What is your favorite quote, proverb, or piece of wisdom?

It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.

• Jean-Luc Picard. In Star trek: The Next Generation s2e21

"This too shall pass"

Attar records the fable of a powerful king who asks assembled wise men to create a ring that will make him happy when he is sad. After deliberation the sages hand him a simple ring with the Persian words "This too shall pass" etched on it, which has the desired effect.

I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next  one.

-Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

We evolve, beyond the person that we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance with each turn. That's how a drill works!

Simon, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

• Be excellent to each other
• If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried
• If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment
• The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing

“We don’t care what music you kids love, so long as you have music to love.” From the Hopeless Savages comic

The one that’s keeping me going nowadays is Samwise from The Movie:

Sam: It’s all wrong By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln (or honestly a like a dozen different other sources...this one has many different variants).

I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like: The more you learn the more you realize how little you know.

"To strike another blow for freedom allows a man to walk a little taller and hold his head a little higher. And while he can, he must." - William J Brennan, former justice of the US Supreme Court. I keep it taped to my door to remind me why I'm here.

With great power comes great responsibility

Serenity Prayer:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

I'm not religious at all, but you can just kinda omit the first 3 words and the meaning is the same.

It's pretty much the basis of Acceptance Commitment Therapy - which is an effective way to manage anxiety and depression.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”

“Comparison is the thief of joy”

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." - Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte"

Great quote. But sometimes I think "twice" was overly optimistic.

Two of my favorite are from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."

"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." (Also attributed as a Native American proverb)

"Say what you mean, mean what you say."

When in doubt, shut up.

• I know that I know nothing.
• Perfection is killing you.
• A book a day keeps the haters away (ok, I made this one up. Still, quite a good advice and a real fine way to spend one's time)

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

This quote from LBJ centres me. Its been the conservative tactic for literally decades, from African Americans, to lgbtq+, to immigrants; it's always been the same grift:

• Choose your marginalised group-du-jour.
• Convince a whole lot of stupid people that that group is the cause of all their problems.
• Profit.

Its honestly astonishing how blatant it really is.

"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards" -Tommy Boy tagline

"The only winning move is not to play."

Following from your post about indecision: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"

Big fan of

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth"

• Garry Kasparov (2015)

That is to say, don't let them shut you up.

There is a longer, more historical version of this but it escapes me at the moment.

I can only find the Hannah Arendt quote (1974)

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And [to] such a people... you can do whatever you want."

But i swear there was one that finished "When the truth is silent, liars can move onto action"

And when all wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful -Ruskin Bond

At a certain level of self-awareness, it will inevitably happen regularly that one finds oneself repulsive.

I forget who said it.

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.

We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

-Donald Rumsfeld

---

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

-Unknown but commonly attributed to Karl Rove

---

My reasoning for why these matter:

The Rumsfeld quote lives on with me due to its sheer absurdity and his explanation behind the impetus for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, that the inability to predict 9/11 was a "failure of imagination." Yet it seems the "imaginations" in charge continue to become more and more narrow and unable to imagine anything outside of a set of prescribed ideas. I actually hate this quote because it reveals the kind of absurdist thinking behind the beginnings of the fascist machinations we live under today.

The Rove quote lives on with me because as much as I hate his guts, he was abso-fucking-lutely right and the Trump administration has practically weaponized this against the "reality based community" which spends its time on journalism and court cases that take years while a thousand new crimes have been committed in the meantime, all of which will take further years of journalism and court cases to resolve. A death by a thousand cuts by moving so fast that the rest of us are "left to just study what [they] do."

Sorry my quotes are kind of downers and not ones you actually want to live by. However, we're living through dark times and I think understanding the mindsets of those would cage and kill us is pretty important.

The moto I live my life by is “The day you stop learning is the day you become obsolete.”

The one I wish more people took to heart is, “After everything has been said, and everything has been heard, these three remain: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love.”

Just love each other, that’s all I’m asking for.

Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. the goods we possess are not ours, but theirs.

• St John Chrysostom

The demands of justice must be satisfied first of all; that which is already due in justice is not to be offered as a gift of charity.

• Second Council of the Vatican

When we attend to the needs of those in want, we give them what is theirs, not ours. More than performing works of mercy, we are paying a debt of justice.

• Pope St Gregory

Three quotes referenced in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and just one example of the dissonance between many “Christians” in the U.S. and the faith they purport to follow.

If that doesn’t get them, the fact that the concept of social justice, as in the actual coining of the term as well as the movement against capitalist exploitation brought on by the Industrial Revolution was by the Catholics does lol

The meaning behind it all is very simple, we’re all in this together, and the gifts given to us by God/nature belong to all of us. They’re not for us to hoard, or to exploit others for.

No matter where you go, there you are.

—Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ, ca. A.D. 1440

Also

• Buckaroo Bonsai

never trust a fart

"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken!" - Col. Sanders

Friendship is when silence between two people is comfortable.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

Alan Watts

Read it, and I mean really read it. then think about what it is that you inherited that you defend and why you should continue to defend it.

Man who walk through turnstile sideways is going to Bangkok.

“Give everything you can, but never anything you need.”

I try to live by this. I give away every extra dollar, and help people every chance I get

Never pass up the opportunity to pee.

And

If a restaurant serves breakfast all day, that's what you should order.

--My dad

Also,

Dont cheap out on anything that keeps you off the ground. (Tires, shoes, mattress etc)

“Never argue with an idiot because the best possible outcome is that you’ll win an argument with an idiot”

I also like “there are some things in life you can’t change, so you shouldn’t worry about them, and there are some things in life you can change, so you shouldn’t worry about them”

"You can make anything idiot proof, the world will just make a bigger idiot"

Pen is mightier than sword, France is Bacon.

When getting into an argument and the other person is just losing their shit and yelling and being uncivilized, it's best to keep your calm and let them vent. Stay cool and collected. And when arguing back, use facts and talk about your feelings. 

I've always loved the dichotomy between "I think, therefore I am" versus "To be, is to be perceived". Also, "life is what happens to you while you are making other plans".

Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.

Being neurodivergent, this is the most efficient way to mentally deal with change (i fucking hate change even though its the only constant in life)

Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, "would an idiot do that?" and if they would, I do not to that thing.

• Dwight Schrute

"The impediment to action advances action. What's in the way becomes the way."

This is basically saying that anything that gets in the way of you solving a problem becomes the new problem to solve.

"The tool works at both ends."

This is about skill building and practice. Making cool stuff improves you as a result.

Something I like about each is that they work in reverse. No impediment in your way? You're probably not going to have very focused forward movement. No need to use tools (literally or metaphorically)? You won't become more skilled.

This one speaks directly to me: "The only decision you should make while angry is to stop being angry." ~ Timothy Zahn, the Icarus series.

"People, what a bunch of bastards".

- Roy from the IT Crowd.

"know thyself"

Plato? I think it's Plato idk

"Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners."

Might not agree with Lenin on everything but this one is right on spot.

Oh, my second favorite quote is also from him I had no idea

"One cannot live in society and be free from society."

Don't be a cunt!

Rationality is not a character trait, it's a process. If you fool yourself into believing that you're rational by default, you open yourself up to the most irrational thinking.

::: spoiler References

• Type: Comment. Author: "@The8BitPianist". Publisher [Type: Post (Video). Title: "On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse". Author: "Veritasium" ("@veritasium"). Publisher: YouTube. Published: 2024-11-04T16:48:03Z. URI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno.]. Published: 2024-11-04T09:06:26Z. Accessed: 2025-03-29T07:48Z. URI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno&lc=Ugy6vV7Z3EeFHkdfbHl4AaABAg. :::

"If you're out to get the honey, then you don't go killin' all the bees" - Joe Strummer

Your favourite restaurant will end before you do

“A Splendid Torch” by George Bernard Shaw

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

"Sometimes, at the end of a sentence, I come out with completely the wrong fusebox. The problem with using the wrong words is a. that I don't always notice, and b. orange water gibbon bucket of plaster."

I think of this often and have to say we can all learn something from it.

[Note to add: it's a throwaway line from Monty Python sketch. Second note to add: TheWrongFusebox was my reddit username for 15 or so years.]

nihil novum sub sole

Never make yourself a priority to someone that treats you like an option.

It's not particularly wise, but it's definitely my all time favorite.

"You knew the job was dangerous when you took it."

Almost always applicable.

A couple from a co-worker:

If you don't have time to do it correctly now, what makes you think you will have time to fix it later.

Remember, you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.

And a couple from my grandmother:

Don't study drunk, but if you do at least be a little tipsy when you take the test.

Don't do anything to your car to make it stand it to the police.

That's a round down range, can't pull it back

•"You are what you consume" •"Surround yourself and be around people who you want to be like" •"Behave with others just like you want to be behaved with"

Here's a few from my time in the service:

"An okay plan applied immediately and vigorously is way better than a perfect plan ten minutes too late."

"Are you willing to do it? No? Then don't ask your troops to do it."

"In the event that signals can neither be seen nor clearly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he puts his ship alongside that of an enemy."

We must imagine Sisyphus as happy

I won't break it down, plenty of people have done that already. It's one of those sorta zen points that's both almost trivial and very difficult to understand

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Carl Sagan

also

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

Not sure it's a quote from anywhere in particular but

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

"There is no healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous: all that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?" - Nahum 3:19

I'm not religious by the way

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

• The Summer Day, Mary Oliver

It can apply in so many instances.

If idioms count then my favorite is this one:

"I see," said the blind man to his deaf wife over the phone.

My father would always say that to me growing up if i took too long to explain something 😅

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

Nathaniel Borenstein.

I can't post the whole Qur'an (and, as a message from the Divine, it's hard to call it "wisdom", it's a bit more uhh axiomatic than that), and I won't post the entirety of Ecclesiastes (but if you're in a moment of existential questioning, I think reading it would be very helpful!), but I will post a passage from the NT, Matthew 25-34, because it might be useful to some of you as it has been to me (and my somewhat anxious wife likes it too!).

"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

All form is interpretation

"Never pass up the opportunity to keep your mouth shut."

-- Canopyflyer's Mother circa 1982

!quotes@lemmy.ca

"Work smarter, not harder." - Scrooge McDuck