Brian Young > Brian's Quotes

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#1

“People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

tags: death, guilt, selfishness, suffering, suicide

1360 likes

#2

“Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.”
― James Thurber

tags: boys, men

70 likes

#3

“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we
imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

tags: inspirational

548 likes

#4

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: life, science, wisdom

13967 likes

#5

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: humor, writing

2368 likes

#6

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
― Isaac Asimov

tags: humor

925 likes

#7

“Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me what makes skies so blue,
And I'll tell you why I love you.

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you. ”
― Isaac Asimov

680 likes

#8

“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”
― Isaac Asimov, Roving Mind

tags: belief, bible, bitter, childish, childish-beliefs, guide, guides, home, ignorance, ignore, imagine, invade, leader, leaders, library, resentment, school, science, shame, the-bible, thought, uneducated, unimaginative, unthinking, writing

547 likes

#9

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

83 likes

#10

“You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

tags: depression, human

1145 likes

#11

“I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: "He is nothing but a boy -- a little boy!”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

tags: atonement, empathy, laughing, parenting, suffer, suffering, understanding

9 likes

#12

“What a long strange trip it's been.”
― Jerry Garcia

1426 likes

#13

“One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”
― Dale Carnegie

tags: life, living

190 likes

#14

“It has always seemed that a fear of judgment is the mark of guilt and the burden of insecurity.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

tags: afraid, being-strong, burden, discernment, fear, guilt, insecure, insecurity, judgment, secrecy, secure, security, strength, strength-and-courage, strength-of-character, uncertainty

174 likes

#15

“Sometimes carrying the burden of an upsetting truth, and hiding it, is actually a gift you give to someone else. You bear that burden, so they don’t have to, in a situation where telling them will change nothing.”
― Cassandra Clare

tags: burden, care, honesty, love, moral, morality, morals, secret

105 likes

#17

“By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

tags: cause, cause-and-effect, compassion, empathy, happiness, interest, point-of-view, sympathy

22 likes

#18

“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

tags: greatness

3730 likes

#19

“As the Readers’s Digest once said: ‘Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

12 likes

#20

“Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.”
― Dale Carnegie, How To Stop Worrying & Start Living

31 likes

#21

“If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

tags: commitment

837 likes

#22

“Fear is a matter of misplaced attention. Focus on redirecting it.”
― Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

tags: positive-motivation

12 likes

#23

“If something is not to your liking, change your liking.”
― Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

tags: adaptability

10 likes

#24

“Insecurity is normal. Count on it.”
― Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up

tags: empowering

5 likes

#25

“Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.”
― Maya Angelou

41 likes

#26

“Reasons aren't really things that make you do other things. Reasons are things that you make up, much later, to reassure everyone that we are all logical and that the world makes sense. We do unreasonable things, because we want to, at the time. No reason. Much later we sit in the wreckage, building reasons out of little bits of wreckage, so we'll have something to show the crash investigators. Look, this is what caused it. So the whole mess at least appears reasonable. So we can convince ourselves that at least there was a reason for the disaster, something we can prevent or avoid, so it'll never happen again. But a lot of the time there's no reason. We just flew it to the ground. Because we felt like it. And we're still dangerous. And it could happen again anytime.
Its easier to live with each other afterwards if we give each other reasons.”
― Julian Gough, Juno & Juliet

tags: reason, reasons

17 likes

#27

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

3687 likes

#28

“Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

tags: labels, manners

1831 likes

#29

“I threw an etiquette party and served nothing but beans and sparkling water. The topic of conversation was ‘excuse me’.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

42 likes

#30

“The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.”
― Fannie Flagg, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

tags: fame, life, manners, truth

44 likes

#31

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

tags: attributed-no-source, be-yourself, gilbert-perreira, honesty, inspirational, misattributed-oscar-wilde, quote-investigator

177231 likes

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