• @electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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    291 year ago

    The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

    Anatole France

  • @ikidd@lemmy.world
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    81 year ago

    If they gave Jerry Falwell’s corpse an enema, they could bury him in a matchbox.

    Christopher Hitchens

  • The willow knows what the storm does not: that the power to endure harm outlives the power to inflict it.

    From the Magic: The Gathering card “Blood of the Martyr”

    • @intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      61 year ago

      Oi oi oi. Me gotta hurt in here. Me smell a ting is near. Gonna bosh, and gonna nosh, and then the ting will disappear.

      — Uthden Troll

  • @Unmapped@lemmy.ml
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    171 year ago

    “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”

    • H.G. Wells
  • @boatswain@infosec.pub
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    131 year ago

    “To know which questions are unanswerable, and to not answer them: this is the skill that is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

    • Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
  • Melllvar
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    141 year ago

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

    -Paarthurnax

  • Dessalines
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    81 year ago

    Life is a comedy to those who think, but a tragedy to those who feel.

    • Horace Walpole
  • @kromem@lemmy.world
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    121 year ago

    I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks he knows. I neither know nor think I know.

    • Socrates
  • @fjordbasa@lemmy.world
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    131 year ago

    ”A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.” Alan Watts

    I think it’s just a reminder of the pointlessness of overthinking. I find it poignant because I spend a lot of time lost in rumination, myself

    • @intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      41 year ago

      Alan Watts is so fun. He used words like that monk lady in the marvel movies that slaps people out of their bodies.

      He’s masterful with words. So masterful he makes it look easy.

      So many teachers like “beyond this point words fail”, and they’ve got a good point, but Watts goes “let me give it a shot” and then conveys things in words that can take years to grasp through the brute force method of direct perception.

      People shit on words, and with very good reason, but they are the chutes and ladders that make enlightenment in a single lifetime possible if one’s lucky enough to have a teacher like Watts.

      • @uhmbah@lemmy.ca
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        31 year ago

        Yes!

        “Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.” Alan Watts

  • TTH4P
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    181 year ago

    The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

    • @FederatedSaint@lemmy.world
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      101 year ago

      When working on an office, it’s great and all that you have “the power of accurate observation” but god our Debbie downer is insufferable.

    • @starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      141 year ago

      Haha but really my favorite quote is

      Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

      Really helps me feel better about the fact that I’m a 28 year old man who exclusively watches anime

  • slazer2au
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    171 year ago

    This too shall pass.

    No matter how good or bad your life is, there will ways be change.

    • Call me Lenny/Leni
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      71 year ago

      That works both ways though. Even the fable where the quote originated had that as a takeaway.

        • Call me Lenny/Leni
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          31 year ago

          I mean the “this too shall pass” part. When people say the quote, usually it’s the kind of person who sees the negative treated differently than they treat the positive.

      • slazer2au
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        21 year ago

        I’m paraphrasing but it was something along the lines of

        ‘Something that will make me sad when I am happy and happy when I am sad’

        • The story goes, or the way that I was told, there was a king that always felt too high and then he felt too low. And so he called all his wise men to the hall, and he begged them for a gift to end the rises and the falls. But here’s the thing—they came back with a ring. It was simple, and was plainly unbefitting of a king, and engraved in black—well it had no front or back, but there were words around the band that said “just know this too shall pass.”