Finding Solace in Favourite Quotes: Escaping Despair with Words of Wisdom

[scott_alexsk]

"The only laws people diligently obey are those of thermodynamics."

 

[Hurlbert]

Cowards Die many deaths, before they die. - Fredrick Nieche

 

[sebas531]

"Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth"-Archimedes

 

[Astronuc]

Businessmen will strive to make money at the expense of the environment as long as they think like CEOs and not grandparents.

Government will only do as much as the people demand.

Pete Seeger - Earth Day, 2006

 

[Astronuc]

I am interested in everyone and everything, and how it all fits together...which used to be normal, now they call me a Renaissance Man.

Evan Pritchard.
http://evansearthwalk.blogspot.com/2006/03/wednesday-march-29th-2006-after.html

The first part applies to me, but then I was never normal.

 

[Reshma]

"Failures are stepping stones to success, but I always step on a falling stone." -Anonymous

 

[siddharth]

"There are 10 types of people in the world, those who know binary, and those who don't"

 

[Astronuc]

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

In memory of John Kenneth Galbraith, who died at age 97, April 29, 2006.

 

[DeadWolfe]

"You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine!" - Homer Simpson

 

[Dawguard]

"We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right." "To forgive all is as inhuman as to forgive none."--Lucius Seneca.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."--Barry Goldwater

"Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth be known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves towards self-destruction rather than self-preservation. The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuous in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous."--Niccolo Machiavelli

 

[fourier jr]

There are four way to know much: live for many years; travel through many lands; read many good books (which is easiest); and converse with wise friends (which is most enjoyable).
Baltasar Gracian

The great reader of a great book said that he had found only one defect: it was neither so brief that he could memorize it, nor so long that he would never finish it.
Baltasar Gracian

If that life of mine, which only concerns myself, is not directed by me towards something, it will be disjointed, lacking in tension and in form. In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.
Jose Ortega y Gassett

You should do it even if you think you can’t, since it will teach you a lot...
Stephen Willard, General Topology p.121

 

[George Jones]

"Having thus outlined my program and declared my allegiances, I leave the reader to decide whether to proceed further, or to open another beer, or both, or both."

R. Hughes in the preface of his book The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics."He was not of an age, but for all time!"

"The only thing you done was yesterday"

It's kind of sad that this last quote was made, but the bad grammar and the wordplay make it amazingly effective as a scathing comment.

Regards,
George

 

[Astronuc]

"Having thus outlined my program and declared my allegiances, I leave the reader to decide whether to proceed further, or to open another beer, or both, or both."

Now that's the way to study QM. Cheers, George!

I love this quote from a BBC caption: "Clouds present huge problems for scientists who model the climate." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4944058.stm

 

[fourier jr]

No human being ever yet made a success trying to be somebody else, even if that person was a success. Success cannot be copied – cannot be imitated. It is an original force – an individual creation. Every man will be a failure just in proportion as he gets away from himself and tries to be somebody else and express somebody else instead of himself. Power comes from within or from nowhere.
Orison Swett Marden

It is either easy or impossible.
Salvador Dali

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
Salvador Dali

When I first applied my mind to mathematics I read straight away most of what is usually given by the mathematical writers, and I paid special attention to arithmetic and geometry because they were said to the simplest and so to speak the way to all the rest. But in neither case did I then meet with authors who fully satisfied me. I did indeed learn in their works many propositions about numbers which I found on calculation to be true. As to figures, they in a sense exhibited to my eyes a great number of truths and drew conclusions from certain consequences. But they did not seem to make it sufficiently plain to the mind itself why these things are so, and how they discovered them. Consequently I was not surprised that many people, even of talent and scholarship, should, after glancing at these sciences, have either given up as being empty and childish or, taking them to be very difficult and intricate, been deterred at the very outset from learning them… But when I afterwards bethought myself how it would be that the earliest pioneers of philosophy in bygone ages refused to admit to the study of wisdom anyone who was not versed in mathematics… I was confirmed in my suspicion that they had knowledge of a species of mathematics very different from that which passes current in our time.
Rene Descartes

It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard what the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon. Master Ittei said, “Confucius was a sage because he had the will to become a scholar when he was 15 years old. He was not a sage because he studied later on.” This is the same as the Buddhist maxim, “first intention, then enlightenment.”
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

 

[Ivan Seeking]

When in Rome, do as the Romanians.

Condi? She is a great Sec of State...you know, she reads the newspapers.

-- Bush impersonator

 

[fourier jr]

Let us recall that at the start we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself. Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man, who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline – the noble life.
Jose Ortega y Gassett

As one advances in life, one realizes more and more that the majority of men – and of women – are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to an external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out, isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
Jose Ortega y Gassett

The fact that you believe implicitly that you can do what may seem impossible or very difficult to others, shows that there is something within you that has gotten a glimpse of power sufficient to do the thing. Many men who have achieved great things cannot account for their faith. They cannot tell why they had the implicit confidence that they could do what they undertook, but the result was evidence that something within them had gotten a glimpse of latent resourcefulness, reserve power, and possibilities which would warrant that faith; and they have gone ahead – often when they could not see a ray of light – with implicit confidence that they would come out all right, because this faith told them so. It told them so because it had been in communication with something within them that was divine, that which had passed the bounds of the limited and had entered the domain of the limitless.
Orison Swett Marden (loves his long sentences )

 

[Tojen]

Under capitalism, men exploit men. Under communism, it's the other way around. --John Kenneth Galbraith

 

[Lisa!]

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

 

[Astronuc]

"Never let adversity stand in the way of having a really wonderful time" - Zaphod's First Corollary to his First Principle.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

~"The likelihood of converting mass to energy [in a useful way and through a sustained nuclear reaction] is about the same as the likelihood of shooting a bird in the dark, in a country where there are very few birds"
- A Einstein.

 

[Astronuc]

"Back in caveman times, Early Man would venture out and brave dinosaurs, plagues, swarms of locuts, and man-eating flying squirrels in order to bring meat back for his woman and children. When Early Man arrived home from this grueling trek, during which he risked life and limb, he was greeted by the sight of his Early Woman (the last time the word 'early' has ever been applied to a woman), standing at the mouth of the cave, hands on hips, shaking her head and muttering, 'You forgot to pick up the firewood, didn't you?'". Jim Belushi from his new book "Real Men Don't Apologize".

I laughed when I read the comment about the man-eating flying squirrels.

 

[Reshma]

Wisdom ceases to be Wisdom, when it becomes too proud to weep; too grave to laugh and too self-ful to seek other than itself.
~Khalil Gibran

 

[Ivan Seeking]

"Who put the tribbles in the Qaudrotriticale?"
-James Kirk

 

[Semaphia]

"Imagination is more powerful than knowledge" - Einstein, Probably appeared before :)
"Have you ever seen fattys legs? Its F**ing F***ed!" - Muse's Matt Bellamy

 

[heartless]

"Have you ever seen fattys legs? Its F**ing F***ed!" - Muse's Matt Bellamy

What is this about?

 

[ek]

"Everything is true just as it is. Why dislike it? Why hate it?"

It's some Zen proverb. And it's changed my life.

 

[rcgldr]

Al Bundy:

"Women and dog poop, the older they get, the eaiser they are to pick up."

"Why go out for milk when you've got a cow at home?"


Lisa Simpson, traveling through the giant redwood forest, trying to impress on the rest of the family just how big those trees are:

"It says here in the brochere that just one of these trees can make enough sawdust to clean up an entire day's worth of vomit at Disneyland."


From 2001:

"There's never been a problem with the HAL 9000 series before."

"That sounds like famous last words."

 

[Evo]

Netscape employees, for their part, warmed to such Barksdaleisms (Netscape CEO James Barksdale) as his three snakes rule, formulated at an early management retreat.

The first rule (borrowed from Ross Perot): If you see a snake, kill a snake. Don’t set up a snake committee. Don’t set up a snake user group. Don’t write snake memos. Kill it.

The second: Don’t play with dead snakes. (Don’t revisit decisions.)

The paradoxical third: All opportunities start out looking like snakes.

 

[Markjdb]

This one I remember after Vladimir Putin was on Larry King live:

Larry King: Let's get to the part that may not have been enjoyable. What can -- what happened? You tell me. What happened with the submarine?
Vladimir Putin: It sunk.

He has a bunch of other good ones, but they're funnier in russian
It's better if you can imagine his face as he says it...

Copied from wikipedia

 

[Ivan Seeking]

In the 24th century, there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all of the children will know how to read.
– Gene Roddenberry

 

[fourier jr]

In the 24th century, there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all of the children will know how to read.
– Gene Roddenberry

well let's hope so...

 

[Reshma]

In the 24th century, there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all of the children will know how to read.
– Gene Roddenberry

...if our human race survives that long .

 

[Ivan Seeking]

That which can be conceived, and then believed, can be achieved.
-Amway salesman

 

[Lisa!]

"Amazing! You hang something in your closet for a while and it shrinks two sizes! "

An example of thinking positively? I don't think so...

 

[Astronuc]

In the 24th century, there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all of the children will know how to read.
– Gene Roddenberry

Yeah, but he didn't take into account GW Bush, who seems bound and determined to prevent that from ever happening.