Ask Lemmy

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

In my language it goes : "Alone you go faster, together you go further".

"It's not your fault, but it is your problem."

I honestly love and repeat this line way too much

Just because you weren't the cause doesn't mean it isn't something you need to worry about/fix. I learned this one from my high school English teacher when a student was late and tried to get out of it by blaming traffic lol. The traffic was not their fault, but it ended up being their problem.

"It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life."

-Captain Jean-Luc Picard

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it

Unfortunately, too many people have been trained to reject ideas or thoughts without first thinking them through. Many simply react to whatever word, expression, or concept triggers them without giving the rest a second thought. For example a brilliant idea can be presented online, but if one word is out of place, the usage of that word will debated instead of the idea.

'Be Kind; Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle'

Sometimes that grumpy old man really is just having a bad day.

There's this quote attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

There are two lessons here. First - the best way to affect meaningful change is to start local. Rather than spending a lot of time agonizing over national politics, get involved in your community - your neighborhood, your town, your apartment building, even just the house you share with your family. Your community will take better care of you and the other people that you care about than any national government ever will.

Second - ultimately the only person whose behavior you can change is your own. Don't be too harsh with other people when they don't behave the way that you believe they should. Be a more stringent judge of your own behavior.

But temper that with this:

Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much. Or berate yourself too much either.

Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Baz Lurhmann

Choosing means losing a little, said by a teacher in highschool when I was struggling to decide what to do after I'd graduate, still remember it 12 years later

Almost every horrific thing that humans engage in stems from fear.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Just because two sides are fighting doesn't mean one side is good (something along this line)

... I don't think it is that profound, but I think about it a lot

There's this quote early in Good Omens: “It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

It's an awkward one these days, but it sounds Pratchett-esque enough to salvage.

Hurt people hurt people.

From "The Good Place": If soulmates do exist, they're not found. They're made.

I believe Seth MacFarlane said something similar in "The Orville".

A great reminder from two great shows.

If the penalty for breaking a law is a fine, that law only exists for poor people.

You can't help people that don't want help.

Goes for people who are going through mental/physical health problems or substance abuse issues. If they don't want help you have to accept that and be there for them when they do.

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Seriously though:

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. — Douglas Adams

When my dad was teaching me how to ride a bike, I kept falling.

He noticed that I was paying so much attention to the road that I couldn't focus on riding the bike.

Finally he picked me up, looked me dead in the eyes and said, "You rule the road. Don't let the road rule you".

Somehow that phrase immediately gave me the ability to ride a bicycle.

I have shared it with other people learning to ride a bicycle after they have fallen down at least once.

It freaking works.

This kind of question always immediately makes me think of something a friend said years ago when I was still a teen. We were talking about school and education and shit and it was on the subject of asking questions when you don't fully understand something and he said "rather ask a stupid question and be a fool for five minutes, then keep your mouth shut and be a fool for the rest of your life." I think it was something that his mother had told him, in their language, so I'm constructing that statement from memory but it was something close to that.

I used to think of myself as a complete pacifist, but these words haven't left my mind since I heard them:

You think you're better than everyone else, but there you stand: the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs and your rigid pacifism crumbles into bloodstained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns.

Of course this only applies to defense, never to offense (especially "preemptive defense"), but I can't really argue against it.

Housing can't be both affordable and a good investment.

"Know your worth."

I've struggled with self-worth my whole life and I'm finally taking a stand for myself both in my professional and personal life. It feels great tbh.

No matter where you go, there you are.

• Buckaroo Banzai

Bill Nye: "Everyone you'll ever meet knows something you don't"

We thought of life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end.

Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played

-- Alan Watts

“Don’t work yourself out if a job.”

My pops told me this after I told him how much more work I had been doing than my coworkers, and how fast I got all of my stuff done. This was like 15 years ago. I immediately started pacing myself, and I’ve since been infinitely less stressed at work.

My Uncle once told me that the most important thing you can learn is where to find more information.

This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Two quotes/ statements from a book named “The Midnight Library” ;

• “If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise”.

• “Never underestimate the big importance of small things”.

"Sometimes, at the end of a sentence, I come out with the wrong fusebox. And the thing about saying the wrong word is a] I don't notice it, and b] sometimes orange water given bucket of plaster."

I think we can all take something away from that.

What is better: to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Used this against my controlling mother, who liked to lay BS at my feet and make me think it was my responsibility to fix. When it was HER that caused the whole thing. The look on her face when I hit her with that phrase and just turned around and left was priceless.

There a LOT of things that are just flat not your problem, even if someone else tries to make it yours.