Ask Lemmy

It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.

• Jean-Luc Picard. In Star trek: The Next Generation s2e21

"This too shall pass"

Attar records the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled wise men to create a ring that will make him happy when he is sad. After deliberation the sages hand him a simple ring with the Persian words "This too shall pass" etched on it, which has the desired effect.

I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next  one.

-Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

We evolve, beyond the person that we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance with each turn. That's how a drill works!

Simon, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

“We don’t care what music you kids love, so long as you have music to love.” From the Hopeless Savages comic

The one that’s keeping me going nowadays is Samwise from The Movie:

Sam: It’s all wrong By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

• Be excellent to each other
• If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried
• If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment
• The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln (or honestly a like a dozen different other sources...this one has many different variants).

I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like: The more you learn the more you realize how little you know.

"To strike another blow for freedom allows a man to walk a little taller and hold his head a little higher. And while he can, he must." - William J Brennan, former justice of the US Supreme Court. I keep it taped to my door to remind me why I'm here.

With great power comes great responsibility

Serenity Prayer:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

I'm not religious at all, but you can just kinda omit the first 3 words and the meaning is the same.

It's pretty much the basis of Acceptance Commitment Therapy - which is an effective way to manage anxiety and depression.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”

“Comparison is the thief of joy”

Two of my favorite are from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."

"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." (Also attributed as a Native American proverb)

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." - Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte"

Great quote. But sometimes I think "twice" was overly optimistic.

"Say what you mean, mean what you say."

"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards" -Tommy Boy tagline

When in doubt, shut up.

• I know that I know nothing.
• Perfection is killing you.
• A book a day keeps the haters away (ok, I made this one up. Still, quite a good advice and a real fine way to spend one's time)

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

This quote from LBJ centres me. Its been the conservative tactic for literally decades, from African Americans, to lgbtq+, to immigrants; it's always been the same grift:

• Choose your marginalised group-du-jour.
• Convince a whole lot of stupid people that that group is the cause of all their problems.
• Profit.

Its honestly astonishing how blatant it really is.

And when all wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful -Ruskin Bond

"The only winning move is not to play."

Following from your post about indecision: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"

At a certain level of self-awareness, it will inevitably happen regularly that one finds oneself repulsive.

I forget who said it.

Big fan of

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth"

• Garry Kasparov (2015)

That is to say, don't let them shut you up.

There is a longer, more historical version of this but it escapes me at the moment.

I can only find the Hannah Arendt quote (1974)

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And [to] such a people... you can do whatever you want."

But i swear there was one that finished "When the truth is silent, liars can move onto action"

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.

We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

-Donald Rumsfeld

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

-Unknown but commonly attributed to Karl Rove

My reasoning for why these matter:

The Rumsfeld quote lives on with me due to its sheer absurdity and his explanation behind the impetus for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, that the inability to predict 9/11 was a "failure of imagination." Yet it seems the "imaginations" in charge continue to become more and more narrow and unable to imagine anything outside of a set of prescribed ideas. I actually hate this quote because it reveals the kind of absurdist thinking behind the beginnings of the fascist machinations we live under today.

The Rove quote lives on with me because as much as I hate his guts, he was abso-fucking-lutely right and the Trump administration has practically weaponized this against the "reality based community" which spends its time on journalism and court cases that take years while a thousand new crimes have been committed in the meantime, all of which will take further years of journalism and court cases to resolve. A death by a thousand cuts by moving so fast that the rest of us are "left to just study what [they] do."

Sorry my quotes are kind of downers and not ones you actually want to live by. However, we're living through dark times and I think understanding the mindsets of those would cage and kill us is pretty important.

"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken!" - Col. Sanders

never trust a fart

No matter where you go, there you are.

—Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ, ca. A.D. 1440

Also

• Buckaroo Bonsai

Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. the goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.

• St John Chrysostom

The demands of justice must be satisfied first of all; that which is already due in justice is not to be offered as a gift of charity.

• Second Council of the Vatican

When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.

• Pope St Gregory

Three quotes referenced in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and just one example of the dissonance between many “Christians” in the U.S. and the faith they purport to follow.

If that doesn’t get them, the fact that the concept of social justice, as in the actual coining of the term as well as the movement against capitalist exploitation brought on by the Industrial Revolution was by the Catholics does lol

The meaning behind it all is very simple, we’re all in this together, and the gifts given to us by God/nature belong to all of us. They’re not for us to hoard, or to exploit others for.

The moto I live my life by is “The day you stop learning is the day you become obsolete.”

The one I wish more people took to heart is, “After everything has been said, and everything has been heard, these three remain: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love.”

Just love each other, that’s all I’m asking for.

Man who walk through turnstile sideways is going to Bangkok.

“Give everything you can, but never anything you need.”

I try to live by this. I give away every extra dollar, and help people every chance I get

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

Alan Watts

Read it, and I mean really read it. then think about what it is that you inherited that you defend and why you should continue to defend it.

Friendship is when silence between two people is comfortable.

“Never argue with an idiot because the best possible outcome is that you’ll win an argument with an idiot”

I also like “there are some things in life you can’t change, so you shouldn’t worry about them, and there are some things in life you can change, so you shouldn’t worry about them”

Never pass up the opportunity to pee.

And

If a restaurant serves breakfast all day, that's what you should order.

--My dad

Also,

Dont cheap out on anything that keeps you off the ground. (Tires, shoes, mattress etc)

Pen is mightier than sword, France is Bacon.

Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, "would an idiot do that?" and if they would, I do not to that thing.

• Dwight Schrute

"The impediment to action advances action. What's in the way becomes the way."

This is basically saying that anything that gets in the way of you solving a problem becomes the new problem to solve.

"The tool works at both ends."

This is about skill building and practice. Making cool stuff improves you as a result.

Something I like about each is that they work in reverse. No impediment in your way? You're probably not going to have very focused forward movement. No need to use tools (literally or metaphorically)? You won't become more skilled.