quote.basket.12.29.2025
perspective, games, school, and optimism
Quote baskets are just quotes that have come up in my life (or substack) recently. If I included them in a longer form post you’ll see it linked below under the quote.
You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one.
~ Paulo Coelho
I like how this one highlights the importance of perspective.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
~ Niels Bohr
Embrace failure, bitches!
I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
~ Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
~
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.
~ Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
~
So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.
~ Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
~
Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.
~ Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Referenced: Ender’s Game Book Review
Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.
~ Helen Caldicott
Some professions echo into eternity…
He who would start a journey alone can leave today; but he who travels with others must wait until the others are ready.
~African / Arabic Proverb (maybe)
Matter, how tiny my share
Time, how brief my allotment
Fate, how small my roll to play
Self, all that can be mastered
~ Pierce Brown
Referenced: Yes, School Sucks
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
~Lao Tzu
Perhaps the strongest argument for not taking everything so fucking serious.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
~ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Oh yeah, we’re all a little fucked-up here, Cat.
Referenced: My Mind Is Empty Of Pictures
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
~ Tom Clancy
Don’t ever forget - the world doesn’t actually make any fucking sense and it wasn’t outlined by some writer-in-the-sky. Shit be nuts.
I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
~ Thomas Jefferson (probably not)
Ah, the American Dream - where all you really need is hard work.
You can make no mistakes and still lose. That is life.
~ Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Referenced: Balatro
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.
~ Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
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“...man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.”
~ Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions
~
“At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.”
Referenced: Choosing What Sucks
The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.
~ Max Roser, Our World in Data
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We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - Washington National Cathedral, March 31, 1968.
Referenced: Relentless Optimism
