A willingness to hear unwelcome truths is the unhappy person’s best friend.
Tag: quotes
Listen to your friends, by all means, but not to the conclusions they’ve drawn; those are about them. […] Listen instead to the reasons your friends felt and concluded what they did, and use them to inform your decisions.
If you sit on, sleep on, stare at, or touch something for more than an hour a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best.
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
The question arose as to what we would do differently if we were immortal. […] I answered that I would travel more. Later the question was asked, what would you do differently if you found out you had only a short time to live. I answered again that I would travel more. Click, buzz, whirr…does not compute, does not compute. […] Given that I would travel more if I was to live either less or more, the probability that I was at just that level of mortality that I should not be traveling now must be vanishingly small.
Alex Tabarrok. Swap out “travel” for whatever it is that you happen to value a lot. (Got reminded about this post via Ben Casnocha.)
What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
From The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. (via carpentrix)
Everybody’s Al Capone in a barber’s chair.
Killer Mike. Also:
Atlanta [is] the post-civil rights city that worked. I think that’s the real legacy. All this foolishness we be doin’ as rappers is just something for the old guys to laugh at,“ he says with a conciliatory chuckle. "They did this on Simpson [Road] 50 years ago.”
Many people think that in the 1960s I quit my job in an advertising company to write my first novel. Not at all: I just quit so I could go to the movies every afternoon.
Don DeLillo. (via) Echoing the Paris Review interview:
I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this. Even when I was well into my first novel I didn’t have a system for working, a dependable routine. I worked haphazardly, sometimes late at night, sometimes in the afternoon. I spent too much time doing other things or nothing at all.
Making a choice and trying it is an important career skill. And choosing something practical, that people get paid well for, is an important life skill.
Moving on doesn’t mean you’ll never feel bad about something again.
Carolyn Hax. Sometimes it’s the almost-obvious wisdom that really works. Filed under: letting go; Carolyn Hax.
A good rule of thumb is that diversity of opinion is essential anytime you don’t know anything about something important.
People who are smart and energetic are often angry. Not at each other, usually. Rather, they’re angry that we’re “not there yet,” i.e. that they have to solve X when they should be working on some greater problem Y.
The iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That’s just the way it is.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz. (via). Cf. Seneca:
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
Behavior is easier to change than expectations are. […] Telling your enthusiasm and daydreams to sit in a closet till [the situation] proves worthy of them? That involves the hard work of identifying, and admitting, why you so badly need the validation. Repairing the source of the need is the answer here.
Carolyn Hax. I edited this quote to make it more general. Relates to another favorite line of hers: Let the facts write your dreams. Other Hax quotes I love.
The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
Hoffman & Casnocha. Warren Buffett agrees:
Hang around people who are better than you all the time. You do pick up the behavior of people who are around you. It will make you a better person. Marry upward. That is the person who is going to have the biggest effect on you. A relationship like that over the decades will do nothing but good.
If I can stretch this a bit, they don’t even have to be alive! See Austin Kleon:
The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.
Eternal Vigilance « Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
@jennylish: “The price of accurately sourcing quotations is also eternal vigilance! (via)
Thomas Jefferson didn’t say this. But strangely enough, I’ve discovered a whole string of quite famous people who did say this, which makes it seem even odder that the attribution got pinned on a relatively obscure figure like [Wendell] Phillips.
The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent on market value, has become a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique, and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (via jenbee). Okay, two things here. One, it brings me back to The Authenticity Hoax again (I wrote about why you should read it). Andrew Potter:
Can you see what is happening here? It is the return of the aura, of the unique and irreproducible artistic work. Across the artistic spectrum, we are starting to see a turn toward forms of aesthetic experience and production that by their nature can’t be digitized and thrown into the maw of the freeconomy. One aspect of this is the cultivation of deliberate scarcity, which is what Alec Duffy is doing with his listening sessions. Another is the recent hipster trend to treat the city as a playground—involving staged pillow fights in the financial district, silent raves on subways, or games of kick the can that span entire neighborhoods. This fascination with works that are transient, ephemeral, participatory, and site-specific is part of the ongoing rehabilitation of the old idea of the unique, authentic work having an aura that makes it worthy of our profound respect. But in a reversal of Walter Benjamin’s analysis, the gain in deep artistic appreciation is balanced by a loss in egalitarian principle.
And two, made me think of any time someone writes a “Why ___ Matters” essay. See: swan song.
Mark Larson 