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.
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Said by a friend who, in the late 90s, copied a dozen albums to minidisk for me. He named all the albums and track names using a remote to select each letter one by one. It must have taken him many hours to do it. But he wanted to do a good job. Up up up up A right, up up up up up f, etc etc. Utterly tedious but he wanted to do a good job.
“What I’m about to tell you is top secret, a conspiracy bigger than all of us. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible. The top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission.”
It’s a really good way to get rid of the mentality of one person can’t make a difference. Because everyone is a drop, and without so many drops, there is no ocean. Maybe one individual drop doesn’t truly make a difference alone. But what if every drop was gone?
It helps me feel that, even if the difference I make isn’t big enough to make an impact, an impact only exists BECAUSE of all the drops.
That goes for both positive and negative things. A thousand bad drops are needed to make a bad thing. A thousand good drops to make a good one.
Sorry to question it, seeing as you like it so much, but doesn’t that not make a difference if you’re still fairly sure there’s not enough other drops?
I prefer the starfish on a beach analogy for the same thing because it cuts others out entirely.
Hm. Good question, and I can’t say I have a great answer.
I like the starfish one too, the ocean one is just better for my mindset.
I guess accountability? The starfish story appeals more to personal ego (not using the term ego as a bad thing here), where as the ocean one feels more like accountability to me.
Starfish is saying that the little thing you do can help someone, even if it doesn’t solve the problem. Ocean one is saying that everyone is responsible, even if only a tiny bit in the grand scheme.
I kind of pair it with a mindset of if every drop thinks that they don’t make a difference, that adds up. One person can’t save the planet, but every person thinking they can’t save the planet means that you have that ocean of people all thinking that they don’t matter. And that’s a big problem.
Like I said, probably not the best answer. Just rambling what came to mind.
Hey, if it works for you, I guess. I find I’m easily frustrated if I imagine there’s a ton of other people working against me but that’s really my issue.
“The hard way is the easy way” has always rung true because when you take short cuts you end up making more work for yourself. Maybe the thing didn’t fit because you didn’t take the time to measure it properly, or you didn’t calibrate the machine. Or you made assumptions that turned out untrue because you didn’t take the time to fully research them or whatever.
Do the work up front, or it increases exponentially. I literally despise this quote. Growing up I hated when my dad quoted it at me. And I’m a little disgusted with myself for agreeing with him now haha. But it’s so true.
“Documentation is the name of the game”: My dad was a union president for the board of Ed in my town growing up. He had to deal with a lot of he-said-she-said cases. But whoever can prove what they’re saying with proper, timestamped documentation always wins the case.
“Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky, they are people who say ‘This is my community and it’s my responsibility to make it better.’” Tom McCall - Oregon Governor 1967-1975.
“Psh, friends? Who needs them? They roll more off the line every day.”
Sounds super callous out of context, but the guy was incredibly friendly and kind. He had originally moved across the country to where his wife was living, and at this point they were going through a really bad divorce. I strongly suspect his local support network was entirely her friends, and they were turning their backs on him. I always took it as advice on being unafraid to remove the people who are dragging you down, and be confident that there are better ones out there.
"Live on, survive, for the Earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention."
Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
A more recent one, meditation-related, short and simple and I have no idea who said it, I just happened to catch it a couple of years ago on a website-that-shall-not-be-named:
Great quote for me from the OP. Thank you.
This prompts me to adjust it to fit my needs: "I am my thoughts, so I better craft my thoughts in a better way."
When I was like 8, a liftee at my local ski hill told me that as I dangled from the chairlift about 5 feet off the ground because I waffled getting on the lift.
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