Post your favorite quotes and expressions here

This quote turned me on. It is so cool…and real.

I meditate because evolution gave me a big brain, but it didn’t come with an instruction manual.
I meditate because life is too short and sitting slows it down.
I meditate because life is too long and I need an occasional break.
I meditate because it’s such a relief to spend time ignoring myself.
I meditate because I’m building myself a bigger and better perspective, and occasionally I need to add a new window.

Wes Nisker.

Arminius, how does one know, in actuality, when they are truly free? What do you think?

Perhaps…perhaps not.
Perhaps if you go back far enough with the pirates who sailed the mighty seas looking for ships to plunder.

Oh Arc, I’m similarly inclined. The Balzac quotation is a taunt, baiting me into argument. I often find myself fighting against the cynicism of (bad) experience - which I would guess is the germ of that quotation.

Here are my faves. I have loved all of these for a long time and thought about them countless times!

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(I am a man. Nothing human is foreign to me.)
~ Terence

Respect deities, but do not rely on them.
~ Miyamoto Musashi

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.–‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’–Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. […]

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This one is more contemporary -

Such energy poured into technical fixes: speed, connectivity etc. So little into social fixes: purpose, community, kindness…
~ Alain de Botton

To me it asks the question: what if all the effort that built the apps on your phone, on your pc, that ceaselessly iterates to create all manner of software applications and endlessly update them - what if even a fraction of that effort was instead directed at building more robust communities and solving social problems? What would the world be like?

“The force of character is cumulative.” I like this.

Yeah! Me too! Self-Reliance is a pretty good read. Not too long either. How’ve you been, Wendy? Hope all’s well.

It’s not “how have I been,” it’s “where have you been?” You can visit here and I’m always relaying how I’ve been to everyone’s chagrin :laughing: , but you have to visit to stay in the know and contribute as well, dear Fuse. You now have your marching orders just don’t march too far away. :handgestures-salute: :happy-smileyflower:

Wendy,

Heh. I’m glad you’ve been well :slight_smile: Oh I still pop-in from time to time to see what the talk is, to see if the latest cultural conversation has made it to this little corner of the internet, to see how ILP is dealing with it. I’m just loathe to get into discussions if I don’t think I’ll have the time or effort to finish them properly.

You should see how many posts I’ve started - long-winded paragraphs of text - only to abort them after taking the time to write it all out. I think I must have a 100 saved drafts in my user control panel lol

Me too. Too many OPs and replies congesting that folder as I’ve said …never to see the light of day.

I can see tolerance as a virtue up to a point…until a laizzez fair attitude or lack of conscious observation and action causes death and destruction.

How is apathy a virtue? It goes against life.
Was Aristotle being literal here or facetious ~~ or did he mean something else by the quote.
Can someone explain this to me.

Arc, meaning a society faces its end when dominated by tolerance and apathy; so they will be its last virtues.

It took you long enough, fuse. :evilfun: Welcome back. Hope you are well. I suppose that there were just too many wonderful clouds to tear yourself away.

I know that you do not see apathy as a virtue. As for tolerance, it is true, is it not, that any virtue can be turned into a vice?

But I think that Aristotle was being ironic here.

fuse,

Was he speaking as a man or as Man (universally speaking)?

How about you? Can you actually make that statement and believe it? Has that been your experience?

Spoiler alert, the quote might be misattributed to Aristotle.

Aristotle did convey the idea of virtue as a mean between two extremes; e.g. bravery falls somewhere between cowardice (a deficiency) and recklessness (an excess), and not necessarily square in the middle. To your point, though, I wouldn’t say that a virtue (e.g. bravery) could be turned into a vice. By Aristotle’s framing, bravery never becomes recklessness or cowardice, but is always some intermediary between them.

I agree the quotation casts apathy and tolerance as “virtues” in a darkly ironic way - to say that they aren’t really virtues at all; they wouldn’t be worth their weight as virtues or earn the name.

So what about tolerance - is it a virtue at all?

I take it he means the latter. It doesn’t make much sense to me the other way.

It’s been a strong and familiar experience, that’s the reason I like the quotation.

fuse,

Terence was a man, fuse. Why would he say "I am [a] man if he was speaking in the universal sense?

I posed that question because of all the great inhumanity to man that has existed in this world.
Can all the chaos and tragedy and despicable acts that have been perpetrated and existed throughout history be so familiar and comfortable to us ~ that we can make that statement.

“Nothing human is foreign to me”.

Maybe the word “foreign” needs to be defined here. Maybe he was being ironic.

We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Carson McCullers

You can’t go home again

Thomas Wolfe