Therefore, have done with this nonsense: you have no ground for hope:
Dismiss, at once, these hurtful thoughts and foolish wishes from your mind, and turn to your own duty, and the dull blank life that lies before you.
You might have known such happiness was not for you.
The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes.
Breathing your air…touching your skin…
Saying goodbye…
The last time I felt alive…I was dying.
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
I had someone once who made every day mean something.And now…
I am lost…
And nothing means anything anymore.
I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand.
And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.
…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.
Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.”
When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, "What was it that you wanted and why didn't you fight for it?
Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.
Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
In Washington, D.C., if it were not for double standards, there wouldn't be any standards at all...
~ Senator John Kennedy, discussing the Biden top secret document debacle, January 12, 2023
Life is too short to worry about stupid things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing, and don't let people bring you down. Study, think, create, and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.
Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame.
That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
Strong relationships are what make for a happy life.
More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.
Man (at bar): Are you married?
Bartender: Yep.
Man: Do you and your wife fight and argue all the time?
Bartender: Sometimes she sleeps.
~ from classic film noir, Don't Bother
What late people don't understand about us on-time people is that...we hate you.
And the reason that we hate you is because it's so easy to be ON TIME.
You just have to be early, and early lasts for hours. And on-time just lasts a second, and then you're late forever.
~ Erik Bartell, comedian
Education is the acquisition of knowledge, while intelligence is the ability to use that knowledge to think and reason.
One can be highly educated but not necessarily intelligent.
And vice versa.
~ Richard Feynman
Everything will be all right in the end.So if it is not all right, then it is not yet the end.
The truth is incontrovertible.
Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
~ Winston Churchill
You don't become cooler with age, but care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way to actually be cool.
You keep asking questions and posing situations, and I keep thinking of my father: A man whose sink had on it one big bar of durable, good soap. And that bar of soap was used for cleaning, shaving, and brushing his teeth. It worked fine; it was fast; it was economical. He could then get on with his day.
I think we clutter our minds and our lives in a way people would have liked for my father to clutter his toilet. There is too much clutter and too much thinking and too much devising. I think you need to be true to your work and your friends--these should be small circles. People who have too many friends tend to have too few ideas, I find, and they cover up their disappointment with parties and chatter and movement.
Focus on working well and being there for you, your work, and your friends. One bar of soap. Taught me a lot.
Sometimes, the only reason why you won’t let go of what’s making you sad is because it was the only thing that made you happy.
I’m afraid we’ll be the ones who miss each other their entire life
I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.
~ Jaime Gil de Biedma
Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow.
Here is another version of the Feynman method that I posted a while back. I like how this version restates the four steps.
How to learn things with the Feynman method:
- Teach the concept to an imaginary child
- Identify gaps in your knowledge and go back to your source material to learn what you’re missing
- Organize your notes into a narrative
- Now go actually teach it to someone
ps: Happy Birthday to me!
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Memorization is not learning.
~ Richard Feynman
You know, I think some women cut off their husband's balls, and then they wonder why they're not attracted to them anymore.
~ Daphne, The White Lotus, Season 2
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Uncle Dudley’s Concise Guide to Critical Thinking
1. Who is telling me this?
2. How does he or she know this?
3. Given #1 and #2, is it possible that he or she is wrong?
4. If the answer to #3 is “yes”, find another, unrelated source.
5. Repeat until the answer to #3 is very, very unlikely.
(Until process is complete, assume baloney)
Guilia: What do I have to do to be left alone, Claudia?
Claudia: You just have to shut the door...
~ L'Avventura
Last night, I went to bed, intending to think about lots of things.
But I fell asleep instead.
~ Anna, to Claudia, in L'Avventura
We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know that we know that they are lying
We know that they know that we know that they are lying,
And still they continue to lie.
~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
To share good things with others is my true heart’s desire.
If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em.
Don't ever, stop fighting. I don't care if you're doing everything wrong, I want you to try a million different things.Fight until the bitter end to keep yourself and your crew and everybody on board alive.
The most important thing is to become a gatekeeper - to find the choke points of everything, and learn to control that choke point. And then you control everything.
Bitter, party of one!
~ Megyn Kelly, discussing Keith Olberman's rant about his ex-girlfriend, November 2022