Two quotes/ statements from a book named “The Midnight Library” ;
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“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”.
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“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”.
Regarding the former: I’m autistic and have a lot of experiences telling me that I should hide parts of myself from others to be acceptable. It doesn’t work. It’s better for one-off social interactions, and I should rein in my info-dumping in some scenarios, but it’s easier to make better friends if I just share myself with others.
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Bill Nye: “Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t”
Hurt people hurt people.
“If it weren’t for my horse, I would’ve never spent that year in college.”
I don’t know what it means, but it has changed my life.
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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.
Whenever you are killing time, time is also killing you
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
“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.
The expression is usually meant to limit speech and ambition.
I don’t take it that way at all.
I’ve never heard it stated in that manner either, only as a way to make it clear that one should stand up for themselves.
“Know your PLACE” absolutely has the negative connotation though.
Housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment.
Variation of this: Poor people rent, that’s how they stay poor.
“Everyone has what they deserve”
So if a truck hits you, you deserved it? If you get robbed, you deserve it? If you’re born in the middle of a war you deserved it? A child that dies of cancer deserved it?
My dad was honored for helping out massive number of people during his short life and died while trying to beat leukemia. He did not deserve that.
So profound, that the Nazis used it to decorate a concentration camp gate with it
Utterly backwards.
This thinking actually leads to Elon Musk worship and the dehumanization (and eventual massacre) of poor people.
This is what the most depraved sociopaths believe. They constantly repeat this lie to themselves to excuse themselves for utterly monstrous deeds.
“It can be two things”
What is better: to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
Does it even matter if you wind up being a good person either way?
Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in faith and in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
–Stanley Kubrick, responding to the question “If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?” in a 1968 Playboy interview.
It a saying from Ubuntu (the philosophy not the operating system) “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” in English it’s “I am because you are” It’s a simple and concrete way of saying how we’re not judged by how we treat others but we are who we are through our interactions with others.
Honestly I’ve only browsed through a bit of philosophy and I’m sure I missing a heap but it really struck me.
