- Tracy Morgan as Tracy Jordan Used most often when female friends ask if I like what they're wearing. Yeah I'm classy.
"Don't try." This was the epitaph on Charles Bukowski's grave, he was quite a fascinating guy. I've always taken it to mean that it's important to follow through with things. Life is too short for half-assing anything. Just like Yoda told Luke on Dagobah, "Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try."
Even Hannibal Lecter reminded us to read our Marcus Aurelius. Stephen King's kid, Joe Hill, wrote a collection of short stories called "20th Century Ghosts." In it is a thoughtful, soul wrenching story called "Pop Art" that might be the saddest thing I've ever read in my life. Like "The Road" sad. From it, this hit me hard:
A couple good ones from the unbelievably pessimistic philosopher Emile M. Cioran: - less true now than when he said it, kind of cementing the validity in it.
"Life is 10% what happens to us, and 90% how we react to it." I don't buy into fate. Everyone is in control of their own lives. Anything less makes us slaves.
"I was training while you were sleeping" -Santiago Botero This is what he said about Lance Armstrong. It comes from a larger text (about 3 paragraphs long) that is worth a read. It reminds me that there are other people out there who may want something as much as I do, and sometimes the only way to beat them is to outwork them. I had it posted on my wall for all the years I rowed. And now that I'm studying for the MCAT it has become more mental then physical, but still gets me excited to get back to getting ready to compete. Read this in full here http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0049n0
This one is a bit longer. It is from a commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave. Spoiler . . . In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
John Daly: Charles Barkley after being asked if he regrets throwing a 5'4" man through a plate-glass window:
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” - Ben Okri I was doing a speech about the suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge and needed a good closing quote. I found this one, and have liked it ever since.
"You fire a guy, you create a rival. If you fire a woman, you create a housewife. -Ari Gold "There are 86,400 seconds in a day. It's up to you to decide what to do with them." -Jimmy V
Some of my favorites come from HBO's Deadwood. " Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back. " - Al Swearingen "In life you have to do a lot of things you don't fucking want to do. Many times, that's what the fuck life is... one vile fucking task after another. " - Al Swearingen When I was a kid, one of the customers at the store I worked at gave me this advice: "Everyone is an asshole until proven otherwise."
A couple of my favorites: "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have."-Soren Kierkegaard "All good books have one thing in common-they are truer than if they had really happened."-Ernest Hemingway
"I could have been your dad, but the guy behind me had exact change and I was late to a LAN party." - RMMB Member. You know who you are, and I still haven't forgotten.
Nice and simple one that reminds me every so often to try to constantly be productive in some way or another. Works in a couple of different ways for me. It reminds me not to fake emotions for things I don't really give a shit about. At the same time it reminds me to keep my bullshit detector aimed on everyone at all times, including at myself. Also reminds me not to worry so much about whatever I may be worrying about. Similar to the old "sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason." Reminds me to pay heed to lessons passed down from those older and wiser than me. Simply beautiful. Captures what has ruined so many societies throughout history. Reminds me to cede judgment to collective wisdom, be wary of all "leaders", and that everyone thinks what they are doing is good.