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.
“You’re not here to make a choice, you’ve already made it. You’re here to try and understand why you made it.”
-The Oracle.
To this day it’s the way I don’t worry about determinism and free will. It doesn’t matter if I truly was the one who made a choice or not—if it was predestined—I’m supposed to learn about why I made that choice.
The way I think about this is somewhat novel I think.
Suppose we have two universes, everything the same, except one has free will and one doesn’t. Would an observer be able to tell them apart? I don’t think so. Maybe I just lack imagination, but I don’t see how free will would actually make a difference.
Your decisions determine what kind of person you are and what kind of person you are determines what decisions you make. They are self reinforcing and tied up together in a big path dependant knot.
Wanting to be a better person also only works if you let it change your decisions, bringing you one step closer to being a better person.
I think that only holds true if we stop making choices.
As far as free will is concerned, the multiverse theory has some great implications for that. Still no answers, but rationales that there are other “yous” out there living ever single possibility.
For example, you’re not very likely to become a Christian being raised Muslim in Iran. As much as we’d like to believe we can shape ourselves, we’re only a part of the equation.
Instead of focusing exclusively on how fast you can get to the finish, which may result in missteps along the way that slow you down, focus on moving smoothly accounting for variables that might make the journey more rough and doing what you can to plan for/avoid them. Making everything “smooth sailing” all the way to the finish line. There’s a dozen different interpretations that can be applied here, and it’s more or less an adaptation of “slow and steady wins the race” but it’s so broad that it’s generally true.
Sometimes, speed for the sake of speed is faster, period, but often speed for the sake of speed comes with compromises and issues along the way which may make the whole process slower over all. I’d rather go smoothly than quickly.
A good real-world example of this is stop and go traffic. Instead of going quickly to catch up to the person ahead of you, then stopping abruptly, if you instead go at a slow/steady rate, you will burn less fuel, consume less of you brake material, and over all have a more pleasant drive than if you’re constantly stopping and going. In addition, if everyone were to adhere to this in heavy traffic, then most traffic jams would very likely be less impactful on travel delays. You’d get through congestion easier and with less frustration, and very likely arrive sooner, feeling more calm and relaxed.
“you can stick your well-laid plan up your well-laid ass”
Been almost 30 years, what a dumb quote to come to mind so often. I never say it, haven’t seen Die Hard 3 since the '90s, no idea why it’s stuck so hard
I always loved this one. The version i knew was something like “…you just paid him to get out of your life” - and it it has been useful more than once.
“Molten wounds still glow where the two nuclear bombs detonated. And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.”
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