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.
“The only thing to abuse is moderation” - A song quoting Sénèque, but I never found the original sentence from Sénèque (apparently he was talking about Sex in it but I think it applies to anything in life)
@zinklog "History loves repeat itself" With Covid , Wars and even daily life you see this so so many times. On big or little scales but this is a almost mantra to me " History is spiral it always comes back to point x" Sometimes it's scary because you know exactly what happened and what happening now can happen again...
Im not wild about this because to often I see folks use something like it to imply something we face now is no big deal due to a false analogy. Like covid with spanish flu. I.E. - I don't need to mask or vaccinate because we got through the spanish flu. Not taking into account its not as bad because of vaccines but without them it is actually a worse disease and that pictures clearly show folks used masks for the spanish flu. Its not just that but with climate change implying it just seems like the end like the cold war but they are completely different issues with different possibilities for solutions.
@HubertManne@zinklog And that it's fine, we all have a=our own Mantras that we listen too or Superstitions you can also say. What most important that you yourself mentioned, that people used to do something and now they are complacent. If you compare how Japan, Europe and USA handled Covid you can see that something you have to learn and repeat and some things you have to do even if your society is pushing against it. Yeah tell someone to wear a mask when they cough!
Im an obsessive masker now. Its not covid per se its just that by 2022 I realized I had not been sick since 2019 and prior to that I had something on average once a year (I was actually overdue for something when the lockdowns hit) and it was not uncommon to be sick even twice a year. Its 2023 now and I am still on the streak and im convinced its because of masking. I don't know how long I can keep the streak but imma gonna try.
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)
This is not a famous thing, it’s just that I’ve heard someone at a past workplace say this.
“Doing the same thing that got you here into this position will not make you successful in it, it may not even be enough for you to keep it.”
To be clear, he wasn’t saying it to me or anyone, he said it to himself as a life lesson he learned going through promotions and changing companies. The point was to stay humble and don’t expect your past accomplishments to get you through future challenges.
I have two that have stuck with me most my adult life-- and I find that they apply frequently.
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
-- Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty Speech, 1944
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's funny because lately I have been applying that quote to people being terrified of "AI". (I hate that we use that word to describe stuff like LLMs, but that's another topic.)
There are countless points in history where a technological advance has rendered some human labor less or no longer needed. There's nothing to be done about it; that's how progress works-- it's why we're not mostly farmers anymore.
The solution to technology rendering human labor less or no longer needed is for society to divorce the need to work from living a comfortable life. It's certainly not to try and hold back or eliminate the technology solely to protect human labor.
But don’t you feel like this is the one that we’ve been warned about a lot? I’m not concerned about losing my job; I’m worried about being killed by M3gan.
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 best time to plant a tree is fifty years ago. The second best time is right now" - essentially don't worry about what you could have done better, or what could have been, make now and the future as good as you can
and
"If you don't fall off occasionally, you're not trying hard enough" - originally told to me in the context of learning to windsurf (I still can't windsurf), but applicable in a lot of areas. This doesn't mean try to fall off, it means failure is a natural part of growth, not something to be shunned
‘You’re just an NPC in everyone else’ life, no one really cares about what weird shoes you wear, or whatever. No one’s remembering, don’t worry about it’
Really helps out in the world really, it’s kinda true.
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