What quote(s) speak(s) to you?

It varies depending on where I am in life. Here are a few:

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”—Eleanor Roosevelt

”“There’s no comparison between what’s lost by not trying and what’s lost by not succeeding.”—Francis Bacon

“I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can
imagine life without breathing.”—Terry Brooks

“You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.”
~ George Orwell

“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” ~ Walter Winchell

Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future. ~ Native American Proverb

“Hide from risk and you hide from it’s reward”

“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”

“Gravestones cheer the living, dear. They are of no use to the dead”.

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me instead of a frontal lobotomy”

“Who the fuck farted?”

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery- celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from- it’s where you take them to.’”

- Jim Jarmusch

Speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt, I believe she’s also credited with:

America is all about speed.
Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.

“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected.”

—Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography, 1821)

“For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”—Albert Einstein

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”—MLK
(this one hit me hard when I first saw it)

“Nothing’s gonna stop me from floating.”—Tori Amos

I just found this one yesterday, so it’s the one I’ll use for this thread

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Change your thoughts and you change your world. – Norman Vincent Peale

My Dad had been sick for about a year or so, then I was told I had cancer. I had a day of “poor me”, “why me” and he wrote that down for me. I taped it to my bathroom mirror, it’s still there. I try not to have those days, anymore.

“Y’all can go to Hell, I am going to Texas.”

—Davy Crockett

“All I know is that I know nothing.” Socrates

“If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.” Rita Mae Brown

A few I really love:

“Breathe with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens.”
Wendell Berry

“Thanks for this day, for all the birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.” 
Barbara Kingsolver

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” H.G. Wells
“
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

“The joy that isn’t shared dies young.” Anne Sexton

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” Henry David Thorea

@gailcalled – I don’t think I’ve ever head that H.G. Wells quote, before. Thanks for sharing!

@cak: son edited the MA Bike Newsletter for several years. He found the quote and used it on the masthead. He also rode only his bike or public transportation. Often he’d arrive somewhere w/o having checked the weather and have to be thawed out.

“I’ve had eighteen straight whisky, I think that is a record.”

- Dylan Thomas

This is long. It’s from the Monkees’ 1968 film Head, which I first saw at 16. A guru was giving young Peter Tork a lesson:

We were speaking of belief. Beliefs and conditioning. All belief possibly could be said to be the result of some conditioning. Thus, the study of history is simply the study of one system of beliefs deposing another…and so on, and so on. A psychologically-tested belief of our times is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain – the conscious and unconscious – is unable to discern between the real and the vividly-imagined experience. If there is a difference. And most of us believe there is. Am I being clear? Because to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To experience the now. Without preconception or beliefs. To allow the unknown to occur and to occur requires clarity. And where there is clarity, there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. But then why should anyone listen to me? Why should I speak? Since I know nothing.

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who put up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” – G.B. Shaw

envy: /n/ – Wishing you’d been born with an unfair advantage, instead of having to try and acquire one.

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory—and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.
~Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable

Paul Lynde

@Blondesjon – I miss Paul Lynde, as far as you can miss a performer you’ve never met. And I was a kid when he died. lurve.

I’m not sure who said this but,

“We are alive, and that is a wonderful thing for those of us for are alive.”

I also love quotes were historical figures talk shit about each other. Like Aaron Burr’s description of George Washington:

“a man of no talents…one who could not spell a sentence of common English.”

“Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I’ve been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. So, I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture. I felt like I was watching a dream I could never wake up from. Before I knew it, the dream was over.” ~ Spike Spiegel, Cowboy Bebop

Someday we’ll find it, that rainbow connection, the lovers the dreamers and me

Kermit The Frog

The Show Must Go On
(Queen)

@Vinifera7

Hooray for Bebop!

@jonsblond, if I could lurve you, again, I would!

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
– Dr. Seuss

@cak It’s the thought that counts! ;)

@jonsblond You beat me to it! That’s my favorite song in the whole world – I danced to it at my wedding!

Here’s a few of my favorites:

“Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.” ~ Kermit the Frog

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” ~ Walt Disney

“If you want to build a boat, do not instruct the men to saw wood, stitch the sails, prepare the tools and organize the work, but make them long for setting sail and travel to distant lands.” ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery

“If you’re going though hell, keep going.”

—Winston Churchill

mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent – adam smith

“Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.”

Adam Sandler

But I think you can make fun of anything as long as it’s funny enough.

Sarah Silverman

Some of my favorites! (I collect them):

Voltaire Quotes:
– Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
– If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.
– Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
– No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

Mark Twain Quotes
– I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.
– The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

And a not so profound but funny one, when referencing his conversations with his father over the last decade before his father died Bono indicated that his father always started them the same way.

“Would you take those fucking sunglasses off son”.

What we got here is failure to communicate. Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. Robert Heinlein in Time Enough for Love
Even those who don’t want to kill anybody would like the power to do it. and
Who will watch the watchmen? both from Juvenal in Satirea

“Ahh…dinner. The break between work and drunk.”

Homer Simpson

“Every now and then say, ‘What the fuck.’ ‘What the fuck’ gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.”

—Miles in the movie Risky Business

This is a popular thread. I would say “Be Honest, and Be yourself.” -90’s_Kid
Hope I didn’t copy a TM…..:S

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

I don’t believe life is supposed to make you feel good, or miserable either. I believe that life is just supposed to make you feel.

“I walk onto the blazing
sunshine.
the whole day is
mine
temporarily,
anyhow.”

From Bukowski’s “Let it Enfold You”. I love the entire poem, but that stanza is wonderful. Absolutely brilliant and beautiful.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit;

Genius hits a target no one else can see.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

“O, for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!”
It is actually a common misquote of Shakespeare.
But I find it coming to mind every time I am trying to whip up a new, creative design.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat

From Theodore Roosevelt’s Citizenship in a Republic speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, 1910–04-23)

From my heavily underlined “Marriage & Morals” by Bertrand Russell published in 1929. Russell’s a pretty sarcastic guy and I love him for it.

”...finding, however, that the grown-ups did nothing to check such conversations, they gradually wearied of them, and became nearly as clean-minded as those who had never been taught decency.”

“Sex outside of marriage is sin; sex within marriage is not sin… but is a disagreeable duty imposed on man as punishment for the Fall, and to be undertaken in the same spirit in which one submits to a surgical operation. Unfortunately, unless great pains are taken, the sexual act tends to be associated with pleasure, but by sufficient moral care this can be prevented, at any rate in the female.”

“It would be wise to subject all unmarried women once a month to medical examination by police doctors, and to send to a penitentiary all such as were found to be not virgins…in order to avoid the risk of certain abuses, it would be necessary that all policemen and all medical men should be castrated.” on maintaining virtue at any cost

Everything in moderation. Mom

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Wordsworth

A friend will help you move. A best friend will help you move a body. S. Wright

Wherever we want, however we want. ;-)

@zen_ love your quotes, particularly the second! (it’s now above my kettle!) xx