Quotes and music
These are quotes and music that I like in no particular order attributed to other people. I will write in depth about these quotes later in my own blog posts, but maybe it’s good for you yourself to think about what it means!
“Sometimes you need to go all around the world to cross the street.”
– My Gym Coach’s dad
“Feel your feelings, especially your anger.”
– A mentor of mine
“People are always just tilting at windmills!”
– Another mentor of mine
“My Revolt! My Passion! My Freedom!”
– Albert Camus
“I’d rather be a freeman in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave. … The harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all.”
– Jimmy Cliff
“To be yourself is all that you can do.”
– Chris Cornell
“The world is a mirror. It mirrors back your inner soul.”
– My interpretation of some Taoist Sage
“One must imagine Sisyphus smiling. (I changed “happy” to “smiling”)”
– Camus
“Talk about your problems to people that will really listen.”
– Me (and Claude)
“When you listen to people’s issues, listen like a therapist would. Ask them questions. Get them to clarify the problem. And then once you have enough information, stop being a therapist and actually rouse them into action. Talking about feelings is not enough, but understanding your feelings and acting anyways is the important part.”
– Me
“I get angry at the people that just don’t let me be sad. Just let me be sad. It’s OK to be sad. Being sad is what allows you to be happy.”
– Me
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“You see, but you do not observe.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“You can only communicate to others what you can communicate to yourself.”
– Mortimer J. Adler
“Language is a leaky abstraction! Words don’t mean what they mean oftentimes, and it’s up to you to figure out what words really mean.”
– Me
“Learn to come to terms with people. Meaning, learn what their words are, understand what they mean by those words. Once you can understand what they are communicating behind their words, you really understand them.”
– (derived from) Mortimer J. Adler
“In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”
– Karl Marx
“All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”
– Ralph Ellison - from Invisible Man