The amount of time invested in an idea has no relation to its usability. It’s worth spending time to find out something doesn’t work.
Rick Rubin
Category: Quotes
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
*eyeroll*
Eyerollers are not naysayers. They’re not constantly cynical or skeptical or negative about your work. They don’t keep you down. They keep you in check. They’re editors.
Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?
If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952)
“Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.”
Ian Fleming, “Casino Royale”
“You know the difference between good and bad?”
“Sure. I’ve been listening to your Hank Williams and Patsy Cline albums.”
Tim Sandlin, “Western Swing”
Everyone makes a youthful promise not to get old and regretful, but every choice we make, by definition, rules out something else, so there’s always something to what-if about. Even the people happiest to be doing X are still going to wonder occasionally, what if they’d chosen Y? Sometimes this is sad, yes. Sometimes, though, it’s just routine maintenance on an open and dynamic mind.
Carolyn Hax: Her wanderlust has faded. Should she try to reignite it? (via)
Foolish
I was young and foolish then
I feel old and foolish now
They Might Be Giants, “Lucky Ball And Chain”
Or
I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.
Mark Twain
Being right is more important to the person being written about than the person writing.
Ryan Holiday
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (via chocolateinthelibrary)