2021 April
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"Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you."-- L. R. Knost
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"The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care." - Hugh MacLeod
2021 February
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"What is grief if not love preserving"
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"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
-Rainer Maria Rilke, "Go to the Limits of Your Longing"
2021 January
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I used to collect quotes a lot. Maybe I still do. Here are a couple of collections I've posted online. Tang In Cheek - a list of quotes (allegedly by me) Email signatures - a list of quotes I used as a pool to randomly select an email signature from. I rarely send email these days, and when I do it's usually web-based, so I can't use these anymore. There's probably a better way to organize these. I mean, I kind of want some kind of upvoting system like they have at bash.org (to see which quotes the three readers
2020 January
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"The wave returns to the ocean. What the ocean does with the water after that is anyone's guess."
2019 August
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Shogun There's a quote I like from James Clavell's novel Shogun: “It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.” The novel implies this was a Japanese saying, which may not be accurate, Clavell probably based it on Jesuit writings from that era. That being said, I like this quote because
2019 May
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“We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.” — Louis L’Amour via swissmiss
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"Take life as it comes. Run when you have to, fight when you must, rest when you can." - Lan Mandragoran
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Bring me all of your dreams, You dreamer, Bring me all your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world. Langston Hughes
2019 April
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"Never give in, never, never, never–never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty. Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." - Churchill Persistence is a virtue, except when it isn't - there is some amount of good sense necessary to discern when one should just give in. As in most things, a balance is required. Unfortunately, good sense is not always in abundance in today's world.
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Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. -- Winston Churchill I already typed the above quote into the post, then realized I had already used it before. Whatever, just goes to show, I'm no stranger to failure. I was reminded of this quote because recently I prepared a demo for a project that didn't push through. At first I was annoyed at the wasted effort, but I realized that I had wisely taken the demo project as an opportunity to learn/sharpen some skills. Specifically, I used it to study the Django
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I found myself poring over the Wikipedia entry for the Ship of Theseus the other day. If you're not familiar, it's basically a thought experiment along the lines of "if a given ship's parts are replaced at every port it visits, and eventually none of the parts are from the original ship, is it still the same ship?" The thought experiment questions the meaning of identity of a whole composed of many individual parts, such as a ship, or even a human. I thought about this while I was digging through time (read: old posts) the other day. In all
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“It is necessary to be lost. There is a simple logic to this. You cannot find yourself without first being lost. You cannot catch what you do not drop. You have to open your fist and let what you are clenching fall." — Cary Tennis @ Salon via karigee
2019 March
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“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people" as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day" and “Weather’s awful today, eh?", you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry" or “What
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"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." -- Ernest Hemingway
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"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White I am fortunate that with my flexible working schedule I get to choose whether to derp around or to be productive every day. Though I must confess, derping around wins more often, maybe.
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Image source: r/GetMotivated It's fun to think about what might have been, but often regret is tinged with optimism - the optimism that given another chance, we might have made different decisions and obtained better outcomes. But different doesn't always mean better, so such visualizations are often pointless speculation. -
"Whatever doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger." Nietzche I liked this quote a lot when I was younger and more gung-ho, especially about things like work. In fact, I may have considered it as a bit of a defining quote back then. I guess the idea was 'ok, we'll rush in and try anything, at worst we learn a lesson and be better for next time'. I think it's kind of the naive optimism that can only come with youth. As I've grown older my views on things like self-care and burnout have evolved, and the quote seems a
2019 February
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“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been." ― John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller - Pamphlet It is human nature perhaps, to think about those alternate realities that might have come from different decisions or different dispositions. If only I was braver. If only I was more decisive. If only I didn't have something holding me back. If only I knew what I knew now. If only I had fought harder for it. If only I could speak to her again one last time. If only I realized what it all meant.