So Philip Zimbardo died earlier this month. I also had sort of a near death experience.. if you follow my other publication.. well maybe you know. Seemed like a trap. really seemed like some kind of trap to me. Thought I’d catch a ride on a freight train.. always wanted to do it. anyway. you probably want to JUMP OFF the thing maybe before it starts goin over 20 miles per hour or so. it won’t be a soft landing…..
I do.. I really do have to get going on finishing up this little project. My work.. no, Hobby the past 10 years has been the collecting of quotes.. and Im up to 3230 so far. And I suppose it is time to pare down the list to just the ones.. I really cannot live without. Let’s say Elon Musk figures out how to augment your brain and working memory and stuff.. and really makes us all.. Wiser? let’s say it works out. and I wake up in the morning. And I want to download a list of things TO REMEMBER. every single day. let’s say it’s a list of 365 little reminders.. then I suppose this would be my list. You might have seen these little meditation books that are popular with people who Used to use drugs.. or Christians.. both. anyway.
If you’ve got Strong ties to Hazelden publishing, maybe put in a good word?
I decided to give myself an Education I missed out on.. when I was busy boozing at UM. Didn’t even get laid. Fucking unbelievable. I don’t know how they get away with this shit.
I thought I had KILLER title when I first tried doing this a few years ago. but.. the list grew. this’ll probably be published in 3 parts.. 120 – 120 & 125. perhaps I’ll shuffle them around a bit later. I do realize this first one here is quite a bit biased toward Male authors.. all I can say is.. I sort for powerful ideas.. that resonate (with me). But.. I know. I know I’ll try to add some Diversity later… I think I’ll limit each author to 3 appearances.
So, here it is. Have another drink from my.. Fire Hydrant. heh.
The fact that you have unlimited texts does not necessarily mean that you cannot stop talking: Meditations for recovery from the compulsive behavior of your choice.
- If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples – ZIMBARDO
- A sane person to an insane society must appear insane – Kurt Vonnegut
- I don’t want my past to become anyone else’s future – Elie Wiesel
- A conscience is that still small voice that people won’t listen to – Carlo Collodi
- It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society – Krishnamurti
- The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history – Orwell
- Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it – Orwell
- I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion’ – Muhammad Ali
- Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it – J. Lacan
- Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking – John Kennedy Toole.
- You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him – John Kennedy Toole
- If reason ruled the world would history even exist? – R. Kapuscinski
- How many things have been denied one day, only to become realities the next – Jules Verne
- Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence – Arthur Clarke?
- If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position – Seth Godin
- Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death – Erik Erikson
- Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action – Tim Ferriss
- Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it – JK Rowling
- A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect – John McWhorter
- Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact – George Eliot
- To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive – Robert L Stevenson
- Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose – Eckhart Tolle
- It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living – Eckhart Tolle
- He who goes about to reform the world must begin with himself, or he loses his labor – St. Ignatius
- For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them – St. Thomas More
- I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts – Will Rogers
- The map is not the territory – Alfred Korzybski
- Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away – Philip K Dick
- A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world – David Cornwell (le Carre…)
- I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks – Carl Jung
- One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple – Jack Kerouac
- Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence – Carl Sagan
- It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way – ROLLO MAY
- Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something – Robert Heinlein
- You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with – Jim Rohn
- sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past – Irvin Yalom
- Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe – HG Wells
- What really matters is what you do with what you have – HG Wells
- When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice – Andre Gide (or Saul bellow… hehe, I gotta look this one up again)
- The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself – Bernard Malamud
- All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience – Gary Hamel
- We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for – Malcolm Gladwell
- The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men – Plato
44.. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools – Herbert Spencer (that reminds me of something…..)
45. Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself – Adam Smith
46. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult – Warren Buffett
47. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true – Nathaniel Hawthorne
48. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man – Heraclitus
49. Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve – Max Planck
50. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants – Isaac Newton
51. Integrity has no need of rules – Albert Camus
52. He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer – Thomas Mann
53. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment – Emerson
54. Prejudices are what fools use for reason – Voltaire
55. ..our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers – M. Scott Peck
56. To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible – Aquinas
57. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free – Goethe
58. It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness – Tolstoy
59. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light – Plato??
60. To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult – Plutarch
61. To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail – Maslow
62. If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later – Maslow
63. We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think – Rod Serling
64. One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries – AA Milne
65. Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important – Stephen Covey
66. All language is but a poor translation – Kafka
67. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate – Carl Jung
68. We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without – Kant
69. It is very difficult also to sacrifice one’s suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering – GI Gurdjieff
70. My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing – Proust
71. No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides – Spinoza?
72. It’s necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live – Dumas
73. If the Martians ever find out how human beings think, they’ll kill themselves laughing – ALBERT ELLIS
74. Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong – David Brooks
75. The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere – Anne Lindbergh
76. Beauty fades, dumb is forever – Judge Judy
77. Non nobis solum nati sumus (I think that’s something about Selfishness..) – Cicero
78. The more we love someone, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that true love shows itself – Moliere
And that’s about it for today. Uh. Yeah, a little short of my goal. But. We’ll see. We’ll see if I can come up with another 290 meaningful quotations from the Master list… Left some question marks when I was unsure about authorship… That might be a challenge if we want to get it all right.
To be Continued.
365… There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously – Thomas Sowell.