Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster. For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Never be poor
If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor. If you shape your lie according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.
~ Epicurus
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Your faculty of reason
You are a human being; that is, a mortal animal capable of making a rational use of impressions. And what does it mean to use them rationally? In accordance with nature and perfectly. What is exceptional in you? Is it the animal part? No. The mortal? No. That which enables you to deal with impressions? No. What is exceptional in you is your faculty of reason.
~ Epictetus
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Blame yourself
Socrates knew how a rational soul is moved; that it is like a balance, and if a weight is thrown in the scale, it will incline whether you wish it or not. Show the rational governing faculty a contradiction, and it will renounce it; but if you fail to do so, blame yourself rather than the person whom you are unable to convince.
~ Epictetus
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The mid-point
At the mid-point of the path through life, I found myself lost in a wood so dark, the way ahead was blotted out. The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say how harsh and bitter that place felt to me —
~ Dante
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Success
The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.
~ Warren Buffett
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Convince me
When one of the company said to him, “convince me that logic is useful,” he said, … Would you like me to demonstrate it to you? Then I must make use of a demonstrative argument? And how will you know, then, whether I am deceiving you with a sophism? And when the man remained silent, he said, … You see how you yourself admit that logic is necessary, since without it you cannot even determine whether it is necessary or not.
~ Epictetus
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24 by 365: Why?
Work will happen 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, if you let it. We are all in that place where we are all letting it for some reason, and I don’t know why.
~ Shonda Rhimes
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The rational soul
Characteristics of the rational soul: Self-perception, self-examination, and the power to make of itself whatever it wants. … It surveys the world and the empty space around it, and the way it’s put together. It delves into the endlessness of time to extend its grasp and comprehension of the periodic births and rebirths that the world goes through. It knows that those who came after us will see nothing different, that those who came before us saw no more than we do, and that anyone with forty years behind him and eyes in his head has seen both past and future—both alike.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Thank you, Miss Merrill
Last weekend, while helping friends pack-house, I found this book:
Wait! Don’t do the math on a book from 1907, and a college student taking Rhetoric in 1924. :)
Instead of packing it, I borrowed the book wondering if this James Sears Baldwin might just be the Baldwin. This is a dry book. But it’s also teaching me a ton about writing. The author hasn’t cracked even the slightest smile in the first 37 pages of this 400+ page tome. But the Baldwin quote I’d love to find within, might just be the sort of pithy thing this author would drop near the end.
Yes, I am willing to read a 400+ page tome on the off chance that I find the quote and get the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of finding an original attribution for a well-known quote. I digress.
By page 30, I had seen a whole bunch these little diagonal marks, but hadn’t really figured out what she was trying to imply.
Then it hit me. Quotes! It’s a diagonal line with a quote on the diagonal line. She’s delineating quotations. I’m guessing that she must have written a paper—who’d expect that in a Rhetoric class, right?—and I bet she came back through and marked the quotation sections. At the same instant that I figured it out, my up-to-then habit of drawing a full line across the page, (often a long line, then up or down a line, and then finish going across, to “cut” in the middle of a line,) seemed dumb.
Thank you Miss Merrill. This looks just way cooler:
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Intelligent dissent
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
~ Bertrand Russell
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Dreams
Dreams come true. You just have to be willing to work for them.
~ Annie Mist Þórisdóttir
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Forge on ahead
Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can. If anything gets in the way, forge on ahead, making good use of what you have on hand, sticking to what seems right. (The best goal to achieve, and the one we fall short of when we fail.)
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Opposing ideas
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Half twist
Continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life span of the things around us. A grape seed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew against eternity.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Spiritless men
Fires can’t be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
~ Baldwin
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Thinking
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
~ George S. Patton
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Who has authority?
Suppose he had passed his judgement upon a hypothetical proposition, and declared, ‘I judge the proposition, “if it be day, there is light,” to be false,’ what would have happened to the proposition? Who is being judged here? Who has been condemned? The proposition, or he who is utterly mistaken about it? So who on Earth is this man who has authority to pass such judgement on you?
~ Epictetus
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Enthralled
When one is enthralled with the beauty on the surface of the ocean, the immensity of its depths can never be discerned.
~ Wu Hsin
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Actions and perceptions
Operatics, combat and confusion. Sloth and servility. Every day they blot out those sacred principles of yours—which you day-dream thoughtlessly about, or just let slide. Your actions and perceptions need to aim: at accomplishing practical ends; at the exercise of thought; at maintaining a confidence founded on understanding. An unobtrusive confidence—hidden in plain sight.
~ Marcus Aurelius
When will you let yourself enjoy straightforwardness? Seriousness? Or understanding individual things—their nature and substance, their place in the world, their life span, their composition, who can possess them, whose they are to give and to receive?
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