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.
In 2004, I was working on the bridge of a ship that was going to be inspected in a few days. There was a small hole in a wall about the size of an electrical outlet with exposed wiring that I wanted to hide from the inspectors. I printed out a picture of a kitten and taped it over the hole. I visited the ship again in 2018, and the kitten was still there.
This one stuck with me and resurfaces in my mind every now and then, particularly nowadays:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.” ~ Carl Sagan
Every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.” by Terence McKenna
And the other is from an old salty chief when I was in the navy. This is paraphrasing but:
“Every fuck up comes down to a combination of three root causes: didn’t know, didn’t care, or a material problem”
Someone gets hurt on the job? Well, did they not know they were doing something wrong? Did they not care enough about safety? Or was it simply because something broke? Maybe they didn’t know AND they didn’t care to find out.
There’s a lot to take from Bojack, but I’m not sure I could pin down one sentiment to wrap up the whole show. Frequently, it’s just a good comedy. At other times, the show is an exploration of depression and self-destruction, and I think that’s what makes it resonate with so many people.
For what it’s worth, the first season is generally the worst in the show by a fair margin. It has a few high points, but I think most fans appreciate that the show demands more commitment than many are willing to devote. It wasn’t until into the second season that things started to really hit the highs that made the show stick with people.
The Serenity Prayer - “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
I don’t consider myself very religious, but this has always stuck with me.
I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and ... kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that ... the real goal here is paint on the wall. We're doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a "good job" can't wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.
I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is ... has always stuck with me.
Damn I should have gotten you to paint our house. Our painter just did a half assed job and started yelling at me when I pointed out lines that weren’t straight or paint splatters from the accent wall on the white wall. He also used the wrong gloss of paint in places and created these shiny patches throughout the house.
And I have to look at this every day until I decide to repaint again. Just a bit more care and effort on his part would have prevented me from being mildly annoyed every day for the next however many years.
(I ended up painting over the glossy stuff myself)
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain
I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:
“If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless…”
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.
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