"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
- Hannah Arendt
"To win any battle, you must fight as if you are already dead"
- Miyamoto Musashi
"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' --- and find that there is no death."
Posted by Kain Shin at 10:04 AM
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not:
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not:
the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
- Calvin Coolidge
Posted by Kain Shin at 5:20 PM
Life in the Cloud
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
Phases of Life
"The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it."
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
Self Perpetuating Pain
"The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, "become you," and live through you. It needs to get its "food" through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness"
- Ekhart Tolle
Actualization
"The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly."
"When one has reached maturity in the art, one will have a formless form. It is like ice dissolving in water. When one has no form, one can be all forms; when one has no style, he can fit in with any style."
- Bruce Lee
"The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype."
- Carl Gustav Jung
"There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind."
Unwinnable Conflicts
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."
- Alan Watts
"Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next."
"In each of us there is another whom we do not know."
Bee Watching
"Oh, the jobs people work at!
Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch.
Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see.
So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder not mawtch.
So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher!
The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!".
Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher.
He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher!
And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee.
You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!"
- The Venerable Dr. Seuss
Rights versus Privileges
"Rights are an idea; they're just imaginary... Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges...
Personally, when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true. I think either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all. Personally, I lean toward unlimited rights. I feel, for instance, I have the right to do anything I please. BUT, if I do something you don't like, I think you have the right to kill me. So where are you gonna find a fairer fucking deal than that? So the next time some asshole says 'I have a right to my opinion', you say 'Yeah? Well I have a right to my opinion, and my opinion is that you have no right to your opinion.'"
- George Carlin
"You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well. You should not copy others, but use weapons which you can handle properly. It is bad for commanders and troops to have likes and dislikes."
-Miyamoto Musashi, Book of Five Rings
Emotional Control
"Our Thinking Mind is like a horny dog on a leash that keeps running after things, and if we aren't used to using our Observing Mind, then our Thinking Mind drags us along with it."
-Mark Manson (source)
Letting Go and Moving On
"I don't think that we let go of anything, I think what we do is just wear things out"
-Charlotte J. Beck
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
-Confucius
Identity-Based Conflict
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."
"If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down."
Context -> Emotions -> Trust
"But no, you don't need to add emotion when there is none, because to do so, you often have to sacrifice trust."
-Seth Godin
"Every so often in my personal life with friends, I'll have somebody who will be telling me, it's usually over a meal, about they're in a relationship, and it's in trouble and this trouble has been going on for some time, often years, and it's now heading for a crisis. And it's one of those things where you know sort of, even though they don't verbalize it, they're asking, "What do you think? What do you think I should do?"
And after listening to the narrative for a while, every so often, I'll say, "What movie are you living now?" And it always produces the same response. The person is startled because it sounds initially like a trivial question. They're usually telling the story with considerable agony, and so they kind of freeze like a deer. And then their eyes rotate, usually upwards to the right, which is where a lot of people go when they're searching their memory bank, and then they'll laugh.
That's the important point of this, and they'll laugh and say, "The Exorcist," or something like that. And the laugh is a sign of recognition that the story they've been telling me has a recognizable structure, and once they give me that, they then usually laugh again and say something like, "Oh, my God." I then say, as quietly as I can, "And where does the story go?" And that's the advice I've given them."
- Howard Suber
"People will forget what you SAID, People will forget what you DID, but people will never forget how you made them FEEL."
"Challenges at a company are normal, but my ability to address them is what determines if I can stay."
- Brian Hook
"Trust can only be built when both parties are committed in good faith to the success of the other"
-Dan Magaha
"We are deeply constrained in what we do by the time and place in which we live"
-George Friedman
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases... 'How can we eat?'... 'Why do we eat?'... 'Where shall we have lunch?"
-Douglas Adams
"If you are a woman who isn't beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone's attention. You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program."
- Wesley Yang
"Obviously there are a lot of different companies with different philosophies, but the important thing is to have a philosophy..."
-Tomonobu Itagaki
"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'".
-Henry Ford
"When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."
-Randy Pausch
"...Apologies are a sign of strength"
- Gary Chapman
Opportunistic Anger
"Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, NOT to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate NOT with more injustice, but with LESS injustice."
-Shelby Steele
"Every word, every silence, every action AND inaction serves an explicit intention with methodical precision... whether that intention be known or unknown is up to you."
-Goodwill, the Asshole Sage
"When you answer somebody's questions, then that is advice.
But if you give advice without being asked, then that is judgement."
- Matthew Hinsley
"I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool."
-Linda Stone
"A living being seeks above all else to discharge its strength. Life itself is will to power. Nothing else matters."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
"The happiest people are either very lucky or very flexible in their criteria for happiness."
-Matthew Y. Wong, Ph.D.
"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find
a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause,
but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers
them unlimited opportunities for both."
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)
"To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium."
- Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change (1963)
"Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable than those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence..."
"We need not only a purpose in life to give meaning to our existence but also something to give meaning to our suffering. We need as much something to suffer for as something to live for."
- Eric Hoffer, On Nature and Human Nature