Like most people, I like snippets that may reflect feelings or emotions that I feel at a given time. Below is just a collection of those snippets, from the mouths or text of other’s, that I found of interest at some point.
Behaviour
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.” — Karen Armstrong: Let’s revive the Golden Rule
“The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. … The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.” — Derek Sivers: How to start a movement
“By slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better: They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better.” — Carl Honore: Praising slowness
“Never trust anyone who wants what you’ve got. Friend or no, envy is an overwhelming emotion.” — Eubie Blake
“Be nice to those you meet on the way up. They’re the same folks you’ll meet on the way down.” — Walter Winchell, 1932
“Sometimes the only way you can take a really good look at yourself is through somebody else’s eyes.” — From the TV show Scrubs
“Why is it so easy to walk away from the things that are working and cling to the things that don’t!” — Brené Brown
“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.” — E.B.White
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools” — Douglas Adams
“Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” — Author unknown, attributed to Mark Twain
“All you can change is yourself, but sometimes that changes everything!” — Gary W Goldstein
“If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Our choices define who we are, far more than our capabilities. What you did in the past will always have an effect on your future.” — Unknown
Relationships
“I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.” — Plutarch
“Sometimes we expect more from others, because we’d be willing to do much more for them; and as we grow older we don’t lose friends, we just learn who the real ones are.” — Unknown
“Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it anyway.” — Elbert Hubbard, A Thousand and One Epigrams, 1911
“Cherish the real friends, those who are there when you need them, those who support you for who you are, not for who they need you to be for their benefit.” — Unknown
“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.” — Dalai Lama
“No relationships should be taken for granted. They are what life is all about, the whole point. How we cultivate our relationships is often the greatest determinant of the type of life we get to live.” — Gary Vaynerchuk
Happiness & Expectations
“There will be times when you will be in the field without a camera. And, you will see the most glorious sunset or the most beautiful scene that you have ever witnessed. Don’t be bitter because you can’t record it. Sit down, drink it in, and enjoy it for what it is!” – DeGriff
“The secret to happiness is low expectations.” — Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
“[It’s] the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.” — Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work
“If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It’s called a lobotomy.” — Kathryn Schulz: Don’t regret regret
“So you’re six years old, you’re reading ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,’ and it becomes rapidly obvious that there are only two kinds of men in the world: dwarves and Prince Charmings. And the odds are seven to one against your finding the prince.” — Emily Levine’s theory of everything
“Self-control is not a problem in the future. It’s only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us.” — Shlomo Benartzi: Saving for tomorrow, tomorrow
“You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” — Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability
“If you Google ‘regret and tattoo,’ you will get 11.5 million hits.” — Kathryn Schulz: Don’t regret regret
“We’ve got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we’ve got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, ‘Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?’” — Graham Hill: Less stuff, more happiness
“When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you’ve previously discounted for being merely intangible … you realize you’re much, much wealthier than you ever imagined.” — Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” — Albert Ellis
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Accept your past without regrets, handle your present with confidence, face your future without fear.” — Unknown
“For attractive lips, speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. For beautiful hair, let a child run his/her fingers through it once a day. For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone. People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone… Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands; one for helping yourself, and the other for helping others.” — Audrey Hepburn
“What if your fears and your dreams exist in the same place? Would you still go there?” — Unknown
“We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.” — Tim Jackson, professor in England
“Life doesn’t change but people do, so learn to accept that not everybody is who you thought you knew.” — Unknown
“Style is a voice, not a prop or an action. If you can buy it, borrow it, download it, or steal it, it is not a style. Don’t look outward for your style; look inward.” — Unknown
“The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.” — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.” — Henry David Thoreau
“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.” — Henry David Thoreau
“People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.” — Dalai Lama XIV
“Every single being, even those who are hostile to us, is just as afraid of suffering as we are, and seeks happiness in the same way we do. Every person has the same right as we do to be happy and not to suffer. So let’s take care of others wholeheartedly, of both our friends and our enemies. This is the basis for true compassion.” — Dalai Lama XIV
“We are but visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful with our lives. If you contibute to other people’s happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life.” — Dalai Lama XIV
“I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of inner peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion and elimination of ignorance, selfishness and greed.” — Dalai Lama XIV
“We’re wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn’t, we start looking around for the real world.” — Lev Grossman
“Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.” — Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
“This is who I am. Nobody said you had to like it.” — Unknown
Critical Thinking
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Ken Robinson: Schools kill creativity
“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.” — Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)
“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision” — Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)
“The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning” — Stephen Jay Gould
“The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.” — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” — Carl Sagan
“There is no such thing as a false opinion” — Plato
Communication
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.” — Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho
“All disputes and disagreements arise from people’s misunderstanding of each other, and mostly people misunderstand each other because they have their fixed point of view and are not willing to move from it. This is a rigid condition of mind. The more dense a person, the more he is fixed in his own point of view. Therefore it is easy to change the mind of an intelligent person, but it is most difficult to change the mind of a foolish person once it is fixed. It is the dense quality of mind which becomes fixed in a certain idea, and that clouds the eyes so that they cannot see from the point of view of another person.” — The Yoga Sanctuary
Religion
“In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know, that’s a really good argument, my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds, and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” – (1934 – 1996)
“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” – Carl Sagan
“Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people’s points of view – these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can’t allow them to delude us to the point where we can’t recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.” – Sam Harris
“As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.” – Sam Harris
“While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.” – Sam Harris
“An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” — Richard Dawkins on militant atheism
“I am an atheist and I Thank God for it!” — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.” — Unknown
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” — Stephen Roberts
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” — Seneca the Younger 4 b.c.- 65 a.d.
“You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.” — Richard Jeni
“Don’t pray in my school, and I won’t think in your church.” — Unknown
“Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” — Unknown
“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man — living in the sky — who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! ..But He loves you.” — George Carlin
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.” — Carl Sagan
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.” — Unknown
“Man created God in his image : intolerant, sexist, homophobic and violent.” — Unknown
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” — Carl Sagan
“Which is it, is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don’t stand up to experimentation, Buddha’s own words must be rejected.” — Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, 1988
Science
“The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.” — Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together
“Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.” — Evan Esar
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.” — Richard Feynman, American physicist, Nobel Lecture, 1966.
“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.” — George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” – Carl Sagan
Food & Drink
“What is the definition of a good wine? It should start and end with a smile.” — William Sokolin
“Wine is bottled poetry.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
“Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.” — Francis Bacon
Nuggets of Wisdom
“When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.” — Unknown
“If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.” — Steven Wright
“Life is short. Make fun of it.” – Anonymous
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” — Dalai Lama XIV
“Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” — Dalai Lama XIV
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone” — Reba McEntire
Loss
“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us” — Helen Keller
“When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure” — Unknown
“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal; Love leaves a memory no one can steal” — Irish Tombstone
“There’s a story behind everything..but behind all your stories is always your mother’s story..because hers is where yours begins.” — Mitch Alborn, For One More Day
Just makes me smile
“To a cat, “NO!” means “Not while I’m looking.” – Unknown
Natural selection: participation is mandatory.” – Anonymous
“Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock and, as it’s always been, rock crushes scissors.” — Sheldon Cooper, Big Bang Theory
“Success is 10% inspiration, 90% last-minute changes.” — From a billboard advertisement
“In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.” — Daniel L. Reardon
“The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser – in case you thought optimism was dead.” — Robert Brault
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose.” — Dr. Seuss
Travel & Adventure
“‘All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’ You could feel the wind at your back in those days. The sounds of the sea beneath you, and even if you take away the wind and the water it’s still the same. The ship is yours. You can feel her. And the stars are still there.” — Captain James T. Kirk
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” — Helen Keller
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” — Mark Twain
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” — St. Augustine
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign” — Robert Louis Stevenson
“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are” — Samuel Johnson
“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” — Paul Fussell
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” — Jack Kerouac
“He who does not travel does not know the value of men” — Moorish Proverb
“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home” — Dagobert D. Runes
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it” — John Steinback
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow” — Lin Yutang
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” — Cesare Pacese
“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in” — D.H. Lawrence
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world” — Freya Stark
“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.” — Mark Twain
“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living” — Mirian Beard
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going” — Paul Theroux
“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted” — Bill Bryson
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by” — Robert Frost
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving” — Lao Tzu
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home” — James Michener
“Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen” — Benjamin Disareli
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends” — Maya Angelou
“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind” — Seneca
“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” — William Least Heat
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” — Aldous Huxley
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it” — Rudyard Kipling
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect” — Paul Theroux
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land” — G.K. Chesterson
“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable” — Clifton Fadiman
“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” — Mark Jenkins
Technology
“I despise Twitter, truthfully. I think it’s one of the worst things that’s been created in my lifetime, and so there’s no way I’m going to go on it. I dislike everything about it. I think that the notion of the immediate reaction to something without any reflection, the idea that you can say anything that matters in the limited number of characters you’re given, and that you have to do it immediately, and everyone will respond immediately with no reflection, I think it’s the worst of our society, so no.” — UBC president Stephen Toope on being asked by The Ubyssey why he doesn’t have a Twitter account.
“You know when a dog stops and sniffs every lamppost and then squeezes out a little bit of wee on each one? That’s Twitter.” — Tweeted by Ricky Gervais