quotes

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

theodore roosevelt (teddy)

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"
macbeth - after hearing of his wife's death

life has no meaning, no purpose - pessimistic. (but also a comment on the artifice of the deal between audience and players?)

"Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice"

Barry Goldwater

"the ineluctable modality of the visible" - reflected on by Stephen Dedalus when walking on Sandymount Strand in chapter 3

*our inescapable reliance upon vision in perceiving the world and in perceiving ourselves*

"reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Philip K. Dick

"No raindrop thinks it's responsible for the flood"

Douglas Adams

"The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed."

William Gibson

"Oh Captain, my Captain."

Walt Whitman on Lincoln

"He was my North, my south, my east, my west,/my working week, my sunday rest,/My moon, my midnight, my talk, my song/I thought that love would last forever,/I was wrong."

W. H Auden "Funeral Blues" (Stop all the clocks)

"Dying is an art"

Sylvia Plath

"Each man kills the thing he loves"

Oscar Wilde, "Ballad of Reading Goal"

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Einstein

You miss a 100% of the shots you don't take.

Wayne Gretsky (Canadian hockey player)

“We don’t stop moving because we grow old. WE grow old because we stop moving”

Limitless documentary, palliative care specialist

“attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”

Simone Weil

God, 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.

Reinhold Neibhur, The Serenity Prayer

“Hell is truth seen too late”

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan

The only ideas worth gaining are from walking.

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Caesar to his best friend. We are responsible for our actions and outcomes, not fate.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”

Often misattributed to Churchill, but likely the idea originates with Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”

These “appeal to the common sense of the ignorant”

WHenever we see something like “Learn _______ in 24 hours” we should think of this. One can study marching until one is perfect, but it’s unlikely that this will make one the next Secretary of the Army. David Mamet. Barbie vs Godzilla.

'There is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.'

Quote from Voltaire, highlighting that even though God does not exist, he recognised that the only thing stopping some people from doing bad things was their belief in divine retribution. Sadly, this seems to be true as is evidenced by the number of theists who are perplexed by where atheists get their morality from.

“It is the desire, not the desired, that we love”

Friedrich Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil” we love our desires, not the thing desired. For example, we might not desire a sports car, but instead desire the idea of being strong, fast, confident, reckless, s

“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man".

Madame de Stael French 18th century “woman of letters”

It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

Eric Thomas. (“Dieting is simple but not easy; making money in the stock market is simple but it’s not easy).

Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe.

Einstein

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Sherlock Holmes to Watson

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Charlie Chaplin

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche