Quote Of The Day Archive

July 3, 2014

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion;respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,even a stranger, when in a lonely place.Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weepand pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” 
–  Chief Tecumseh

 

July 5, 2014

“Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

– Kurt Vonnegut

 

July 7, 2014

I’d hold you up to say to your mother, “this kid’s gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid’s gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew.” And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilige. Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you’re no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that! I’m always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You’re my son and you’re my blood. You’re the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain’t gonna have a life.

– Rocky Balboa

 

July 8, 2014

"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them."

– Bill Waterson

 

July 9, 2014

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-tow minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a-half minutes per mile].

So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.”

I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.”

He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.”

I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.”

So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out.

I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” — and we’re still running — “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles.

Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

 

July 10, 2014

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”

– Timothy Leary

 

July 11, 2014

Decide in your heart of hearts what really excites and challenges you, and start moving your life in that direction. Every decision you make, from what you eat to what you do with your time tonight, turns you into who you are tomorrow, and the day after that. Look at who you want to be, and start sculpting yourself into that person. You may not get exactly where you thought you’d be, but you will be doing things that suit you in a profession you believe in. Don’t let life randomly kick you into the adult you don’t want to become.

– Chris Hadfield

 

July 12, 2014

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.”

– Charles Bukowski

 

July 16, 2014

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

– Dr Evil

 

July, 17, 2014

I wish I could let you into a man’s head as he’s falling in love with a woman. It’s a process that’s so alien, so strange, that I’m afraid you’ve got to experience it to believe it. But it’s as real as death and taxes….

Sometimes, a guy will meet a gal and think nothing of it. Maybe she’s a co-worker, classmate, or his buddy’s friend. She gets mentally categorized as “Female, acquaintance, feelings neutral”. Then, he gets to know her better. If they mesh personality-wise, something fascinating happens in the man’s mind. He starts to notice things about her appearance – pleasant things. It starts small – one day he realizes he likes looking at the curve of her nose, or where her ear lobe meets her face.

It’s nothing he can put his finger on or describe, really…just that looking at that part of her makes him feel good. He starts wanting to do that more. Then, he notices an expression she makes – could be her genuine belly-laugh, or the way she furrows her brow in concern – and he gets a little flutter in his chest.

They stay friendly for awhile, get to know each other better.

Then, one day, she hugs him goodbye….and he can’t stop thinking about it. He plays it over and over in his head – the feel of her breasts through two shirts, her arms around his back, her smell…he finds these little mental movies of her playing unbidden when he’s driving somewhere, squeezing out his other usual daydreams.

Shortly thereafter, the guy realizes that whenever he looks at this woman, he feels good. He likes her lines, her curves, her sounds and smells…

It’s like she’s gradually turned from a black-and-white photo into a 3D color movie with surround-sound – a perfect movie that makes him feel good. He starts wondering what he can do to keep her around, to make her happy. He realizes that he likes looking at her more than any other human being in the world.

To him, she is perfect and beautiful.

A man in love with a woman doesn’t see her objectively. There is a filter there, or some kind of participatory illusion. He does not see who you see in the mirror. He is seeing someone beautiful and perfect and sublime, and it’s one of the most powerful things in his life.

Go watch a happy old couple that’s been married for decades. Watch the man’s eyes. Sure, he may appreciate some young woman’s ass in yoga pants or whatever…but watch his eyes when he’s looking at his spouse. If you’re paying close enough attention, you can almost see the filter click on when his gaze settles on her. In that moment, he’s not seeing the same frumpy empty-nester that you or I see – he’s seeing something wonderful.

No shit. If I hadn’t lived this stuff, I wouldn’t believe it either. But it’s true.

– SavageHenry0311

 

July 18, 2014

“Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

“All of them at once,” said Bilbo.

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

 

July 20, 2014

sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

 

July 21, 2014

I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger … cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle … or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words … only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, "Why?"
I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

– Miguel de Cervantes

 

July 23, 2014

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

July 24, 2014

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.” 

– Pablo Neruda

 

July 25, 2014

I hate that word—“lucky.” It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me.

– Peter Dinklage

 

July 27, 2014

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

July 29, 2014

“Most people, and particularly kids, don’t realize that they are in control of their lives and they’re the ones that are going to make their decisions and they’re the ones that are going to make it one way or the other. Usually adolescence is a time when kids feel that the world is doing it to them, whether it’s their parents doing it to them or their teachers doing it or their friends doing it to them, and that they are the victim of all of this. Somewhere in here, you have to learn that you’re not the victim, but instead you’re the one that’s doing it. That moment is sometimes a long slow realization or sometimes it’s turning on a light switch. All of a sudden you realize you are the person who has control of your life.”

– Jim  Henson

 

July 30, 2014

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.”

The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves.

“What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!”

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store.

“Hey, son! May I ask you a question?

Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?”

The boy licked his cone and replied,

“Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”

 

July 31, 2014

7 Cardinal Rules For Life

1. Make peace with your past, so it won’t disturb your present.

2. What other people think of you, is none of your business.

3. Time heals almost everything. Give it time.

4. No one is in charge of your happiness, except you.

5. Don’t compare your life to others and don’t judge them. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

6. Stop thinking too much. It’s alright to not know the answers. They will come to you when you least expect it.

7. Smile. You don’t own all the problems in the world.

 

August 1, 2014

"So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys – to woo women – and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays."

-John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society

 

August 4, 2014

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

– Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

 

August 6, 2014

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

– Benjamin Button

 

August 7, 2014

“You don’t need no gun control, you know what you need? We need some bullet control. Men, we need to control the bullets, that’s right. I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars… five thousand dollars per bullet… You know why? Cause if a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no more innocent bystanders. 
Yeah! Every time somebody get shut we’d say, ‘Damn, he must have done something … Shit, he’s got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass.’
And people would think before they killed somebody if a bullet cost five thousand dollars. ‘Man I would blow your fucking head off…if I could afford it.’ ‘I’m gonna get me another job, I’m going to start saving some money, and you’re a dead man. You’d better hope I can’t get no bullets on layaway.’
So even if you get shot by a stray bullet, you wouldn’t have to go to no doctor to get it taken out. Whoever shot you would take their bullet back, like “I believe you got my property.” 

– Chris Rock

 

August 8, 2014

"You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again."

– Azar Nafisi

 

August 9, 2014

“She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by-
And never knew.”

–  Shel Silverstein

 

August 10, 2014

Kintsukuroi

(n.) "to repair with gold" the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken

 

August 11, 2014

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.  I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. 

– Jack London

 

August 12, 2014

It’s an interesting thing: The internet isn’t about having a good time — it’s about showing people you’re having a good time. When you go out to bars and clubs, nobody’s actually dancing or enjoying themselves; they’re all taking photos of themselves at the bar so that later on they can say, “I was there, wasn’t it great?” It’s crazy.

– Daniel Radcliffe

 

August 15, 2014

"You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall." 

– Will Smith

 

August 18, 2014

I am thankful for..

– The taxes I pay because it means that I am employed

– The clothes that fit a little too snug because it means I have enough to eat

– My shadow who watches me work because it means I am out in the sunshine

– A lawn that has to be mowed, windows that have to be washed, and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home

– The spot I find at the far end of the parking lot because it means I am capable of walking

– All the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have the freedom of speech

– The lady behind me in church who sings off key because it means that I can hear

– The huge pile of laundry and ironing because it means my loved ones are nearby

– The alarm that goes off in the early morning because it means that I’m alive

 

August 19, 2014

“If she’s amazing, she won’t be easy. If she’s easy, she won’t be amazing. If she’s worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you’re not worthy. … Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” 
– Bob Marley

 

August 21, 2014

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”

– Mitch Albom

 

August 22, 2014

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

– Lao Tzu

 

August 25, 2014

“Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”

– Osho

 

August 27, 2014

“It’s easy to take off your clothes and have sex. People do it all the time. But opening up your soul to someone, letting them into your spirit, thoughts, fears, future, hopes, dreams… that is being naked.”

– Rob Bell

 

August 28, 2014

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

– Gary Provost

 

August 30, 2014

Did you ever realize how much your body loves you? It’s always trying to keep you alive. It’s making sure you breathe while you sleep, stopping cuts from bleeding, fixing broken bones, finding ways to beat the illnesses that might get you. Your body literally loves you so much. It’s time you start loving it back. 

 

September 3, 2014

“A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

–  Jorge Luis Borge

 

September 4, 2014

“There are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.”

-Bill Hicks

 

September 5, 2014

natsukashii

(adj.) of small things that brings you suddenly, joyously back to fond memories, not with a wistful longing for what’s past, but with an appreciation of the good times

 

September 8, 2014

If you don’t value your life start smoking, you’ll die ten years early. Or, start drinking to excess every day, you’ll die fifteen years early. Or you could love someone who doesn’t love you back, you’ll die every day.

-Anonymous

 

September 10, 2014

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” 

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

September 13, 2014

"When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope. Instead, I became a painter, and wound up as Picasso."

– Pablo Picasso

 

September 19, 2014

One day the Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. “You have no right teaching others,” he shouted. “You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake!”

The Buddha was not upset by these insults. He just smiled. The man insulted him again and again, but the only reaction he could get back from the Buddha was a smile and silence. Finally he stomped his feet and left cursing.

The disciples were feeling angry and one of them couldn’t keep quiet and ask the Buddha, "why didn’t you reply to the rude man?"

The Buddha replied, “if someone offers you a gift and you refuse to accept it, to whom does the gift belong?"

"Of course, to the person who bought the gift" replied the disciple.

"That is correct", smiled the Buddha

 

September 20, 2014

Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it. I’ve disappointed and hurt people in my life and that’s just something I’m going to have to live with. If you made the basic decision that even in spite of your crimes, you are worth persevering, that it’s worth trying to get good things for yourself, even though you might not deserve them, then you, you eat that guilt and you live with it. And you own it. You own it for life. 

– Anthony Bourdain

 

September 26, 2014

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.

Theodore Roosevelt 

 

September 29, 2014

“A boy comes to me with a spark of interest, I feed the spark and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire and it becomes a roaring blaze.” 

– Cus D’Amato

 

October 3, 2103

The sun is perfect and you woke this morning.
You have enough language in your mouth to be understood.
You have a name, and someone wants to call it.
Five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it.
If we just start there,
every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible.
If we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world.

– Warsan Shire

October 6, 2014

Do you like Huey Lewis and The News? Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in ’83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor."

– Patrick Bateman

 

October 7, 2014

On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about the weather and other things. I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head hurt from his banality. I almost didn’t notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

John Doe – Se7en

 

October 8, 2014

So, if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo. You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that….If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, you’d probably uh…throw Shakespeare at me, right? "Once more into the breach, dear friends." But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, and watched him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I ask you about love, y’probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable…known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you..who could rescue you from the depths of Hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, n to have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleepin’ sittin’ up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms visiting hours don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much. I look at you: I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. no one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and ripped my fuckin’ life apart. You’re an orphan, right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don’t give a shit about that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.

 

October 13. 2014

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

– Louis de Bernières

 

October 14, 2014

“None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.”

– Henry Ford

 

October 15, 2014

“The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens.”

– Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

October 20, 2014

What’s heroin like?

It’s like having the worst girlfriend ever, who you are madly in love with but who treats you like shit, makes you sell your car and house and furniture and even your high school yearbook that your crush from 10th grade signed and told you that you were cute. She’s told you to stop talking to anyone you’ve ever cared about, they don’t want to talk to you while you’re still dating her anyways. You sell your clothes so she can go out and buy new ones. You eat ramen every meal so she ca eat at the best restaurant in town. In the morning you think about her and in the evening you think about her and when you go to take a crap but you can’t because you’re constipated you’re reminded of her. You wake up and if she’s not in bed with you you get the chills, your eyes water, you have diarrhea, you sneeze, your muscles ache, you have anxiety, you have depression, you don’t want to eat because food isn’t appealing even though your stomach is rumbling, you don’t particularly want to drink but you’re dehydrated so you force yourself to drink some water, and during all this your skin is crawling as if it was dirty covered in goose-bumps from who knows where and you wish you were still asleep so you could at least pretend she was still in the bed with you. But you’re awake now. So you get out of bed, and you go find her. Maybe today you won’t have to do something that compromises your morals to find out where she’s gone, but really you don’t even care, as long as there is a way. You walk an hour and forty five minutes to get on the bus. You travel for another 45 minutes on public transportation. You get off at the train station in the bad part of town. All the while you have to shit so bad but you know once you find her that will be solved. You’re hungry but dont want to eat, once you find her you can eat. You feel dirty and sad and anxious but once you find her she’ll bathe you and make you happy and calm. But right now your walking through the ghetto. You walk another 20 minutes. Maybe it’s cold and raining, if so you are so so so cold. Maybe it’s hotter than hell and that just makes you feel dirtier. You find a guy that knows where she is. He says he’ll go get her and bring her to you. And the cops pass you as you’re talking to him and they have to know what’s up. What’s someone like you doing in this part of town? So the 10 minute wait for her to come back to you accompanied by the guy who could give two shits about you as long as you bring him money seems like an eternity. Maybe he’ll run off with her and your money. Maybe she wont be looking so hot today, maybe she won’t be herself. Maybe he’ll come back with a woman you don’t know and don’t want to meet but now your money is gone and you’re broke and sick and a good few hours away before you can get some more money and the world might as well be over in your opinion. But your girlfriend comes back, he brings her, and she gives you a kiss on the cheek. Then you go home, to your mattress and your overdue rent and the lack of food and the piled up bills and the same clothes you’ve been wearing for three days and your parents that have called but you never answer and your friends that invite you out but you never go, but you’re home and she’s there with you. Eventually you go to bed. But she’s never there the next morning, and you know she won’t be, and you wish someone invented a way to pause time, or go back in time, to that first time you met her, the first couple months when you guys hung out, before she made you sell everything to be with her, but you can’t and you’re fucked. And you know it.

– notthecolorblue

 

October 23, 2014

A Typical Week In A Corporate Office Job

When I worked at a decently sized corporation, most people would kind of jack around, look at their assignments etc., on Monday morning. They’d start working on it around 2 PM on Monday afternoon, half heartedly, and then start thinking about what they were going to have for dinner, go to the cooler, go have a snack, email, etc. They would have gotten about 30 minutes of real actual work in by around 3:30 in the afternoon.

By that time, they decide the day is shot, look at the project for another 30 or so minutes, "planning" until they get an email about something unimportant. They spend some time on the email for no apparent reason, and now it’s 4:30. They get on reddit till 5.

They come in Tuesday morning raring to go. They finish about half of the project by lunch. They spend the rest of the afternoon researching their fantasy football team, since they ate a big lunch to celebrate.

They come back, Wednesday, and there a decent amount of emails about nothing from Corporate in their in box. They have to fill out various forms and self evals. This sucks, and eats up their Wednesday morning. There’s a meeting around 2:30 of their department. They fuk around after lunch, until the meeting. The meeting lasts till 3:45. Fuk it, I’ll finish this Thursday.

They get another quarter of it done Thursday morning, since they are kind of bored of the work week, and their kid kept them up the night before. They start making plans and emailing and texting with their friends for Thursday happy hour, or college football watching or whatever it is that they are going to do. It’s now 2:30 Thursday and they have about 3/4 of their project done.

Their kid calls from school and needs X,Y,Z or something else occurs to take them from work, maybe they are sick, or need car repair, for whatever reason, no one was ever at work on Thursday afternoon.

They get in Friday morning, and now they are kind of anxious, because if something goes wrong, they won’t finish. That fear gets them kind of paralyzed until about 10:30. They start working on it, decide to eat lunch at their desk, and finish the work up at around 2:30 on Friday.

They go chat with their friend in HR because they feel good, and then realize they still need to send the work to their boss, look at their clock and realize it’s 4:45.

They send it to their boss, who is happy they finished "on time." Said boss continues to think it takes a week to get that kind of work done.

by scoote

 

October 24, 2014

Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe?

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.

In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.

In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.

(National Geographic)

 

October 25, 2014

Network Decay

Many cable channels are created to fulfill a specific programming niche, and their name is Exactly What It Says on the Tin — the Golf Channel shows golf, the Game Show Network shows Game Shows, and so on.
Some channels, however, are not as wedded to their original concept as others. Meddling executives look at the demographics to whom their channel appeals and decide that, hey, since the people watching their Speculative Fiction channel are mostly 18-31 males, and Professional Wrestling is hot among that demographic, surely no one would mind if they started showing pro-wrestling!
The fans of the original programming will mind, of course, but the channel tends to keep going regardless. This may show up with only a couple of odd programs in the schedule, but far too often, given enough time, a channel will have pretty much abandoned its original concept. Whether or not the former invariably leads to the latter is a subject for debate.
Since the network is strongly impacted by the ratings, and the highest ratings go to generally the same few demographics, this tends to lead to networks becoming more and more like each other, either in similar programming or outright airing the same shows.
Some changes can be chalked up to the changing landscape of TV. As the number of channels goes up, networks re-align themselves to try and hold some of their market. That, or the parent companies who might own seven or more cable channels each shuffle stuff for “synergy” or to reduce redundancy. Competition with new media is prevalent as well — classic reruns give way to DVD box sets (and the real killer, Netflix and similar streaming services), music-video channels give way to YouTube and iPods, and info-dumping all-text channels give way to the data display in a digital cable box, smartphone apps (once again, the real killer) or some new-fangled webernet site. Other times, it’s just shifting to whatever the network feels will attract the biggest audience — and the audience that lets them charge the most for ads (especially the lucrative young adult demographic, needless to say).

– TV Tropes

 

October 28, 2014

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

Excerpt from "A Hanging" – George Orwell

 

October 31, 2014

Mauerbauertraurigkeit

n. the inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like—as if all your social tastebuds suddenly went numb, leaving you unable to distinguish cheap politeness from the taste of genuine affection, unable to recognize its rich and ambiguous flavors, its long and delicate maturation, or the simple fact that each tasting is double-blind.

Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

 

November 3, 2014

On their way to get married, a young Catholic couple is involved in a fatal car accident. The couple find themselves sitting outside the Pearly Gates waiting for St. Peter to process them into Heaven. While waiting, they begin to wonder: Could they possibly get married in Heaven? When St. Peter showed up, they asked him.

St. Peter said, ‘I don’t know. This is the first time anyone has asked. Let me go find out,’ and he leaves.

The couple sat and waited, and waited. Two months passed and the couple are still waiting. While waiting, they began to wonder what would happen if it didn’t work out; could you get a divorce in heaven. After yet another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled.

‘Yes,’ he informs the couple, ‘you can get married in Heaven.’

‘Great!’ said the couple, ‘But we were just wondering, what if things don’t work out? Could we also get a divorce in Heaven?’

St. Peter, red-faced with anger, slammed his clipboard onto the ground. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the frightened couple.

‘OH, COME ON!’, St. Peter shouted, ‘It took me three months to find a priest up here! Do you have any idea how long it’ll take me to find a lawyer ?

 

November 4, 2014

I know people who feel like they’ve wasted years of their lives because of poor choices. They spent years in a relationship that was toxic, years with an addiction, years at a job where they weren’t fulfilled. But you have to realize, nothing you have been through is ever wasted. Your past experiences, good and bad have deposited something on the inside of you. Those challenges have sharpened you to help make you who you are today.

 

November 7, 2014

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

– Benjamin Button

November 8, 2014

A rich man on his deathbead calls his three lawyers in for a final consultation.

“They say you can’t take it with you, but I’m going to prove them wrong! I’m giving you each a third of my money. At my funeral, I want you to throw it in my grave so that it’s buried with me.”

After the funeral, the lawyers are gathered for a drink when one of them says “I have a confession to make. I’m really behind on my mortgage, so I took 1/4 of the money and threw the rest of it in.”

The second lawyer responds. “I have to confess, I’m also having money problems. My Mercedes just broke down and the repair bills are killing me. I took half the money and threw the rest in.”

The third lawyer indignantly blusters at the other two “I’m ashamed of you both ripping off an old man like that. Why I’ll have you know I threw in a check for the full amount!”

 

November 10, 2014

I am in my late 20s, and feel I have wasted a lot of time. Is it too late?

Too late for what?

If you slept through your 26th birthday, it’s too late for you to experience that. It’s too late for you to watch “LOST” in its premiere broadcast. (Though, honestly, you didn’t miss much.) It’s too late for you to fight in the Vietnam War. It’s too late for you to go through puberty or attend nursery school. It’s too late for you to learn a second language as proficiently as a native speaker. It’s probably too late for you to be breastfed.

It’s not too late for you to fall in love.

It’s not too late for you to have kids.

It’s not too late for you to embark on an exciting career or series of careers.

It’s not too late for you to read the complete works of Shakespeare; learn how to program computers; learn to dance; travel around the world; go to therapy; become an accomplished cook; sky dive; develop an appreciation for jazz; write a novel; get an advanced degree; save for your old age; read “In Search of Lost Time”; become a Christian, then an atheist, then a Scientologist; break a few bones; learn how to fix a toilet; develop a six-pack …

Honestly, I’m 47, and I’ll say this to you, whippersnapper: you’re a fucking kid, so get over yourself. I’m a fucking kid, too. I’m almost twice your age, and I’m just getting started! My dad is in his 80s, and he wrote two books last year.

You don’t get to use age as an excuse. Get off your ass!

Also, learn about what economists call “sunk costs.” If I give someone $100 on Monday, and he spends $50 on candy, he’ll probably regret that purchase on Tuesday. In a way, he’ll still think of himself as a guy with $100—half of which is wasted.

What he really is is a guy with $50, just as he would be if I’d handed him a fifty-dollar bill. A sunk cost from yesterday should not be part of today’s equation. What he should be thinking is this: “What should I do with my $50?”

What you are isn’t a person who has wasted 27 years. You are a person who has X number of years ahead of you. What are you going to do with them? 

 

November 14, 2014

Son, love is… strange. The very first time you ever feel it, it’s like a whole new world has been opened. Your head starts spinning like a propellor on a plane, your heart soaring just like that aircraft. You can construct beautiful sentences in your head, but the second you start talking to this girl, they get jumbled up and you end up stammering out a combination of mixed up words. Those words start winding around your brain and pulling a knot, making it impossible to think, and you eventually end up walking away, your cheeks as red as the blood that your heart is pumping through your body at a million beats per second. And it’s beautiful.

Then years go by and love changes. Love warps and stretches until you don’t even recognize it as the thing you felt back when you were 13. You look at this girl, and see the most beautiful thing on earth. Every time you see her you still get that feeling. The soaring, spinning feeling. It never leaves you, just fades away. Now love brings a smile to your face, a warm feeling to accompany the soaring in your heart, and the spinning slows down. You’d walk to the ends of the earth for her. You’d take a bullet for her in a heartbeat, and you know that this is the girl you want to spend the rest of your life with.

You live out your lives together, and after so many years the feeling you got when you first saw her still comes up occasionally, but it’s almost been completely replaced with another. It’s a feeling of contentment, almost. You know that you made the right decision, and your heart is bursting with love for this woman. A feeling that will never go away, not until the end of time.

You look at your wife, your anchor, the mother of your children, your other half, and you can’t imagine life without her. You squeeze her hand one last time before she closes her eyes for the last time. You can feel a part of you being ripped out of your heart, but yet, it’s still there. Now love is different. Love is a gallery of memories. You love your children, but nothing will ever compare to the love you felt for your wife. And the feeling is still there, buried under layer after layer of sadness. Regret. Wishing you could have done more. But love tells you that you did everything you could. It tells you she was happy.

– lemmy13 

 

November 17, 2014

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

– Dylan Thomas

 

November 18, 2014

First I was dying to finish high school and start college. And then I was dying to finish college and start working. And then I was dying to marry and have children. And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school so I could return to work. And then I was dying to retire.

And now I am dying…

And suddenly I realize I forgot to live.

 

November 19, 2014

Currently you’re a slave to your occupation, you’re worried about your financial situation. You have the desire to travel the world but you have a fear of the unknown. Forget about your savings, travel is the only thing that makes you richer.

All you can do is just stop thinking about it; just do it. When you land flat on your ass on the other side of the world you’ll begin questioning if you’ve made a mistake. When you’re riding a motorcycle from the north to south of Vietnam you’ll be wondering why you’ve never been travelling extensively before. When you’re climbing Everest Base Camp you’ll be questioning why you live in a city. When you’re getting a five dollar massage you’ll be wondering what you’ve been paying thirty times the price for. When you’re eating cuisine that invigorates the soul you’ll be stupefied. When you’re watching a lion crawl through the tall grass of the Okavango Delta you’ll get the perfect photo. When you’re drinking Belgian beer you’ll wonder why anyone drinks Budweiser. When you’re hanging out with Polar bears in Churchill you’ll wonder why we’re not looking closer at alternative energy sources worldwide. When you’re diving with sharks in the South Pacific you’ll realize Jaws was a terrible portrayal of such beautiful creatures. When you’re at Carnival in Salvador, Brazil you’ll wonder why you pay entrance to the clubs where you live. When you’re flying down the side of a volcano in Nicaragua on a sled so fast you can’t slow down you’ll know you did the right thing leaving home.

The list can go on and on and on. The world is far too big to be stuck in an office chair working for some bureaucratic bastards who care more about their bank statements than their employees. I’m going to have to quote Mark Twain here..

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

In the end, who knows.. Maybe you’ll end up marrying a Philippina and living on a white sand beach in the Visayas where your student loans will be a distant memory. Just let go and see what the world has in store for you. – solitaryman69

 

November 24, 2014

“Be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference. Don’t allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It’s there for your convenience, not the callers. Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is. Don’t burn bridges. You’ll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river. Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Don’t major in minor things. Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Learn to say no politely and quickly. Don’t use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved. Don’t waste time grieving over past mistakes Learn from them and move on. Every person needs to have their moment in the sun, when they raise their arms in victory, knowing that on this day, at his hour, they were at their very best. Get your priorities straight. No one ever said on his death bed, ‘Gee, if I’d only spent more time at the office’. Give people a second chance, but not a third. Judge your success by the degree that you’re enjoying peace, health and love. Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly. Leave everything a little better than you found it. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life and death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. Never cut what can be untied. Never overestimate your power to change others. Never underestimate your power to change yourself. Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years. Remember that winners do what losers don’t want to do. Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out. Spend less time worrying who’s right, more time deciding what’s right. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life. Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get. The importance of winning is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it. When facing a difficult task, act as though it’s impossible to fail.”

— Jackson Brown Jr.

 

November 25, 2014

What It Feel Like To Be 80 Years Old

I am in my 80s. To be this age is largely luck. To be this age and reasonably healthy with peace of mind is even luckier. To be this age, be healthy, and not lonely makes one feel so lucky that you want to gulp the moments down like a drowning man reaching air. I have been in five car crashes without being hurt (none were my fault). During the war as a child, I experienced several bombs falling within close range and where people within yards of myself were killed or injured. Numerous other such incidents sometimes gives one a sense of invulnerability, and other times that the next incident won’t be so lucky.

I regret much but also realize that having regrets meant that I had opportunities to regret; I was lucky to have those opportunities. There is a desire to leave one’s mark; graffiti on the wall of time; an apt engraving on a tombstone or small plaque on a park bench. The gifts of inheritance that will be gratefully accepted, and carry the essence of one’s past. The slogan ‘I was here’ seems as important as always, but much more in the sense of ‘I hope I deserve it’ rather than ‘And now you know.’

Much thought is sometimes given to organ donations, with an underlying feeling of ‘Please God keep me healthy and I will give my body to science in return.’ Though living on as a kidney transplant is more of an altruistic gesture than a religious one.

When friends pass away, it is not just their presence that is lost, it is also the memories they have of you. The “Do you remember when…?” conversations that pepper the elderly reminiscences. Fear of death is actually rare and is commonly a joke. On the other hand, fear of losing one’s memories, faculties, or independence is real. We put a great value on having people who we can trust — especially to carry out wishes when we are gone. Making final decisions can be upsetting, particularly if they relate to young people who are distant in age and lifestyle yet close in relationship.

One gets comfort from familiarity; the same cup; the same chair; the same view. One can be disturbed by the disruption or criticism of established habits. Having pets is a comfort, but caring for them can be increasingly difficult when joints get stiff, and even bending over is an effort.

It is easy to put off things till tomorrow, though there is the thought that there may not be a tomorrow. Oddly enough, the older one gets, the more likely it is that one will live longer. If the Devil hasn’t taken you yet, he may not be bothering. There is the constant sorting out of possessions no longer used, and not acceptable even for charity shops. The clothes that once looked smart in ones finger-clicking days now seem to say “How can you do this to me?” as they read your thoughts. There are the books you intended reading, but now never will. The postcards of forgotten places with ‘Hope you are well’ signed by some long lost friend. The photos of someone you knew well, but cannot now recall the name. Perhaps the more intimate letters from those you knew when time stood still.

So, what is it like to be in your eighties? It is really not much different from being any age where your concerns are getting through the day. On the other hand, people have more importance than possessions; comfort more worth than ambition; trust more value than money; love more satisfying than immortality.

Perhaps in some ways, one wants to leave the world as one entered it; without fear or pain; without anger or distrust; without possessions or debts; without demands or expectations; in innocence.

Stan Hayward

 

November 26, 2014

The 3 Classical Symptoms Of Killing Our Dreams

The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.

The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.

And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.

When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being.
We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice.

And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons

By Paulo Coelho

 

November 28, 2014

It’s a real struggle. You wake up in the morning with no motivation to get out of bed unless you have your precious, the thing you would do ANYTHING for, the thing you love more than yourself and your family/friends. When you don’t have it, life is absolute hell, there’s no purpose in life. When you do have it, life is okay… ish. You feel normal, and maybe a little numb to the things that are bothering you, and suddenly this innocent brown powder you’re using as a crutch in life is causing more and more problems, instead of solving them like it initially seems. But it’s okay, you don’t care about problems anymore, in fact, you don’t give a fuck about anything. Your friends? What friends? All your real friends left you to move on with life, and the people you call "friends" don’t give a fuck about you, they just want your money. Your family? They still love you, but at this point you’ve hurt them too much to still be a true family. Yourself? Well, you’re not really there anymore, so you don’t care. You’ll blame the people around you, and then continue to steal from them and hurt them more, then wonder why people don’t stay in your life. You probably don’t have a job anymore, and if you do, you don’t care about it. Then one day you realize; you caused it all for yourself, and you know it, but you can’t admit it to yourself. "What’s the point in living anymore?" goes through your mind every day, and you can’t answer the question in any way. You might as well be dead. You’re an emotionless zombie, enslaved to the illusion of happiness you created with the help of one of the most addictive substances on earth. You’re a piece of shit, worthless, and it doesn’t bother you, because you can just go bang up a couple more bags and not care. You can try rehab, and it might help, but you’ll probably just relapse. The alternative is continuing until you overdose. Heroin does fucked up things to people, opiates are deceptive.

But hey, it’s your body, it’s up to you. If you were smart, you’d stop before it’s too late. Opiates are like an endless path in the woods, that seems like a nice path at first but gets harder and harder to follow the further you go. You can turn around before it’s too late, but keep walking too far and you might just find yourself lost, with nobody to blame but yourself.

– ObamaInYoMomma

 

December 10, 2014

If I had to give up my mouth or my ears, I’d definitely get rid of the mouth. You learn nothing from your own talking. I know everything I’m going to say, I never surprise myself.

– Karl Pilkington

 

December 16, 2014

What Does It Feels Like To Be Rocked By A Punch

Everything seems distant for a second: the room seems dimmer and the lights, by comparison, brighter. sounds seem to echo and sound hollow, as if someone is calling to you through a tunnel. it doesn’t hurt, at least not acutely and not immediately. the most shocking thing about the sensation is the lack of sensation. you can think surprisingly clearly, but the connection between your conscious thoughts and your ability to make your body put them into action is tenuous at best. you can get hit, and your frontal lobe says “I need to circle right and step back to recover and avoid getting hit for a few seconds,” but the part of your brain that’s in control is animalistic and survival-oriented, and it usually says “you need to get yourself into the fetal position, curl up on the ground, and not take any more damage.” a fight is a constant battle for self control in the face of extreme fear and physical hardship, and getting hit like that is one of the most powerful examples of that fact.

– ghostmcspiritwolf 

 

December 22, 2014

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

– Neil Gaiman

 

December 29, 2014

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

– Douglas Adams

 

December 31, 2014

When I was younger I’d put my arms in my shirt and told people I lost my arms. Would restart the video game whenever I knew I was going to lose. Slept with all the stuffed animals as a child so none of them got offended..Had that one pen with 4 colors, and tried to push all the buttons at once. Poured soda into the cap and acting like I were taking shots. The hardest decision was choosing which Nintendo game to play. Waited behind a door to scare someone, then leaving because they’re taking too long to come out or you had to pee. Faked being asleep, so I could be carried to bed. Used to think that the moon followed my car. Watching two drops of rain roll down window and pretending it was a race. Went on the computer just to use Paint. The only thing i had to take care of was a Tamagotchi. The only ‘fake’ friends i had were invisible ones . I used to sing in the shower. (Now? I make life decisions in there now). Swallowed a fruit seed I was scared to death that a tree was going to grow in my tummy. Getting a bruised knees heals better than a broken heart. Remember when we were kids and couldn’t wait to grow up…what the hell were we thinking?

 

January 6, 2015

As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this: There are never enough comfort stops. The places you’re going to are never on the map. And once you get that map out, you won’t be able to refold it no matter how smart you are. So forget the map, roll down the windows, and whenever you can, pull over and have a picnic with a pig.

Kermit the Frog

 

January 7, 2015

Jesus fucking christ, it’s a hell of a world we live in where a man with a pencil and a paintbrush can make a coward with a gun feel intimidated.

– PainMatrix

 

January 8, 2015

A husband walks into the bedroom to see his wife packing a suitcase. He asks, "What are you doing?"

She answers, "I’m moving to Nevada . I heard that prostitutes there get paid $400.00 for what I’m doing for YOU for FREE!"

Later that night, on her way out, the wife walks into the bedroom and sees her husband packing his suitcase.

When she asks him where he’s going, he replies,

"I’m coming too. I want to see how you live on $800.00 a year."

 

January 9, 2014

What It’s Like When An NFL Linebacker Nearly Knocks Your Head Off

Here’s how I would describe it: Before I hit the ground, something large hit me in the head. I know now that it was Willie, flying in at a death angle, dropping his shoulder and running it through my temple into my tonsils. The blow dislodged the ball and knocked me out. It was the kind of borderline hit that today might get him fined. Being knocked out in a football game is not a painful event at impact. It is a dimensional vacuum through an extremely narrow wormhole. It is a piano falling on your head in the middle of your recital. It’s a system reboot. My adrenaline was always too high to feel the pain of a hit, anyway. When I came to, I didn’t know where I was. You’re lying on the grass, Nate. The crowd is roaring. But what are they roaring about? Oh, yes, it’s for you. You got knocked out. Yay! His brain is bleeding!

– Nate Jackson

 

January 19, 2014

"The family often used to ride with me to the Atlanta airport, and on our way, we always passed Funtown, a sort of miniature Disneyland with mechanical rides and that sort of thing. Yolanda would inevitably say, “I want to go to Funtown,” and I would always evade a direct reply. I really didn’t know how to explain to her why she couldn’t go. Then one day at home, she ran downstairs exclaiming that a TV commercial was urging people to come to Funtown. Then my wife and I had to sit down with her between us and try to explain it. I have won some applause as a speaker, but my tongue twisted and my speech stammered seeking to explain to my six-year-old daughter why the public invitation on television didn’t include her, and others like her. One of the most painful experiences I have ever faced was to see her tears when I told her that Funtown was closed to colored children, for I realized that at that moment the first dark cloud of inferiority had floated into her little mental sky, that at that moment her personality had begun to warp with that first unconscious bitterness toward white people. It was the first time that prejudice based upon skin color had been explained to her. But it was of paramount importance to me that she not grow up bitter. So I told her that although many white people were against her going to Funtown, there were many others who did want colored children to go. It helped somewhat. Pleasantly, word came to me later that Funtown had quietly desegregated, so I took Yolanda. A number of white persons there asked, “Aren’t you Dr. King, and isn’t this your daughter?” I said we were, and she heard them say how glad they were to see us there."

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – Playboy Interview 1965

 

January 26, 2014

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces:

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944. Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory.

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

February 2, 2015

My Dad taught me this after I took a penalty kick square to the groin during a soccer game. It is goddamn magic and I am horrified more guys don’t know about it.

The pain of a ball shot is caused by everything down there contracting very quickly and very violently in what I assume is a misguided attempt to make it a smaller target. You can counteract this by lying on the ground and having a friend lift you by the belt or waistband. This will stretch the muscles of the area and reverse the painful cramping. If you are by yourself or are not comfortable with this, lie down and lift your groin upwards as though you were going to assume the crabwalking position.

I have seen this turn laboured breathing and teary eyes into walking around normally in a minute flat. SPREAD THE WORD.

 

February 3, 2015

“The way you step up your game is not to worry about the other guy in any situation, because you can’t control the other guy. You only have control over yourself. So it’s like running a race. The energy that it takes to look back and see where the other guys are takes energy away from you. And if they’re too close, it scares you. So, that’s what I would say to my team all the time: Don’t waste your time in the race looking back to see where the other guy is or what the other guy is doing. It’s not about the other guy. It’s about what can you do. You just need to run that race as hard as you can. You need to give it everything you’ve got, all the time, for yourself.”

-Oprah Winfrey

 

February 9, 2015

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time – a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life burst into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single eternal flow of energy.

– Alan Watts

 

February 10, 2015

You asked me how depression felt,
and this is all I could come up with.

It feels like
I’m walking upstream
through a current strong enough
to pull me under four times over.

There are others with me
but they are walking along the banks 
telling me to “just get out of the water.”
But instead of extending a hand in help,
they just move on and leave me behind.

Every once in a while I find a rock
that is strong enough for me to lean on,
And I can rest for a bit.

But the rocks always get tired of holding me up,
and when they let go, I’m left drowning,
thrown 50 feet back again.

And nothing is harder
then standing up in that current
when everything in you
is telling you how much easier things would be
if you just let yourself get dragged under.

 

February 12, 2015

Indian Chief ‘Two Eagles’ was asked by a white U.S. government official, “You have observed the white man for 90 years. You’ve seen his wars and his technological advances. You’ve seen his progress and the damage he’s done.”

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, “Considering all these events, in your opinion where did the white man go wrong?”

The Chief stared at the government official and then replied, “When white man find land, Indians running it, no taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work, Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex.”

Then the chief leaned back and smiled, “Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that.”

 

February 13, 2015

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” 

– Randy Pausch

 

February 16, 2015

“Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.” 

– Lao Tzu

 

February 17, 2015

“The greatest feeling you can get in a gym or the most satisfying feeling you can get in the gym is the pump. Let’s say you train your biceps, blood is rushing in to your muscles and that’s what we call the pump. Your muscles get a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode any minute and its really tight and its like someone is blowing air into your muscle and it just blows up and it feels different, it feels fantastic. It’s as satisfying to me as cumming is, you know, as in having sex with a woman and cumming. So can you believe how much I am in heaven? I am like getting the feeling of cumming in the gym; I’m getting the feeling of cumming at home; I’m getting the feeling of cumming backstage; when I pump up, when I pose out in front of 5000 people I get the same feeling, so I am cumming day and night. It’s terrific, right? So you know, I am in heaven.” 

– Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

February 23, 2015

What do you think is the most positive thing someone can realistically do to change the world?

I think the best thing we can do to change the world is to inspire young people. The more people realize that the key to happiness in life is to surround yourself with good friends, to be a good friend, to challenge yourself in honest ways, to not take short cuts but rather to rise to the challenge and grow from the struggle. To not be jealous of each other’s success but rather be inspired by it. The more we realize that the key to happiness doesn’t lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel and the way they make us feel. The values of true community.

Although these values are massively important and resonate with every honest person when they’re discussing “meaning” and “happiness” in life, they’re not taught in school. We learn the building blocks of mathematics, the fundamentals of language, the facts of history – but we never learn how to manage our minds. We never learn how to live by a code and to surround yourself with like-minded people and to inspire and encourage each other.

Occasionally we’re fed clumsy, abstract shiet like “think positive!” but no one ever gives us a clear path of what the fuk that means. No one ever tells you that all the success in the world will leave you a miserable wreck of a person if you stab your brothers and sisters in the back in your attempt to reach victory. No one ever tells you that all the money in the world ain’t worth shiet if no one gives a fuk about you and you have no friends.

The quicker we all realize that we’ve been taught how to live life by people that were operating on the momentum of an ignorant past the quicker we can move to a global ethic of community that doesn’t value invented borders or the monopolization of natural resources, but rather the goal of a happier more loving humanity.

People can still make money and still find success while doing it all ethically. We live in a time where we’re seeing corporations acting as remorseless, profit seeking monsters with each human part required to keep it moving feeling free of guilt because of the diffusion of responsibility that comes with being a single piece in a huge machine. Too many people have the attitude that this is the only way to do big business. That’s a pile of weak bullshiet, and this generation may be one of the first generations that has the information available to make that distinction and stop that flawed model from being acceptable.

The more people require the highest level of friendship and love of themselves the more other people will be inspired by them. If that sounds like some hippy, utopian bullshiet… it’s because it is. It also might be the only way people are ever really going to change. One person inspiring another, each commiting to upholding a higher standard until it becomes the norm.

Humanity has changed drastically over the past few thousand years. It used to be when people you didn’t know showed up in town they were there to rape and murder. Now, they’re tourists and they’re welcomed with open arms as a valuable part of the global economy. One day I believe that if we don’t blow ourselves up, or poison ourselves with polution, or get wiped out by a super-bug or an asteroid impact we’ll slowly come to the understanding that we really are just one species, and that the only way to truly be happy is if everyone around you is happy as well.

– Joe Rogan

 

February 25, 2015

“Success has always been the greatest liar – and the “work” itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the “work,” whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have create it; “great men,” as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

 

February 26, 2015

An O-face is by far the sexiest and most seductive thing in the world to me.

To a man, or at least to me, my GF O-face silently reassures “You are everything society has told you you should be. You have fulfilled the most important role of what a man is supposed to be and have been deemed worthy. You are such a manly, manly man that I have completely lost all control of myself, down to my most basic motor and language skills. You have unraveled me, and I am falling apart beneath you, yet I trust you so completely to be totally and absolutely vulnerable before you. You make me happy and are the only one who can make me feel this way. Also, in ways that can be scientifically quantified, your dick gets me extremely high.”

My GF’s eyes always grow really wide, and search my own. I can see surprise, love, and a dash of fright in hers. I can read “I will love you forever, and for this brief instant I see, feel, hear, smell, and taste nothing but you. You are my entire universe for a handful of seconds. I have some reservations about trusting anyone this much, but make love to me. Gentle or rough, just satisfy yourself and have me completely.”

Then there are the squeaks, gasping breaths, and moans she makes, and those add another dimension to the whole situation. Honestly, I think I enjoy her orgasm more than mine. The best is when we both cum at the same time. I can’t describe it, but it reminds me of those Infinity mirrors…

The lack of control my GF experiences during an orgasm is complete and total bliss for me. I can’t help but be influenced by growing up in a world where media and society has taught my brain that a man MUST be able to please a woman. It’s almost the male equivalent of how media makes many women feel like they must be thin. Every one of my GF’s orgasms is a reassurance of my own value, both to her as her other half, and also an individual.

–  Sammygirl2321 

 

February 27, 2015

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

– The Great Gatsby

 

March 2, 2015

I am only 24 years old, yet I have actually already chosen my last tie. It’s the one that I will wear on my funeral a few months from now. It may not match my suit, but I think it’s perfect for the occasion.

The cancer diagnosis came too late to give me at least a tenuous hope for a long life, but I realized that the most important thing about death is to ensure that you leave this world a little better than it was before you existed with your contributions . The way I’ve lived my life so far, my existence or more precisely the loss of it, will not matter because I have lived without doing anything impactful.

Before, there were so many things that occupied my mind. When I learned how much time I had left, however, it became clear which things are really important. So, I am writing to you for a selfish reason. I want to give meaning to my life by sharing with you what I have realized:

• Don’t waste your time on work that you don’t enjoy. It is obvious that you cannot succeed in something that you don’t like. Patience, passion, and dedication come easily only when you love what you do.

• It’s stupid to be afraid of others’ opinions. Fear weakens and paralyzes you. If you let it, it can grow worse and worse every day until there is nothing left of you, but a shell of yourself. Listen to your inner voice and go with it. Some people may call you crazy, but some may even think you‘re a legend.

• Take control of your life Take full responsibility for the things that happen to you. Limit bad habits and try to lead a healthier life. Find a sport that makes you happy. Most of all, don’t procrastinate. Let your life be shaped by decisions you made, not by the ones you didn’t.

• Appreciate the people around you Your friends and relatives will always be an infinite source of strength and love. That is why you shouldn’t take them for granted.

It is difficult for me to fully express my feelings about the importance of these simple realizations, but I hope that you will listen to someone who has experienced how valuable time is.

I’m not upset because I understand that the last days of my life have become meaningful. I only regret that I will not be able to see a lot of cool stuff that should happen soon like the creation of AI, or Elon Musk’s next awesome project. I also hope that the war in Syria and Ukraine will end soon.

We care so much about the health and integrity of our body that until death, we don’t notice that the body is nothing more than a box – a parcel for delivering our personality, thoughts, beliefs and intentions to this world. If there is nothing in this box that can change the world, then it doesn’t matter if it disappears. I believe that we all have potential, but it also takes a lot of courage to realize it.

You can float through a life created by circumstances, missing day after day, hour after hour. Or, you can fight for what you believe in and write the great story of your life. I hope you will make the right choice.

Leave a mark in this world. Have a meaningful life, whatever definition it has for you. Go towards it. The place we are leaving is a beautiful playground, where everything is possible. Yet, we are not here forever. Our life is a short spark in this beautiful little planet that flies with incredible speed to the endless darkness of the unknown universe. So, enjoy your time here with passion. Make it interesting. Make it count!

Thank you!

– mylasttie

 

March 3, 2015

Guys, if you can’t fathom why women hate being catcalled, just think about those obnoxious salesmen at mall kiosks. You know how awkward and annoyed you feel trying to get by them as they desperately try to push their shitty product on you?

Imagine if that happened EVERYWHERE, and if – instead of shoe cleaner – their product was DICK.

That’s a woman’s reality: a never-ending, thinly veiled penis infomercial. Moral reasons aside, you shouldn’t catcall simply because it doesn’t work. From an economic standpoint, dick is over-saturating the marketplace. Supply and demand. Too many guys are trying to supply dick. Droves of desperate dudes are drastically decreasing dick demand, detrimenting distribution.

Simply put: The Cock Market is an all time low.

The reason vagina is such a valuable commodity is because it’s harder to come by. You can’t just get it through a hole in the wall at a truck stop bathroom. You want your product to sell, you have to create a need.

In everyone’s best interest, gentlemen, treat your dicks like the McRib. Periodically take them off the market. Give consumers a chance to miss them and forget how gross they really are.

– Nat Baimel

 

March 4, 2015

As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth. Today, I know, this is AUTHENTICITY. As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody as I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this person was me. Today I call it RESPECT.

As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life, and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow. Today I call it MATURITY. As I began to love myself I understood that in any circumstance, I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm. Today I call it SELF-CONFIDENCE.

As I began to love myself I quit stealing my own time, and I stopped designing huge projects for the future. Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in my own rhythm. Today I call it SIMPLICITY. As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health—” food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is LOVE OF ONESELF.

As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since, I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is MODESTY. As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worry about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where EVERYTHING is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it FULFILLMENT.

As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me and it can make me sick. But as I connected it to my heart, my mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this connection WISDOM OF THE HEART. We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of problems with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing new worlds are born. Today I know THAT IS LIFE!

– Charlie Chaplin

 

March 5, 2015

Son, love is… strange. The very first time you ever feel it, it’s like a whole new world has been opened. Your head starts spinning like a propellor on a plane, your heart soaring just like that aircraft. You can construct beautiful sentences in your head, but the second you start talking to this girl, they get jumbled up and you end up stammering out a combination of mixed up words. Those words start winding around your brain and pulling a knot, making it impossible to think, and you eventually end up walking away, your cheeks as red as the blood that your heart is pumping through your body at a million beats per second. And it’s beautiful.

Then years go by and love changes. Love warps and stretches until you don’t even recognize it as the thing you felt back when you were 13. You look at this girl, and see the most beautiful thing on earth. Every time you see her you still get that feeling. The soaring, spinning feeling. It never leaves you, just fades away. Now love brings a smile to your face, a warm feeling to accompany the soaring in your heart, and the spinning slows down. You’d walk to the ends of the earth for her. You’d take a bullet for her in a heartbeat, and you know that this is the girl you want to spend the rest of your life with.

You live out your lives together, and after so many years the feeling you got when you first saw her still comes up occasionally, but it’s almost been completely replaced with another. It’s a feeling of contentment, almost. You know that you made the right decision, and your heart is bursting with love for this woman. A feeling that will never go away, not until the end of time.

You look at your wife, your anchor, the mother of your children, your other half, and you can’t imagine life without her. You squeeze her hand one last time before she closes her eyes for the last time. You can feel a part of you being ripped out of your heart, but yet, it’s still there. Now love is different. Love is a gallery of memories. You love your children, but nothing will ever compare to the love you felt for your wife. And the feeling is still there, buried under layer after layer of sadness. Regret. Wishing you could have done more. But love tells you that you did everything you could. It tells you she was happy.

– lemmy13 

 

March 6, 2015

Deep, deep down ask yourself, “Who do you want to be?” Not what, but who. I’m talking about figuring it out for yourselves, ‘What makes you happy?’

You have to think outside the box. That’s what I believe after all. What’s the point of being on this Earth if all you want to be is be liked and avoid trouble?

We have so many rules in life about everything. I say break the rules, not the law, but break the rules.

I remember that after I was finished with my body building career I wanted to do acting, I wanted to be a star in films. Everyone had the same mind that it can’t be done. They said, “Look at this body, you have this huge monstrous body, you’re overly developed.” This doesn’t fit into the movies. But yer, I didn’t listen to all this, that was their rules. I was convinced I could do it.

Then I got the big break, Conan The Barbarian. Trust yourself no matter what anyone else thinks.

And there the directors said, “If we didn’t have Schwarzenegger, we would have to build one.” Then when I did Terminator, “I’ll be back…” One of the most famous lines in the movie history, all because of my crazy accent. It just shows you, you never should listen to those who say you can’t do something.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Anything that I have always attempted, I was always willing to fail. Don’t be afraid of making decisions; you can’t be paralysed with the fear of failure or you will never push yourself. You can push because you believe in yourself and your vision. You know it’s the right thing to do and success will come. Don’t be afraid to fail.

I mean, how many times have you heard, ‘you can’t do this, or you can’t do that because it’s never been done before.’ So pay no attention to the people who say it can never be done.

If I would have listened to the naysayers, I would still be in the Austrian Alps yodelling. I would never have come to America. I always listen to myself and say, “Yes.You.Can.” You never want to fail because you never worked hard enough. Work your butt off.

I always believed in leaving no stone unturned. No Pain, No Gain.

While you’re out there partying, horsing around, someone out there at the same time is working hard, someone out there is getting smarter, someone is winning — just remember that.

You can’t climb the ladder of success with the hands in the pockets.

– Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

March 9, 2015

“So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion;respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,even a stranger, when in a lonely place.Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weepand pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” 
–  Chief Tecumseh

 

March 10, 2015

I hate that word—“lucky.” It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me.

– Peter Dinklage

 

March 11, 2015

When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice, then they think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight fucking hours with 800 people at a convention center and… then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not fuckin’ good enough.’ Can you imagine?” he implores. “It’s destroying the next generation of musicians! Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy and old fucking drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll fucking start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some shitty old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass shit, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don’t need a fucking computer or the internet or The Voice or American Idol.”

– Dave Grohl

 

March 16, 2015

"When you wake up this morning I want you to go to the mirror and I want you to look at yourself in the eyes and say Fuck you, fuck your hopes, fuck your dreams, fuck all the good you thought this life was ‘gon bring you.
Now lets go out there and make this bitch happy."

– Chris Rock

 

March 19, 2015

and when he gets to heaven,
to Saint Peter he will tell:
"Just another soldier reporting, sir
I’ve served my time in hell.

 

March 23, 2014

Being busy does NOT mean being productive.

Busyness isn’t a virtue, nor is it something to respect.  Though we all have seasons of crazy schedules, very few of us have a legitimate need to be busy ALL the time.  We simply don’t know how to live within our means, prioritize properly, and say no when we should.

Being busy rarely equates to productivity these days.  Just take a quick look around.  Busy people outnumber productive people by a wide margin.  Busy people are rushing all over the place, and running late half of the time.  They’re heading to work, conferences, meetings, social engagements, etc.  They barely have enough free time for family get-togethers and they rarely get enough sleep.  Yet, emails are shooting out of their smart phones like machine gun bullets, and their day planners are jammed to the brim with obligations.  Their busy schedule gives them an elevated sense of importance.  But it’s all an illusion.  They’re like hamsters running on a wheel.

Though being busy can make us feel more alive than anything else for a moment, the sensation is not sustainable long term.  We will inevitably, whether tomorrow or on our deathbed, come to wish that we spent less time in the buzz of busyness and more time actually living a purposeful life.

– Marc And Angel

 

March 24, 2015

“Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

– Kurt Vonnegut

 

March 30, 2015

We’re happily married, though I wouldn’t say “awesome” best describes what we have, I’d like to answer this question anyway because no one has an only awesome relationship. I love my wife very much and when things are good they are really good. We fight, we get mad, sometimes over stupid things but not always. We have similar passions which is really important and empathize well with each others feelings. Have there been surprises? Definitely… both good and bad, and being married has been so much different than I expected. The thing that really makes me sure that we will survive, is that I can’t picture trying to do get through this life without her, that we truly enjoy spending time with one another, even if it’s doing nothing. I know that I am a fully capable adult but with her I feel unstoppable and I actively aim to be the same inspiration for her. Are things always awesome? …no way, would I change it? …no way.

– Itsnotgivingmewhat

 

March 31, 2015

Will:  You’re a first year grad student. You just got finished readin’ some Marxian historian — Pete Garrison probably. You’re gonna be convinced of that ’til next month when you get to James Lemon, and then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That’s gonna last until next year — you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

Clark: Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social 

Will: Wood drastically — Wood ‘drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.’ You got that from Vickers, ‘Work in Essex County,’ page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you…is that your thing? You come into a bar. You read some obscure passage and then pretend…you pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some girls and embarrass my friend? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don’t do that. And two: You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f—-n’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.

– Good Will Hunting

 

March 5, 2015

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

 

March 6, 2015

I’d hold you up to say to your mother, “this kid’s gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid’s gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew.” And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilige. Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you’re no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that! I’m always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You’re my son and you’re my blood. You’re the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain’t gonna have a life.

– Rocky Balboa

 

March 7, 2015

Her name is the S.S. Queen of Glasgow. Her registry: British. Gross tonnage: five thousand. Age: indeterminate. At this moment she’s one day out of Liverpool, her destination New York. Duly recorded on this ship’s log is the sailing time, course to destination, weather conditions, temperature, longitude and latitude. But what is never recorded in a log is the fear that washes over a deck like fog and ocean spray. Fear like the throbbing strokes of engine pistons, each like a heartbeat, parceling out every hour into breathless minutes of watching, waiting and dreading. For the year is 1942, and this particular ship has lost its convoy. It travels alone like an aged blind thing groping through the unfriendly dark, stalked by unseen periscopes of steel killers. Yes, the Queen of Glasgow is a frightened ship, and she carries with her a premonition of death.

– Rod Serling, Twilight Zone: Judgement Night

 

March 8, 2015

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

 

March 13, 2015

The great chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land, the idea is strange to us, yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them from us, every part of this earth is sacred to my people.

We know the white man does not understand our ways, One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother but his enemy and when he has conquered it he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves and his children’s birthright is forgotton.

There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to hear the leaves of spring or the rustle of insect wings, but perhaps because I am a savage and do not understand – the clatter only seems to insult the ears, and what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoowill or the arguments of the frog around the pond at night.

The whites too shall pass – perhaps sooner than other tribes, continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hill blotted by talking wires.

Where is the eagle. Gone. Where is the buffalo. Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt, the end of living and the beginning of survival.

– Written by Chief Seattle to President Franklin Pierce, 1855.

 

March 14, 2015

"— you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and the time to
create."

no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on 
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown 
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re giong to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.
baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

Charles Bukowski

 

March 15, 2015

It’s hard to explain, but for me it’s that the sense of being part of some story where you are the protagonist kind of fizzles out unceremoniously and leaves you drifting for the rest of forever.

As a kid, you’re on a path, there’s a plan laid out for you, and whether you intentionally break from the plan or follow it to the letter, there’s this linear progression of growth, and an ultimate goal to strive for. You have allies, you have enemies, you have trials that you pass or fail, you have moments of catharsis, etc. You feel like part of a beautiful narrative, like the heroes in movies and books and tv shows and stories. You feel like there’s a right and a wrong way to go, and some ultimate fate waiting for you at the end that will sum up what all of it meant.

When you get to be an adult, that illusion crumbles away as you realize that you don’t have a narrative, there is no path or plan, things aren’t always linear, and you’re nobody’s hero. There are no allies, because friends can be both good and bad for you simultaneously. There are no enemies, because frankly no one cares enough to wage a personal war for long. You don’t have a destiny. You make choices that are more a product of random chance than you want to admit, and sometimes the consequences make sense, sometimes they don’t. You may flounder around in a bunch of different directions for many years, ultimately not making any progress, and having nothing of import to show for it. You’re not a good person or an evil person – you’re just an ant wandering around looking for crumbs. No, worse than an ant, because an ant has a purpose in life, to serve its queen and colony. You can choose to align yourself with a purpose, but it may never fulfill you or reward you. And nobody will be waiting with a shiny gold medal for you if you stick to it.

Life as an adult seems less and less like an exciting adventure story and more and more like a delerious, confusing fog of random developments and passing phases that raise more questions than they answer.

– calliope720 

 

March 22, 2015

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

– Louis de Bernières

 

March 23, 2015

I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

Col. Kurtz’s – Apocalypse Now

 

March 24, 2015

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 

– Albert Einstein

 

March 27, 2015

A blonde woman walks into a bank in NYC before going on vacation and asks for a $5,000 loan.

The banker asks, "Okay, miss, is there anything you would like to use as collateral?"

The woman says, "Yes, of course. I’ll use my Rolls Royce."

The banker, stunned, asks, "A $250,000 Rolls Royce? Really?"

The woman is completely positive. She hands over the keys, as the bankers and loan officers laugh at her. They check her credentials, make sure she is the title owner. Everything checks out. They park it in their underground garage for two weeks.

When she comes back, she pays off the $5,000 loan as well as the $15.41 interest.

The loan officer says, "Miss, we are very appreciative of your business with us, but I have one question. We looked you up and found out that you are a multi-millionaire. Why would you want to borrow $5,000?"

The woman replies, "Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return?"

 

May 4, 2015

A Priest was being honoured at his retirement dinner after 25 years in the parish. A leading local politician and member of the congregation was chosen to make the presentation and to give a little speech at the dinner. However, he was delayed, so the Priest decided to say his own few words while they waited: Thank Goodness we Catholics have a wonderful sense of humour!

“I got my first impression of the parish from the first confession I heard here. I thought I had been assigned to a terrible place. The very first person who entered my confessional told me he had stolen a television set and, when questioned by the police, was able to lie his way out of it. He had stolen money from his parents; embezzled from his employer; had an affair with his boss’s wife; had sex with his boss’s 17 year old daughter on numerous occasions, taken illegal drugs; had several homosexual affairs; was arrested several times for public nudity and gave VD to his sister in-law.

I was appalled that one person could do so many awful things. But as the days went on, I learned that my people were not all like that and I had, indeed, come to a fine parish full of good and loving people.”

Just as the Priest finished his talk, the politician arrived full of apologies at being late. He immediately began to make the presentation and gave his talk:

“I’ll never forget the first day our parish Priest arrived,” said the politician. “In fact, I had the honour of being the first person to go to him for confession.”

 

May 5, 2015

I don’t know you. I don’t know a thing about you. I don’t know where you come from, where you’re going, or why you do what you do. I don’t know if we’d get along if we met. But there is one thing that I do know: You are capable of much more than you have been led to believe.

As I am writing this, there are 7 billion people walking and breathing on our humble rock. The overwhelming, vast majority of them will pass through their 720,000 hours like a match struck in the wind. Hardly noticed, scarcely remembered.

Tomorrow, as you go about your day, take your time to look around. Are there a lot of people around? What do you see? You see mediocrity. You see average. You see everything about yourself that you hate, that you fear, but that you have been conditioned to believe is acceptable. Fine. Enough. A good job.

I’m here to tell you that you will NOT settle for what is fine. You will NOT settle for a good job. Fine is for the loser. Fine is for the guy who skipped the last set of his workout because he just didn’t feel like it. Fine is for the guy who cheated on his diet (this goes for you too, you skinny fuk) because he just couldn’t do it anymore. Fine is for the guy who took a nap instead of sprinting around town in the torrential downpour. Fine is for the guy who got the job, but not the one he wanted. That guy made second place. He has never embraced pain, personal sacrifice, or thrown himself into the fires of dedication. Most importantly, and starting today, this guy is NOT YOU.

You are not this person. You are destined for greatness. You have it inside of you, and you know it. You have always known it. You have felt it as a faint thumping in your gut. It is clawing, scratching, struggling to be set free. It needs your help. As long as you hold yourself to the standard of “average”, that is all you will ever be. In your dreams you aren’t average, so why the Fuk are you settling for it now? What should you be doing right now? What is eating at the back of your skull? Go do it! You know what it is, soldier. The time to act is now. You will burn. You will suffer. Your demons will not be defeated easily. Every step of the way they will whisper in your ear that you aren’t good enough. That you are not meant to succeed. “Just give up,” they will mutter, “you will never be the best.” “NO,” you will reply. You will embrace suffering. You will finish that last repetition. You will claw through the agonizing pain. You will destroy the mediocre pussy in your head. You will break boundaries. You will rise above the rest. You will realize your potential.

You are no average man. Now go do what you were destined to do. End of fuking story.

 

May 11, 2015

Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a critique of Wall Street. It’s a critique of you, the viewer

Every time I watch Wolf of Wall Street, I want to be more like Jordan Belfort.

I know this is a critique leveled by so many people: that for a anti-Wall Street movie, it sure does glamorize Jordan’s life a lot.

I mean, the guy’s partying, having sex with the hottest women, and he doesn’t even get a half decent sentence. What’s so bad about that?

Critics complain that we never get a shot of his victims. We never see anyone who has lost his job or his life earnings because of Jordan’s schemes. The only people it touches upon are Jordan and his immediate family, and we never even see a glimpse of what happens to his first wife, his dad or his mom.

Then we get this scene at the very end:

http://i.imgurrr.com/FG6rAHL.png

Take a look at their faces. What do you see? Hope? Greed? Awe?

That’s exactly the same look I had on my face watching Jordan. Not disdain. Not disgust. But awe.

I wanted to be Jordan. I wanted that Alpha Male "Masters of the Universe". I wanted a big mansion and a hot wife.

Exactly the same dreams all those people in the last shot want.

This is Martin Scorsese’s real critique: Wall Street is just a symptom. The real problem is with us, the ordinary people who want to emulate Jordan instead of rejecting him.

I think that last shot captured the essence of the movie. That we will overlook all outrageous behavior as long as we get a chance to make big money.

This, to me, is the essence of Scorsese’s critique.

–  spaceythrowaway

 

May 12, 2015

Being a veterinarian, I had been called to examine a ten-year-old Irish wolfhound named Belker. The dog’s owners, Ron, his wife, Lisa, and their little boy, Shane, were all very attached to Belker, and they were hoping for a miracle.

I examined Belker and found he was dying of cancer. I told the family we couldn’t do anything for Belker, and offered to perform the euthanasia procedure for the old dog in their home.

As we made arrangements, Ron and Lisa told me they thought it would be good for six-year-old Shane to observe the procedure. They felt as though Shane might learn something from the experience.

The next day, I felt the familiar catch in my throat as Belker’s family surrounded him. Shane seemed so calm, petting the old dog for the last time, that I wondered if he understood what was going on. Within a few minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away.

The little boy seemed to accept Belker’s transition without any difficulty or confusion. We sat together for a while after Belker’s death, wondering aloud about the sad fact that animal lives are shorter than human lives.

Shane, who had been listening quietly, piped up, “I know why.”

Startled, we all turned to him. What came out of his mouth next stunned me.  I’d never heard a more comforting explanation.  He said, “People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life – like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?”

The six-year-old continued, “Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they don’t have to stay as long.”

 

May 13, 2015

My only brother, older by 2 years, was terminally ill with Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. I got a call from my mother at 5am and she only needed to say three words to me.. "It’s your brother". I threw some clothes on and sped to their house. He was clearly on his way out. I gathered myself, laid with him and did my best to comfort him. As he began to slip away, my brother and best friend, who had been wheelchair bound since he was 8 years old, and was then 25, said to me the most beautiful and haunting words I will ever hear.. "I’m running so fast"

– O_McG_had_a_pharm 

 

March 15, 2015

“An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?”

– Carl Sagan

 

May 17, 2015

"You absolutely own your mind. It’s yours. This is part of the “gift of life” thing that you get in exchange for never having asked to be born. You are the proprietor of your thoughts and feelings, and you choose how you frame the many experiences that form the campus of your personality. It’s a weird and glorious moment of self-awareness the day you realize that you are the warden rather than the prisoner of your emotions. The interesting thing about our minds is that if we don’t actively seize control of them, they default to autopilot. When you don’t take an aggressive role in shaping your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, you become a helpless passenger floating through the universe like a ghost ship, merely reacting to wherever it takes you. Awesomely, YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO ALONG WITH IT.

– Chris Hardwick, The Nerdist Way"

 

May 20, 2015

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

–  Fernando Pessoa

 

May 25, 2014

It’s so hard to begin to convey it to someone who has never been there, let alone served. I don’t say that to try and be arrogant or belittle anyone who hasn’t, but there is so much more to the lifestyle and entirety of the situation. From the time you enter boot camp you are conditioned to fight. Every night before we went to sleep in boot we’d recite article 1 of the armed forces code of conduct. "I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense." Eventually, it all just seems like a good idea. As an infantryman, we don’t have a 9-5. We don’t go work on trucks, we typically disappear out into the woods 5 days a week and spend the time preparing for combat. Patrols, rushes, drills, marksmanship, communications, land nav, and a myriad of other skills you will need to get you through (hopefully) alive. You spend every waking moment living, breathing and eating topics that relate to combat in some way shape or form. It becomes a part of you. It always remains a part of you.

I remember one of our guys didn’t every perform so well during drills and ended up being left behind to pull guard duty when we went into Fallujah. He was very upset by this and felt as though he was less of a man for it, if that gives you an idea of how your mind is operating at the time. When you get there, you’ve done it some much, you WANT to go. You NEED to go. You spent so much time, blood, and sweat preparing for this, training as hard as you can it just seems natural. But you don’t know, you have no idea, and nothing will ever prepare you.

To this day I still can’t believe I was there. Felt like watching a movie through my own eyes. 7 weeks in that city. 7 weeks of grinding through streets, clearing hundreds of houses a day "SWAT" style, or whatever amounts to it wearing 70-130 pounds of gear depending on your MOS. Smoke, explosions, death, blood, yelling, cursing, screaming, sweaty, hungry, scared, exhausted, cold, hot, miserable, exuberant, numb inside but full of life. It’s overload on every level. Emotional, physical, mental, you are just overwhelmed beyond what you had ever dreamed, but you keep your shit on lock down. You have to, you trained for this, and your buddies depend on you doing your job. You can’t quit. I remember one time in the middle of a firefight I almost lost my shit. It was out of no where, my brain just started repeating "I want to go home. I just want to go home." Luckily I had enough of whatever it was to reign myself back in and remind my brain that’s its either on my own to feet or a bag. Got my head straight quick and got back to doing my job.

Its surreal. The video games aren’t anything close. You shoot people, they just stop. Like they chose right then and there to take a hard nap, but they never wake up. Sometimes they don’t go so quickly. I don’t want to talk about that.

It’s almost like your higher brain functions just turn off. You aren’t thinking anymore. You can’t think. Its just like on the range. See the man shaped target pop up, put the man shaped target back down. Bodies just in the street where they fell. Some not so neat.

Strange behavior, for the first couple of days it wasn’t real. We’d wax one of the enemy, and we’d laugh, we’d high five. You may think we’re terrible for it but its the only thing you CAN do. If you really stopped to realize what you were doing you’d never make it. Once we took our first KIA it wasn’t funny anymore. It was real, very real. No more smiles. Just grim set jaws and eyes burning with hatred for that they did to our friend. You soul goes black and you want to burn down the entire country. Your buddies are of the utmost importance. You’re all alone in a hostile country, and there’s not a lot of people wearing the same clothes anymore.

For all the negativity, and this may sound strange, there is some good in it. You witness acts of heroism, acts of courage and sacrifice. What men do for each other under fire is a kind of love you will never experience anywhere in your life again. It isn’t a question, it isn’t a thought, you just run out into fire to get them. I didn’t do that, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m no hero, I just did my job. I just wanted to get home to my mom.

You just react. That’s it. Its high strung instant reflexes. We got told as a squad to rush across a 6 lane highway in the city once, all that open ground. I don’t know why I stepped off and started going, I just did. My body did it for me.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m kind of at a loss for words. I feel like the above was my best explanation, but I still feel like it doesn’t come close. I’m open to questions though. If ou have anything specific you want to know, or have some kind of guidelines I could follow for answering it would make it easier.

– BulletSponge51 

 

May 27, 2015

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

– George Orwell, The Hanging

 

May 28, 2015

As an American, I was raised to believe I was entitled to 100% happiness, all day every day, until I died. But in our Declaration of Independence, we’re granted only the PURSUIT of happiness –
not actual happiness. The founders of this country were smart not to promise the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free too much of a good thing.

The good news is that the pursuit of happiness is way better than being happy any day. The irony is that actual happiness blasts us across our faces, necks and chests all the time – but we’re so busy chasing the elusive notion of what happiness is to us at that moment, we tend to overlook the authentic bliss we create for ourselves and others in the process of simply trying to be happy. And by the time we realize these were, in fact, moments of happiness, it’s too late: those moments are now memories.

Happiness can’t be bottled. It can’t be smoked, swallowed, shot or ejaculated. And there is no end game: you never cross the finish line and are suddenly happy. Even when all your wildest dreams come true, you still pursue happiness.

Thankfully, human beings are at their happiest when they feel they’re at their most productive. So the only real happiness is the pursuit of happiness. When we chase happy, we feel our best. Life is about the journey, not the destination – so while the idea of happiness sounds great, it’s actually the pursuit of happiness that provides the most contentment. And in that pursuit, we are ultimately at our happiest.

– Kevin Smith

 

May 29, 2015

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.” 

–  Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

 

June 1, 2015

“Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.”

– Osho

 

June 2, 2015

“You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.”

– Maya Angelou

 

June 4, 2015

Conor McGregor’s post on an Irish MMA forum from 2011

Dont worry folks i reply to any call out even if it is against a little white guy who thinks he is a big black guy,,,,

Conor Dillon that broken foot was the best thing that ever happened to you that night and you know it 
You left that ring lookin like your hero snoop dogg, black and blue

Walkin around with a death row records chain around your neck you bum your a five foot nothing pastey white kerry bum you remind me of that donkey Chris ”Menace to absolutly f@@king nothing” Stringer with his bandana on you guys should fight,, winner takes the losers 2pac posters

Im after the real gold a belt that no irish man has ever won and dont say paul mcveigh has won it he is as scottish as the loch ness monster

On another note vote for me for fighter of the year how can you not the busiest fighter this year 4 second ko’s ,16 second ko’s, broken orbital bones, broken jaws, broken noses, fighters retired,, 100 per cent knockout 
ratio what other guy in the country is doing this 

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM ARE RUNNING SCARED 
EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!!

 

June 9, 2015

Shotokan guy here (25+ years training). 14 years of teaching. 4 years running my own dojo.

JKA is Shotokan Karate. I have been a member of the JKA in the past, but am currently not a member due to regional political (karate politics, not real politics) reasons. In terms of Shotokan the JKA is the most popular organization in the world. Their headquarters are based in Japan. They started the Instructor Trainee Program that has produced countless Shotokan masters. Pretty much all other Shotokan organizations have direct ties to the JKA, and although there is surely to be variation, many Shotokan schools who branched off from the JKA train like they always did when they were apart of the JKA. If Shotokan is indeed what you want to do, as an organization, you can’t go wrong choosing the JKA. Very high standard of quality (in their field). But locally, you should choose your school and style based on the teacher, not what organization/style he/she belongs to.

Typically, Shotokan focuses on the 3 K’s approach to training, which are Kihon (basics), Kata (patterns), and Kumite (sparring). Although classes may obviously be more heavily weighted at times to one of the three, as a rule those three areas are practiced an equal amount.

Although the JKA forever claim that their karate is budo (martial way), leading people to believe that it is effective in self-defense, in reality Shotokan has mainly (d)evolved into a sport-oriented form of karate. Their sparring is light-contact and in tournaments they follow the "shobu ippon" point-sparring rules. Definitely not full contact. However you likely won’t "spar" until you are brown or black belt. Most of the time, junior ranks are only allowed to practice partner line drills, which are better known as 5-step, 3-step, and 1-step sparring (kihon kumite).

You can expect a large group of the membership to consist of children. It is not uncommon for children as young as 10 to be awarded black belts in this style of karate, depending on when they began their training. Really, there’s nostandard for what a black belt means anymore, so I wouldn’t worry about that point too much. For many that is a big red flag, but I wouldn’t declare a school a McDojo solely for that purpose. Poor quality and shady business practices (long-term contracts, forcing people to buy their equipment from the instructor at prices way over margin, instructor never teaches and always gets students to teach, guaranteed rank promotions, etc) would be my main concerns.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself what your main goals are from taking up a martial art. If all you want to do is learn how to fight, there are other martial arts (boxing or muay thai for example) that would more quickly get you trained for that purpose. If you want to learn self-defense techniques, probably some form of Jiu Jitsu (BJJ or JJJ) or Judo would be more appropriate. If you know you want to do karate, and want full contact, then Kyokushin or some variant is probably best. If you’d rather not learn a full contact style and have interest in eventually competing in tournaments, as a sport Shotokan is a fine option.

To answer your question. Observe a few classes. Try a few classes (hopefully for free). Ask questions. Shop around.

 

June 11, 2015

Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources. In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0 , Hunting and Fishing 7.5, Farting 99.9, and Racing 3.6
I can’t seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I’m thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0 , but the uninstall doesn’t work on Wife 1.0. Please help!

Thanks,
A Troubled User. (KEEP READING) ___________________________________

REPLY:
Dear Troubled User:

This is a very common problem that men complain about.

Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING!!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed.

You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed to not allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony-Child Support. I recommend that you keep Wife1.0 and work on improving the situation. I suggest installing the background application “Yes Dear” to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE because ultimately you will have to give the APOLOGIZE command before the system will return to normal anyway.
Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as Clean and Sweep 3.0 , Cook It 1.5 and Do Bills 4.2.

However, be very careful how you use these programs . Improper use will cause the system to launch the program Nag Nag 9.5 . Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0 !
WARNING!!! DO NOT , under any circumstances, install Secretary With Short Skirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system.

Best of luck,
Tech Support

 

June 15, 2015

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

– John Lennon

 

May 16, 2015

He’s hot and miserable, so he decides to take action. The A/C has been busted for a long time, so he fixes it. Things cool down quickly. The moving walkway motor jammed, so he un-jams it. People can get from place to place more easily. The TV was grainy and unclear, so he fixes the connection to the Satellite dish and now they get hundreds of high def channels.

One day, God decides to look down on Hell to see how his grand design is working out and notices that everyone is happy and enjoying umbrella drinks. He asks the Devil what’s up?

The Devil says, "Things are great down here since you sent us an engineer."

"What?" says God. "An engineer? I didn’t send you one of those. That must have been a mistake. Send him upstairs immediately."

The Devil responds, "No way. We want to keep our engineer. We like him."

God demands, "If you don’t send him to me immediately, I’ll sue!"

The Devil laughs. "Where are YOU going to get a lawyer?"

 

June 17, 2015

A day in the life of an average (read : poor, not middle class) Filipina

I used to rent a place in Marikina (closer to where I worked) but would go back home to Laguna on weekends.

One time, coming from Laguna, I found that I had less money on me than I thought. This was bad news. I had always been on top of my budget, always had things carefully managed because I was struggling to make ends meet. I still don’t know where I went wrong.. ( Wrong calculations? Maybe dropped a bill at some point? Definitely not stolen, I only kept bills in my wallet and I still had it. )

Sweating bullets, I fished around in my bag for loose change, etc. and (thank gods) managed to come up with enough money to at least pay the fare until Magallanes.

When I got off the bus, I literally had ZERO money on me or anywhere else. ZERO. After an episode of almost overwhelming panic and desperation I was left feeling helpless and ashamed. The shame was heavy and intense and still all too easy to recall.

So I decided to walk home. Nothing else could be done, really. But, with the heat and fumes, and my backpack (plus the shame) weighing me down, I gave up at Guadalupe. I sold my phone, an entry level Samsung for 1k. That was the best deal I could get, no shit.

That money got me on the train, the rest of the way home and to work the next day.

Honestly, I’ve run out of money more times than I care to admit. There was a time I had become such a regular at a certain pawnshop near my place that they no longer bothered to ‘test’ and weigh my gold stuff anymore, since it’s been in and out of the shop so many times, always the same thing.

I have had to call my boss to tell him I couldn’t come to work because I didn’t have any money to get there.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a result of lousy money management, but, just for a moment, imagine eating insant pancit canton / instant noodles / instant spaghetti for a month because it’s the most cost-efficient (no need for a fridge or extra expenses on fare to get fresh stuff weekly), taking 3 public transpo transfers and walking a good stretch to save money when a cab could get you there in 15 mins., reusing your jeans until the actually start to smell to save on water and soap, never pressing / ironing ANY of your clothes to save on power costs and still running out of money.

How else can you manage minimum wage better? I don’t know.

It’s easy to blame this on laziness or unwillingness to finish school (doing well in school + graduating = jobs that pay well), but with no money for tuition, how could you study even if you desperately wanted to?

I, along with many others, decide to struggle with being a full time student and employee at once, and it honestly really is shit, let me tell you.

I don’t know. I’ve been in the slums, in makeshift shelters – an entire house smaller than a decent-sized bedroom, maybe even some spacious bathrooms or walk-in closets. (I’ve been in double-digit-million peso homes too, so I have a basis for comparison.)

The worst part is the lack of plumbing – washing dishes in a basin, dumping dirty water on muddy ground, no sinks or anything, an outhouse (which is basically a toilet in the ground) with tarp hung around a wooden frame for privacy.

It sucks, yes. It really does.

– kisscurl 

 

June 19, 2015

First I was dying to finish high school and start college. And then I was dying to finish college and start working. And then I was dying to marry and have children. And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school so I could return to work. And then I was dying to retire.

And now I am dying…

And suddenly I realize I forgot to live.

 

June 23, 2015

12 Reasons Why Canada Should Be Feared

Ninety percent of population is massed within 100 miles of northern American border.

Seems not to mind that one of its provinces has turned almost entirely French.

Excessive politeness only makes sense as cover for something truly sinister. But what?

Citizens seem strangely impervious to cold.

Decriminalization of marijuana and acceptance of gay marriage without corresponding collapse of social institutions indicate Canada may, in fact, be indestructible.

Has infiltrated entertainment industry with singers, actors, and comedians practically indistinguishable from their American counterparts.

Consistently stays just below cultural radar yet never quite disappears.

Parliamentary government and common-law judiciary appear to function acceptably yet remain completely inscrutable.

Never had a “disco phase.”

Seemingly endless supply of timber, donuts, and Scotch-plaid hats with earflaps.

Keeps insisting it “has no designs on America” and “only wants peace.”

Plays a mean game of pond hockey.

 

June 25, 2015

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.”

— Fahrenheit 451

 

June 26, 2015

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

 

June, 30, 2015

“It amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By "we" I mean adults. We’re adults, right? But emotionally we’re a culture of seven-year-olds. Have you ever had that moment when are you updating your status and you realize that every status update is just a variation on a single request: "Would someone please acknowledge me?”
― Marc Maron

 

July 2, 2015

“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”

― Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

 

July 3, 2015

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

– Henry Scott Holland

 

July 6, 2015

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” 
– Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

 

July 8, 2015

"Politics was good a hundred years ago. Today, politicians have no ability to solve any problems because they are not students of behavior. They are not students of agriculture, oceanography, they know nothing about the factors that operate the world. So, they say things that people like to hear, and that gets them elected. Now scientists, on the other hand, are not concerned with public approval. Even if everybody on earth believed the earth was flat, they would say, ‘You’re wrong. This is the evidence we have to support the fact that the earth is round’. They don’t say, "it’s a little round and a little flat." – that’s politicians."

– Jacque Fresco

 

July 9, 2015

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

 

November 18, 2015

It was a face that had not seen itself in twenty years. Vader saw his son crying, and knew it must have been at the horror of the face the boy beheld. It intensified, momentarily, Vader’s own sense of anguish—to his crimes, now, he added guilt at the imagined repugnance of his appearance. But then this brought him to mind of the way he used to look—striking, and grand, with a wry tilt to his brow that hinted of invincibility and took in all of life with a wink. Yes, that was how he’d looked once. And this memory brought a wave of other memories with it. Memories of brotherhood, and home. His dear wife. The freedom of deep space. Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan, his friend … and how that friendship had turned. Turned, he knew not how—but got injected, nonetheless, with some uncaring virulence that festered, until … hold. These were memories he wanted none of, not now. Memories of molten lava, crawling up his back … no. This boy had pulled him from that pit—here, now, with this act. This boy was good. The boy was good, and the boy had come from him—so there must have been good in him, too. He smiled up again at his son, and for the first time, loved him. And for the first time in many long years, loved himself again, as well.