What's a quote that has stuck with you for your whole life?
I always loved browsing such posts on reddit, so thought I should make one on lemmy too
Edit: Usually these kind of posts only used to have excerpts from books or ancient proverbs, but now I am seeing a lot more quotes from shows/movies/games are also resonating with people. It’s pretty cool to see.
“Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.” Shannon L. Alder
Copy/pasted from Goodreads, I’m not actually verifying.
I took a long time to warm to this one. I used to think that if I could just make the right arguments people would agree with me. Eventually, I realised that even if they’re perfectly reasonable, natural language has a certain bitrate, and human memory has a certain bitrate of loss over a given timeframe. If you can’t explain your idea quickly one of you will hit it.
“Why not? You and I are eccentrics. We’re certainly not typical of the people living on Terminus. As for criminals, that’s a matter of definition. And if criminals are the price we must pay for rebels, heretics, and geniuses, I’m willing to pay it. I demand the price be paid. […] You can’t have geniuses and saints without having people far outside the norm, and I don’t see how you can have on only one side of the norm. There is bound to be a certain symmetry.” - Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov
There is only one way to make people talk more than they care to. Listen. Listen with hungry earnest attention to every word. In the intensity of your attention, make little nods of agreement, little sounds of approval. You can’t fake it. You have to really listen. In a posture of gratitude. And it is such a rare and startling experience for them, such a boon to ego, such a gratification of self, to find a genuine listener, that they want to prolong the experience. And the only way to do that is to keep talking. A good listener is far more rare than an adequate lover.
-Travis McGee
from Nightmare in Pink
by John D. McDonald
It’s just something I need to get much better at. I’ve come pretty far from where I used to be, but being a good listener is something I still struggle with sometimes.
Well, the only thing you can really do is identify the behavior and self-correct. As for whether or not people have mentioned it…yeah, they have in the past.
“The spaceships hung in the air, in much the same ways that bricks don’t” - Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy
I use this quote a lot when doing D&D Campaign prepping. It’s a fantastic example of a non-sensical sentence that somehow completely explains the subject
Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
God’s Final Message to His Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience."
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.’
It parses fine really, there is a (possibly empty) set of things that float in the air, and the spaceship is one of them, but bricks are not. It’s not nonsensical, it’s just a creative twist on a common idiom (“in much the same way a brick does”) that’s so unexpected it seems silly.
I also think of the later books where Arthur perfects the art of falling and missing the ground sometimes.
Tagging on, since my favorite quote is also from Douglas Adams:
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
It’s stuck with me as a perspective I have. It’s up to you to make things happen the way you want them to, and certain things shouldn’t be taken for granted.
This is a weird application of that quote, but I remember when Avengers: Infinity War came out and there were people saying that Thanos was right, and his decision to kill half of all beings would, in fact, lead to less starvation and poverty. And I got in an argument where I said, “You may be right that Thanos’s was a valid solution. But there is not fucking way in hell that it was even close to the best, or even a good solution! Just because you think of something that works first doesn’t mean you should always go with that!”
It’s not even a good solution. Take, for example, Earth. Half the people are gone. We’re at about 8 billion people now. Know when we were at half that? 1973. This solution puts the clock back by 50 years, causes a lot of pain and strife, and Thanos (and most people on earth) would likely have lived long enough to see the correction he made undone. When a solution that drastic doesn’t solve the problem for even a lifetime, it doesn’t even approach being a good one.
"For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
Cannot remember where this is from but I like it enough tosaved it in my notenbook.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
Life has been remarkably stagnant ever since I was born. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It just takes a bit of time to realize it and recognize the patterns.
Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. . . . because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.
Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.
Does a poem count? Ozymandias has stuck with me forever.
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Fun facts time! There are actually two versions of Ozymandias, one written by Shelley and the other by his friend Horace Smith. They had a competition to both write a poem with the same title and subject matter, which I think it’s fair to say Shelley won. But anyway, here is Smith’s version:
I dislike this one quite a bit. I'm a good planner, but we're all human, and can forget sometimes. This quote is just an excuse to feel better about not helping someone out, and not in a healthy I'm-setting-boundaries manner.
I think there’s a difference between being a shitty person and being unwilling to help and being repeatedly used because you’ve helped out a couple of times before and now people end up leveraging your kindness. I personally subscribe to the line of thinking in the comment you replied to after giving the person I’m working with the benefit of the doubt that it’s a justified emergency a couple of times. I have a list of people at work now that I’ll still assist but I don’t jump at the opportunity as quickly because everything is an emergency to them and I think that’s just as shitty as not helping someone.
Just to clarify, I phrase it a bit differently: Not “piss-poor planning” but rather “a lack of planning” since it sounds less aggressive.
I think there’s a difference between being a shitty person and being unwilling to help and being repeatedly used because you’ve helped out a couple of times before and now people end up leveraging your kindness.
Unfortunately the older I have gotten, I have found that this applies zero to the world of corporate and upper management when dealing with their endless ‘emergencies’ due to fuckups of planning.
Also, throw sales management into that above lot. They tend to be the worst when it comes to any sort of concept of planning or prioritizing or, well, anything.
Edit: edit just to clarify what I meant was shit tends to roll downhill in a major way and you either have to do it or else.
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