“The world belongs to the enthusiast who keeps cool.” – William McFee
I really like this quote because it reinforces and clarifies a truth I experience in life. That is that a person with passion and belief in their pursuits will actually do the pursuing, will make the effort. But unless they also analyze and think critically about their pursuit they will most likely overshoot, lose focus, overreact or do some other action that will doom their endeavor.
“The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.” – Mel Brooks
And I thought the final test was to have a TV movie of the week made about your addiction and recovery and 2nd addiction and recovery and your ultimate redemption by getting a TV movie of the week made about your addiction and recovery.
“It Is Not Only Fine Feathers That Make Fine Birds” – Aesop
This might seem like an argument against judging people by their cover, but it isn’t saying the feathers don’t matter. It is saying feathers aren’t ALL that matter.
I love this quote. It reminds me of a road trip. Destiny is the driver and Fate is the friend in the passenger seat saying ‘turn here, go there, get on the freeway, take exit 243B, etc.
How do you see destiny and fate?
“Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.” – Henry Miller
I wrote this quote to my daughters in response to seeing so much false (and useless) humility within the church. So many seem to feel the necessity to condemn themselves due to the ‘original sin’ idea. They are afraid of appearing prideful if they say they like themselves, or are proud of themselves and so they go the opposite direction and say they aren’t the ones behind any success, it’s Jesus or God that did it, or that they still have so many issues, etc. that any success they have isn’t really worth bragging about.
I love that Spurgeon (a christian writer of old) says it in all its simplicity. Know yourself and be honest about yourself and you will have humility. That includes being courageous enough to state your talents and skills and accomplishments. They are asreal as your faults.
“Humility is to make the right estimate of one’s self.” – Charles Spurgeon
I had a friend once who thought it wrong to be disagreeable. She spent 18 years agreeing as best she could. Then one day she decided she could be disagreeable and 18 years worth of disagreeableness came out. It was quite painful for all concerned. She realized then that if she had let the disagreeable out more often, but in smaller doses, it wouldn’t have been so painful.
“The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.” – Walter Bagehot
The older I get the more I realize this is true. Great art is not something done in a tub of luke warm water, it’s done with the passion and focus of the bees.
What do you think it takes to create great art?
“The artists, like the bees, must put their lives into the sting they give.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I remember when I was burned severely as a teenager. My friends didn’t think they could handle it if it happened to them. And I remember realizing at that point and afterwards that ‘handling it’ is much more about what you take from the experience than going through the experience. Going through ‘the experience’ is often pretty automatic in some ways especially if you are in intense pain, turmoil or grief and you are not always consciously thinking about how to ‘handle it’. But, who do you end up being afterwards – Better or bitter, courageous or more fearful? That is the important question.
So, does that mean those who hold grudges, keep resentment inside (or out) don’t understand? I would think if you tried to argue with them that they should forgive someone they might say ‘but you don’t understand!’ What is that all about?
I am in a long productive conversation with a friend who also happens to be a Pastor. And we were talking about the Governor Spitzer case and how is wife was standing up there with him during his mea culpa. One question is: Does showing some level of forgiveness, albeit only on the surface, by standing up with him send a message that what that person did was ok?
“Men love war because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.” – adapted from a longer quote by John Fowles in ‘The Magus’. Here is the complete quote for context.
“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
“Life cannot go on without much forgetting.” – Honore Balzac
As someone who commented on this quote said ‘But what to remember and what to forget, that is the question.’ I understand the quote since I feel my life is much happier because I don’t remember a lot of bad things, and if I do remember them I don’t obsess with them and become bitter over it. But on the other hand I know I have forgotten too many things that are of value too.
“That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end.” – Francis Quarles
I wonder if it really shouldn’t say ‘That friendship will not continue to the end that CONTINUES for an end’. The beginning of something can often have a reason, a motive, an end. But if the friendship develops beyond that, then that ‘end reason’ sort of dissipates and no longer drives the friendship, right?
“Our friends show us what we can do, our enemies teach us what we must do.” – Johann Goethe
Explain this one to me. I mean all of you, pipe in, tell me what you think it means. I liked it when I set it on paper, but I haven’t quite ever understood it to my satisfaction.
“It is the mission of history to make our fellow beings acceptable to us.” Jose Ortega Y Gasset
I think most people don’t realize how different our ‘history’ is now that we have an omnivorous media and access to so many documents we didn’t use to have. Now we can write histories that make people and actions in the past not look acceptable at all. But that wasn’t how it always was.
“Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre” – Goodwin
I taught drawing at the college level for 9 years. I came to understand that what the students don’t know, they don’t know. In other words, they do not know about your decision making, they don’t know about what you are leaving out, they don’t know about your confusion. All they know is your presentation. This is true of any public speaking.
I remember being illuminated at one time by the idea that we are not only liberated by an idea, but that the very act of verbalizing the idea is the act of building a series of walls, within which we then must live.
Religion of course is a prime example of that. Trying to define God, Heaven, Love, Salvation, etc. allows us to contemplate the infinite, but those same definitions creates a finite limit to the ideas.
“Unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another.”
So, if this is the case, what are your unbeliefs? And once you tell us that, how did your beliefs, blind or otherwise, create those unbeliefs? Or, maybe you don’t believe this quote about unbelief?
“Truth is rarely pure and never simple.” – Oscar Wilde
I have come to see truth as a useful construction for most people. That doesn’t mean the ‘truth’ they believe isn’t true, it means their reasons for believing it have less to do with it’s truth and more to do with the believer’s needs. The believer wants things to match their world and so constructing a truth that validates that world is very helpful.
But equally interesting is the phenomenon of when a person turns their own world upside down, converts to a new ‘truth’, abandons an old one, rejects prior reasons something was ‘true’. That destruction, or deconstruction, is simply a process by which one ‘truth’ that no longer fits their needs is jettisoned and a new ‘truth’, one closer to reality maybe, maybe not, is found to replace the fallen ‘truth’.
This is very, VERY true! Do you want to be heard, your opinions and ideas and feelings listened to? Then be patient and listen to others. Find your way through their thoughts and yours will come out as well. If they don’t let you come out, maybe it’s time to find some new conversationalist friends.
“The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
