I'm now remembering a few other quotes I like:
- There's one I only remember from an Harold Ramis interview, but it's something like, "You should keep two pieces of paper in your pockets. In one pocket, it says 'You are totally insignificant within the vastness of the universe.' The other pocket, the paper says, 'You are the most important thing in the world.' Remember both are true."
I think it's originally some ancient rabbi, but I like the idea that it's from Rabbi Ramis.
Oh hey, I found it:
"There's a great rabbinical motto that says you start each day with a note in each pocket. One note says, "The world was created for you today," and the other note says, "I'm a speck of dust in a meaningless universe," and you have to balance both things."
"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept" is one that has actually changed my outlook on life.
"Work always as though you were living in the early days of a better nation" - Alasdair Gray, I think?
Comparisons are the thief of joy.
I am sure you know better quotes than this.
I end up saying it to the Geeblets semi-often!
Felix Gilman just retweeted this:
Looking up at the stars always reminds me that stars are so small just little dots who cares. And I am enormous.
Lately the geeblets and I often howl "wanna pet that DAWWWWG" like the appalachian toddler in the bear video. Does that count?
"Keep your feet on the stars and keep reaching for the ground. "
Keep your foot on one stair and keep reaching for the next with the other foot.
some quotes...
• "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable - the art of the next best." Otto von Bismarck
• There is nothing more practical than a good theory. Kurt Lewin 1952
• Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. Voltaire, 1763 Letter to Frederick
• In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. Dwight D. Eisenhower
• "He who has a why? to live for can endure almost any how?" Nietzsche 1888 , Twighlight of the Idols
• Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. Immanuel Kant 1784
• Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down. Robert Frost Mending Wall
• "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results." Narcotics Anonymous "Basic Text" 1981
Aww, Kurt Lewin. He had close ties to my family.
Aww, Kurt Lewin. He had close ties to my family.
Cool. I didn't know much of him until I went searching for the best source of that quote, which I think I originally attributed to Herb Simon.
He used to teach at this Scottish-themed school down the street.
These are some good directions. I should clarify that I'm fine expanding from "inspirational" to "improving".
Maybe I'll get an old quote book from a prior century. Those can be treacly too but not as thoroughly in my opinion.
A few of my faves, though not very inspirational:
Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. Salman Rushdie
"Loneliness is a very good practice for eternity." Rilke
Thoreau: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them
"... placed in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward toward the abyss." Tocqueville
Salvatore Quasimodo:
Everyone stands alone in the heart of the world
pierced by a ray of sun
and suddenly it is evening.
Anaïs Nin: And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
And my big sister on the occasion of her 70th birthday:
llegar a esta edad tiene sus ventajas y desventajas: no ves las letras de cerca pero reconoces a los pendejos e hijos de p*uta desde lejos....
Duolingo hasn't gotten me that far yet.
Improving, not depressing. Although I am likely to use "The graveyards are full of indispensable men" for its managerial wisdom. (Unattributed)
Add a little to a little and you'll get a big pile -Ovid
The graveyards are full of people who said insightful things.
A bit of Gulf expat wisdom imparted to me on my first day there (not totally applicable to me as I also came out of interest in the region and its culture): when you get here they give you two buckets: one for money and one for bullshit, when one of them fills up you leave.
Marcus Aurelius (probably often suitable in tone) and La Rochefoucauld (not suitable, but great) are both pretty good reading. Maybe Montaigne?
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me librium or give me meth.
22: I spent a while looking through La Rochefoucauld, it was all too acid.
There's always Firesign Theater. Give me immortality or give me death!
Now I don't know, but I been told
It's hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I have heard it said
It's just as hard with the weight of lead
24 There's one something like "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue" About as acid as Jon Stewart
27: I'm telling you, culture gap. Jon Stewart is probably a bit acid for this venue.
"So, Jeeves!"
"Yes, sir."
"What do you mean, 'Yes, sir'?"
"I was endeavouring to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: 'Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.'"
I breathed a bit stertorously.
"He said that, did he?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass."
I regret that the Inspirational Quotes board in my old office wasn't up long enough for me to execute my plan of putting up the "Thoughts for the Day" from my old 40k rulebooks.
"BLESSED IS THE MIND TOO SMALL FOR DOUBT."
"ONLY IN DEATH DOES DUTY END."
"A QUESTIONING MIND BETRAYS A TREACHEROUS SOUL."
"IN AN AGE OF INSANITY, LOOK TO THE MADMAN TO SHOW YOU THE WAY."
IDOLATRY IS WORSE THAN CARNAGE. Oh, whoops, that's from somewhere else.
30: "The snail's on the wing, the lark's on the thorn, or rather vice versa."
Now I don't know, but I been told
It's hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I have heard it said
It's just as hard with the weight of lead
SOUND OFF!
One! Two!
SOUND OFF!
Three! Four!
This reminds me of the early 90s when email was still new and people put quotes in their sig files.
24: "Whatever great advantages nature may give, it is not she alone, but fortune also that makes the hero." (Or you could go with "A noble heart embiggens the smallest man.")
Not an aphorism but a wonderful line I'll never forget from Billy Wilder's so dark it shines newsie noir Ace in the Hole: I've known a lot of hard boiled eggs in my time but you, you're twenty minutes.
My wife and I, we've been married 25 years.
Feels like 25 minutes.
Underwater.
One of our neighbors still does the email-sig thing, so we regularly get messages about yard sales and so on with spurious Mark Twain attached at the end.
I guess my Sappho tattoo is in some sense an inspirational quote but I never start meetings with it.
This reminds me of the early 90s when email was still new and people put quotes in their sig files.
These have extinguished themselves in your parts?
Gotta kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight -- Bruce Cockburn
A dear friend has "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice" on hers, and it puts me in the most argumentative mood, which I bite back, because Unfogged is the only place with the correct temperament to argue with the accuracy of that quote.
40: Except for men's fashion, the 90s are done here.
James Thurber wrote a fable about a moth who pursued a star rather than more socially acceptable practice of chasing flames. That moth outlived all his relatives, producing this inspiring moral:
Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
One of my favorites is from Matt Groenig's Life In Hell:
If you can keep your expectations tiny,
you'll go through life without being so whiny.
The quote in 39.1 drives me completely fucking nuts every single time I see it. But I am pretty chill on the neighborhood mailing list.
The list of things I'm not doing over the next 20 years may be disappointing, but in other ways it's a spectacular success.
I don't loathe the quote as such -- the illiterate attribution is what gets me -- and it could spur an interesting discussion about regret, in particular the bias against regretting the things you've actually done.* Obviously that can get heavy, but if kept light, the conversation could be fruitful. You could loop in the related theme of asking for forgiveness rather than permission too.
Or even "Act in haste, repent at leisure" vs. "A stitch in time saves nine." One of my colleagues at my old job used to work for a toxic tech firm that listed among its core values "bias toward action," and I told her my knee-jerk response to that would be to run away, not walk -- the knee would jerk into a full-out sprint. Yeah, okay, that's bias towards action, but the exception proves the rule.
* Pop discussions here and here. Finding those links led me to an email thread that also included this wonderful thing.
Ha! Overlapped with Dan Millman back in the day at DCHA. Knew him a bit through athletics. Did not know about Socrates. He taught a course where everyone got naked at some point. Interesting guy; I had no idea about his subsequent prolific writing career.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.
Charles Lamb
How about lines from civil rights speeches? Thurgood Marshall, Medgar Evers? Labor leaders? I feel like that might fit the culture you're describing but make you feel a little less icky.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe - A. Lincoln, allegedly
Yeah, my first thought was that all the Frederick Douglass quotes people have posted here are collectively in their own league. I don't know what would specifically be "inspirational," though.
Lincoln is my role model when it comes to entering my time.
I spent a while looking through La Rochefoucauld, it was all too acid.
When life gives you lemons, make acidic water.
I've grown less patient with aphorisms and short quotes over the years, and I'd like to think I'd quit a job shortly after finding out that was part of a regular meeting agenda. But in reality I'd probably delay quitting for a couple of years if other benefits were good, as I've done once before and am in the process of doing again.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe
This wasn't Lincoln because it is a very stupid thing for anyone who has ever actually used an axe to say, and Lincoln, famously, knew how to use an axe.
Really, Abe? You think that once you have spent two hours sharpening an axe, you can then spend another two hours sharpening it to the point where it chops the tree down more than twice as fast? What, does it turn into a lightsaber? By "sharpening" do you mean "literally forging your axe from scratch"?
In my experience, once you've done (generously) half an hour, that axe is as sharp as it is reasonably ever going to get.
45: I did not attend the funeral but I did send a nice letter saying I approved.
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women
AIHPMHB, Insurance Hell literally had posters with quotes from the Seven Habits of Higle Effective people.
Maybe "sharpening his axe" was a euphemism?
Maybe George Washington took his sharpening stone to cut down a cherry tree so he bad to walk to Virginia.
Per this investigation all the earliest variants (mid 20th century) of this (not attributed to Lincoln) were if given 5 minutes would spend 3 sharpening the axe. Lincoln seems to have first said it in 1960 (still minutes). The switch to hours seems to have its genesis in early 1980s self-help books (not by Dan Millman, however).
Typical American axe sharpening process.
64: Actual sharpening of the axe is left as an exercise for the reader...
My theory is now that early 80s self-help books -were written by AIs sent back from the future by evil actors who despairing of any other utility used them (in conjunction with the Reagan era in general) to plant the seeds that would come to fuck the worlds 30-40 years later.
"Failure is not an option - it is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."
"The people united will sometimes win and sometimes lose!" -- Fran Peavy
I'm glad you liked it, and I misspelled Fran Peavey's name.
Incidentally, Charlie Varon's sketch "Evolution Revival Meeting" is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsMV7qntv08
"Why do you preach evolution?" I look at them and I smile and I say, "because I want to know my roots." I am proud to look back over five million years of hominid evolution and trace my lineage all the way back to Australopithecus africanus.
I've been listening to The Dropout podcast, about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, and they keep replaying clips of her saying things like, "First they attack you, then they [say something else bad about you]*, then you change the world."
*I haven't not put in the mental effort to remember the whole quote.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they win.
72: back in the 90s, we used to chant: "A slogan, defeated, should never be repeated!"
16: The massive men lead lives of quiet mastication
5: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up the skirts
Except when behind me at the movie.
Also from the 90s: "I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no penis"*
*I know, I know, but it was a simpler time.
78: Pun only visible in written version - very Walt Kelly.
78: But they shouldn't be doing it to Jerry West anymore.