Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

"Live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!"
Friedrich Nietzsche

 

I thought I was being original when I started writing non-fiction, but apparently it's a quote from Woody Allen. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that this was during an interview in which he was being questioned for adopting his "almost" adopted daughter.


At age 21, I still haven't come to an understanding as to why girls could be "in love" with total douchebags. The guy can cheat, steal, and shit on her mother and she would still love him all the same. This quote allows me to just say "Fuck it. It is what it is."

I guess not everything is as logical as it seems.

 

This one is a fictional bastardization, but it really stuck with me:

"The enemy of my enemy is the next one to die."

 

"Shoot straight you bastards and don't make a mess of it" Edward Woodward. I take from this: be ready to die, live your life in a manner that you don't fear it; and be defiant, especially in death. Seen first in the graphic novel Preacher.

“The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.” Chuck Palahniuk Don't be afraid when you're down.

Victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan-John F. Kennedy Fuck credit, anyone can take credit. The deed is worth more than the recognition.

By daily dying I have come to be. ~Theodore Roethke

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. ~Friedrich Nietzche

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. ~Matsuo Basho.

 

"Complacency is the evil of all men" is something I penned on the old board. I forget what the thread was about, but my post involved me going into detail about how I swallowed my pride and continued to live at home after I graduated college, and how I feared becoming my brother, who even today, at 28, continues to live at home with mom. That was the first time green dots had actually made me smile, and it was from Hack, aka Mark Ebner. It's pompous to quote yourself, but I like the way it sounds. I plan on writing a book one day, after I finish this PhD and that line is going in the book somewhere. It reminds me why I continue to press on, because a life of complacency is a life of slow suicide for me. Which brings me to another quote:

"Better to go down swinging than live in the slow suicide of What if?"
-The Philadelphia Lawyer

For when times are hard and I have nothing to eat:
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
-Winston Churchill

and

"To Hell with circumstance, I create opportunity."
-Bruce Lee

For my blundering incompetence in graduate school:
"Being enlightened is no longer enough. You must apply.
Being willing is no longer acceptable. You must do."
-Bruce Lee

On manning up and getting shit done:
"Either way I was learning the lesson - the one that's not supposed to hold true. The one that goes against everything they teach us as kids about being careful, acting deliberately, cautiously - that little's ever lost in impulsiveness, and often much gained. That the meanest regrets in life are all born of hesitation. Of thinking when you should have been acting."
-The Philadelphia Lawyer

On living a life of significance, as Dr. Rob touches on in his blog:
In the event of my demise
when my heart can beat no more
I hope I die for a principle
Or a belief that I have lived for
I will die before my time
Because I feel the shadow's depth
So much I wanted to accomplish
Before I reached my death
I have come to grips with the possibility
And wiped the last tear from my eyes
I loved all who were positive
In the event of my demise
-Tupac Shakur

and

"I just wanna see life and unsee limits, but everyone around me wants to play it timid, I know what it's like to be alive but not living, I know what it's like to be drove, but not driven."
-Omen

And on remaining grounded and humble:
"You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."
- Tyler Durden

 

Another longer one, this time by Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

 

Jeez, no love for the original granddaddy of all poignant statements?

Fortune favors the bold ~ Virgil/Terence
Be bold, be brave - it'll work out more often than not.

 

I'm guessing Woodward took a few more takes to get it right than Breaker Morant took when he originally said it.

(For those wondering what I'm on about, <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_Morant_%28film%29" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_Morant_%28film%29</a>)


Focus:

"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right"

-Randall Munroe, XKCD. (or whoever he stole them off. Enlighten me if this is the case.)

 

I'll add my favourite XKCD quote, from this comic:

"Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they're doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go."

 

"You mean to tell me Carmen Electra's tits weren't real?"

-Dennis Rodman

Found that one somewhere, a few words might have got lost in translation.

 

"Ahh, sweet liquor eases the pain." - Lionel Hutz

What I say most Friday nights after work has gone balls-to-chin a few too many times that week.

"I see more blurry lights than starry nights" - Gord Downie

I always think of this one when I have to work late and I'm driving home under streetlights, thinking about the cottage.

"You gotta get to know your cage, stress points, corrosive age. The keeper's hours throughout the day; his habits, weaknesses and ways" - Gord Downie

One of my favorite quotes.

"Don't get good at something you don't like to do" - Unknown


I could probably do an entire post of just Fight Club quotes, but a few of my favorites:

"You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die."

"Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things that you used to own, now they own you."

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."

 

Philosophical: "Why mourn the cocoon when the butterfly has already flown?" The Tao

Not so philosophical: "Always check the bread for mold." Mom