask whatever you want, but I’m particularly interested in everyone’s favorite quotes. A few to get us started (paraphrased from memory):
“A man’s wealth is best measured by what he can do without.” HD Thoreau
“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” Mark Twain
"“Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who claim to have found it.” Voltaire
‘All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.’
--Emerson
‘If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.’
“Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” - Shakespeare
“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. ...” Thoreau
“There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.” - Morihei Ueshiba
"The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape...in essence a stone is nothing more than a long event." -Carlo Rovelli
“Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity…we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“If death is evolution’s ‘stick,’ sex is evolution’s ‘carrot’.
— I. J. Weinstock (OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity's Destiny)
“Here is my final point...About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography...What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, or take into my body as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? And for those who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about how to answer that question, I'll answer it for you. NONE of your fucking business. Take that to the bank, cash it, and go fucking on a vacation out of my life.”
"The biological notion of addiction as a disease increases the susceptibility to addiction." -- Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction
"Stability is similar to a loan one has to eventually pay back." -- Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
“Men need to learn to equip themselves for peace.” -- Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man
“No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.” -- bell hooks, The Will To Change
“I freak out the squares, therefore I am.” -- Flea, Acid for the Children
“The compromise you cannot make is often what leads to initiation” -- Toko-Pa Turner, Belonging
“You become an artist in the hope of attracting girls; now that I had a girlfriend, why was I an artist?” -- Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
“All problems are interpersonal relationship problems" -- Kisimi & Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
“Myth: We know how to determine the direction our lives will take.” -- Puett and Gross-Lot, The Path
“In periodic flashes like that I’d be painfully aware that I was living badly, just plain living wrong.” -- Caroline Knapp, Drinking, A Love Story
“what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all." -- William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life
“Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.” -- John Gray, Straw Dogs
“a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill." -- Laura Kipnis, Against Love
"Don't keep money in the house" -- Nicolai Lilin, Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld
“The more you fuck, the more you want to fuck, and the better you do fuck!” -- Henry Miller, Sexus
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
“We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.”
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ You quoted this one New Year’s Day podcast years ago. I love it. Live by it. My life is good with this as a compass point
"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity." Guess who!
"Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-month affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison."
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering” - Carl Jung
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
- Milan Kundera
And the really profound one that I absolutely had to share:
“Every time I fart in my car I roll up the windows and crank the heat, because that's what punk rock is all about.” - Joe Strummer (The Clash, vocalist/guitarist)
"Men learn to love women they're attracted to; women learn to be attracted to men they love."
-- Oscar Wilde
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
- Seneca
‘All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.’
--Emerson
‘If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.’
--Bukowski
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
"The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind." - Henry David Thoreau
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heidi Priebe -
“To Love Someone Long-Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be:
The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer.
The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore.
The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be.
It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.
Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame.
Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.”
'Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex. '
- Frank Zappa
We are all just walking each other home - Ram Dass
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde
“Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” - Shakespeare
“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. ...” Thoreau
“There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.” - Morihei Ueshiba
“Not the rug man!” - The Dude
"The truth will set you free, but not until it is done with you."
-David Foster Wallace
“Calm waters never made a skilled sailor” ain’t that the truth...... author unbeknownst to me 🤷🏻♂️
“ A true voyage is not of visiting new places, but looking with new eyes”
"The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape...in essence a stone is nothing more than a long event." -Carlo Rovelli
“Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.” -Alexander Pope
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell
Sorry, couldn't resist.
"You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly"
Song by Conway Twitty
It's one of my dad's favorite titles, so I always think of him when I think of it.
'Avoid Guru's, follow plants'
- Terrence McKenna
"In my defense, I was left unsupervised." Lee St. John
"What you resist, persists." Carl Jung
"One has the right to their actions, but not the fruits of their actions." Paraphrased/translated excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita
"Don't just do something, stand there." Some Buddhist guy
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Carl Sagan
“Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity…we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“If death is evolution’s ‘stick,’ sex is evolution’s ‘carrot’.
— I. J. Weinstock (OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity's Destiny)
"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life."
“Here is my final point...About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography...What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, or take into my body as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? And for those who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about how to answer that question, I'll answer it for you. NONE of your fucking business. Take that to the bank, cash it, and go fucking on a vacation out of my life.”
Bill Hicks
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood.' Nietzsche
"Belong to a religion? Doesn't bother me if you do, as long as it's not one that says to stop thinking and be loud about it."
Tim Dorsey, Torpedo Juice
“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating a perfect love.”
Tom Robbins
great thread! Just a few ;)
"The biological notion of addiction as a disease increases the susceptibility to addiction." -- Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction
"Stability is similar to a loan one has to eventually pay back." -- Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
“Men need to learn to equip themselves for peace.” -- Grayson Perry, The Descent of Man
“No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.” -- bell hooks, The Will To Change
“I freak out the squares, therefore I am.” -- Flea, Acid for the Children
“The compromise you cannot make is often what leads to initiation” -- Toko-Pa Turner, Belonging
“You become an artist in the hope of attracting girls; now that I had a girlfriend, why was I an artist?” -- Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
“All problems are interpersonal relationship problems" -- Kisimi & Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked
“Myth: We know how to determine the direction our lives will take.” -- Puett and Gross-Lot, The Path
“In periodic flashes like that I’d be painfully aware that I was living badly, just plain living wrong.” -- Caroline Knapp, Drinking, A Love Story
“what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all." -- William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life
“Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.” -- John Gray, Straw Dogs
“a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill." -- Laura Kipnis, Against Love
"Don't keep money in the house" -- Nicolai Lilin, Siberian Education: Growing Up in a Criminal Underworld
“The more you fuck, the more you want to fuck, and the better you do fuck!” -- Henry Miller, Sexus
“Each time we say yes to pleasure, it requires an act of great courage”
“A woman, in the revolutionary act of loving herself, is a completely irresistible thing.”
“You don’t get extra points for suffering.”
All from Regena Thomashauer
"Like a sandcastle, all is temporary. Build it, tend it, enjoy it. And when the time comes, let it go." - Jack Kornfield
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced.”
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal (pretty sure I heard this one on the podcast)
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" - Krishnamurti
“Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.” - Eugene V. Debs
“Social inequality is more violent than any protest or riot.”
“It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
“Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.”
The Joker explains to the Dark Knight that every poo poo is pee pee time, however not every pee pee is poo poo time in this incredible deleted scene.
https://youtu.be/PMNY8g0_wJA
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
“We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.”
John N Gray
A couple quotes that have been helping me out recently:
- Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
- To understand all is to forgive all
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ You quoted this one New Year’s Day podcast years ago. I love it. Live by it. My life is good with this as a compass point
Fish and company stink after 3 days...... Poor Richard
Free your mind...and your ass will follow.
The kingdom of heaven is within
-George Clinton
“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou
The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.
Kerouac - The Dharma Bums
"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity." Guess who!
Bunny: “Billy doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.”
The Dude: “Awhh, that must be exhausting.”
- The Big Lebowski (1998)
“Throw me into hell, and I’ll find a way to enjoy it.” -Ikkyu Sojun
"We have art so that we may not perish by the truth.” - Nietzsche
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."-Mark Twain
“Those who danced were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” - I think it’s attributed to Angela Monet...?
"My child, we can no longer live as rats. We know too much."
- Nicodemus, "The Secret of Nimh"
We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.
- Martin Amis
"Neither duration nor proclamation of commitment is necessarily the measure--there are ephemeral explosions of passion between strangers that make more erotic sense than many lengthy marriages, there are one-night stands in Jersey City more glorious than six-month affairs in Paris--but finally there is a commitment, however brief; a purity, however threatened; a vulnerability, however concealed; a generosity of spirit, however singed by lust, that must be present if couplings are to be salubrious and not slow poison."
-Tom Robbins
Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people..................with the greatest of ease. Me
“It’s good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey the matters in the end.” - Ernest Hemingway
Apologies for the shameless plug, but I've recently launched an instagram page for all quotes enthusiasts. So that's great timing, uncle Chris! :)
One quote a day with an AI-generated image associated to it.
It's called @sneaking.wisdom
Hope some of you will enjoy it, happy to hear any feedback as well !
Otherwise, my favourite quote is :
' True hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been ' - Dan Sullivan
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering” - Carl Jung
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
- Milan Kundera
And the really profound one that I absolutely had to share:
“Every time I fart in my car I roll up the windows and crank the heat, because that's what punk rock is all about.” - Joe Strummer (The Clash, vocalist/guitarist)
“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit…”
-Chris Ryan