Quotes / Brain Droppings / Random Thoughts
“The secret to happiness is freedom… And the secret to freedom is courage.” ~Thucydides
“Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.” – Jeremy Goldberg
“He who angers you conquers you.” ~Elizabeth Kenny
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” ~Isaac Asimov
We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.” Daniel J. Boorstin
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. ~ Carl Jung
“While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.” ~Michael Mandelbaum
The Key to financial success: Never take financial responsibility for anything that eats.
‘Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable,’ ~ Sydney J Harris.
“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone”
“The other night I was lying in bed, looking up at the stars, and I wondered, ‘Where the hell is my roof?” ~Steven Wright
“What others think of me is none of my business”~ Eleanor Roosevelt
“A person who buys excuses will soon attempt to sell them to others.”~ Orrin Woodward
“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” ~David Foster Wallace
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony” ~Mahatma Gandhi
“Dream as if you are going to live forever and live as if it is your last day”
“In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable” ~Loren Eisely
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance” ~Thomas Jefferson
“Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?” ~Michael Pollan
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an action, but a habit.”
~ Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)
“Today I will do what others won’t – So tomorrow I can do what other’s can’t”
“Life is hard if you live it the easy way and easy if you live it the hard way”
“First you shape your habits – then they shape you”
“The moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in ones favour all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would come his way” ~ William Hutchinson Murray
The range of what we think and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds
~ R.D. Laing
“If you can think it, you can do it.
If you can visualize it, you can become it.
Where your imagination leads, your reality will follow…”
~ unknown
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The future is not some place we are going but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found, but made, and the activity of them changes both maker and destination” ~ Warren Bennis
“Men and women are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
~ Ayn Rand
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”~ Aldous Huxley
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”~ Aldous Huxley
“Truth is a quality whose value is confirmed by its effectiveness when applying concepts to real life.”~ William James
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”~ William James
“Most advances are by mistake. You uncover what ‘is’ after you get rid of what ‘isn’t’.”
~ Buckminster Fuller
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
~ Rudyard Kipling
“‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” ~ David Ogilvy
“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will learn.”
“Doing isn’t difficult. Deciding what to do is.”
~ Foster Hibbard
“The greatest problem of communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”
~ George Bernard Shaw
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung
“Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.” ~ Milton Glaser
“Glory lies in the attempt to reach one’s goal and not in reaching it.”
~Mohndas Gandhi
First do what is necessary. Then do what is possible. And all of a sudden you are doing the impossible.
~ St Francis of Assisi
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” ~ Peter Drucker
“The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”
~ Marcel Proust
“Be the flame, not the moth.”
~ Jacomo Casanova
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift upsomeone else.”
~ Booker T. Washington
“Live the truth instead of professing it.”
~ Elbert Hubbard
“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to meet it.”
~ Jonathan Winters
The 7 Ps
“Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance” ~SAS
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you cant achieve it. ~ Unknown
“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal.” ~Paulo Coelho
The Golden Rule of Investing: You can not predict the future.
“If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.” ~multiple attributions
With patience and perseverance you can piss a hole through a rock
Choose your thoughts wisely they do not live in your head rent free.
Life was never meant to be a struggle, just a gentle progression from one point to another, much like walking through a valley on a sunny day.
~Stuart Wilde
“Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.” ~ Miguel de Unamuno
“A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”
~ Saint Basil
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. ~Mark Twain
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
~W.H. Murray
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
~Marcus Aurelius
“The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.”
~Rory Sutherland
“ The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. ”
~Chinese Proverb
“Truth is like poetry.
And most people fucking hate poetry.”
~Adam McKay
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it. ~Albert Einstein
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ~Blaise Pascal
The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born. ~William Ralph Inge
“It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what’s going on.”
~Amos Tversky
Walter Cronkite once said:
“If you’re not confused you don’t understand what’s going on”.
In other words
“If you think you know what’s really going on, you’re probably full of shit.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” ~Lao Tzu
“To understand is to know what to do.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.~ Robert Anton Wilson
“We’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don’t have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we’re willing to listen.”~ Robert Anton Wilson
“Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and “progress,” everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority.”~ Robert Anton Wilson
“Every nervous system creates its own “reality,” minute by minute — we live inside a “bubble” of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again.”~ Robert Anton Wilson
“Of course I’m crazy, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”~ Robert Anton Wilson
“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently.
Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability
to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals;
censorship blocks transmission.”
~ Robert Anton Wilson
“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet,
it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology
(Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.”
~ Robert Anton Wilson
“The map is not the territory.”
~Alford Korzybski
“All models are wrong but some are useful.”
George Box
“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
~The Talmud
“We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent.”
~Paul Valéry
“The universe is change, life is opinion.”
~Marcus Aurelius
“I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.).”
~Robert Anton Wilson
“People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians – meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.”
~Robert Anton Wilson
“Only the madman is absolutely sure.”
~Robert Anton Wilson
“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
~Sigmund Freud
“(!Achtung!!! – Is Reality Distorting Your Ideals?)”
~Antero Alli
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
~William James
symbols get mistaken for reality – symbols can be manipulated
hence ‘reality’ can be manipulated – messy situation develops
Reality is the new fiction they say, true is truer these days, truth is man-made.
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented, it’s as simple as that.
~The Truman Show
“There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.”
~Robert Anton Wilson
“‘Seeing’ is not a function of the eyes alone, but of the eyes-and-brain working together. A popular proverb says, ‘Seeing is believing,’ but as the philosopher Santayana once pointed out, humans are much better at believing than at seeing.”
~Robert Anton Wilson
“Perception is real even when it is not reality.”
~Edward deBono
“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
~John Lennon”
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
~Albert Einstein
“DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND: IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING!”
~Robert Anton Wilson
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
~Arthur Schopenhauer
“You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it, better keep yourself clean and bright;
you are the window through which you must see the world.”
~George Bernard Shaw
“Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.”
~Grant Morrison
“Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.”
~Ram Dass
“All that is, is metaphor.”
~Noramn O. Brown, Closing Time
“I never aimed at reality; I aimed at truth. Look at Cagney. Nothing he ever did on screen was realistic, but it was all true.”
~Orson Welles
“Your beliefs can be like fences that surround you. You must first see them or you will not even realize that you are not free, simply because you will not see beyond the fences. They will represent the boundaries of your experience.”
~Jane Roberts
Two thoughts from Dorothy Parker
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
“Of course I talk to myself. I like a good speaker, and I appreciate an intelligent audience.”
“There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
~John von Neumann
“The task is… not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”
~Erwin Schrödinger
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
~ H. L. Mencken
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.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.” ~Marcus Aurelius