Nimesh De Silva > Nimesh's Quotes

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” That is the voice of authenticity. “Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else.” That is the voice of inauthenticity.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“We’ll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated: Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. But here’s the rub: sometimes, when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally. Why? Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values…If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it’s time to examine your values. It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice–it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“If you can't understand why someone is doing something, look at the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, and then infer the motivations from their consequences.

For example if someone is making everyone around them miserable and you'd like to know why, their motive may simply be to make everyone around them miserable including themselves.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“Alone, trying to calm down, we would each ask ourselves the same single question: What had we each done to contribute to the situation we were arguing about? However small, however distant … we had each made some error. Then we would reunite, and share the results of our questioning: Here’s how I was wrong ….
The problem with asking yourself such a question is that you must truly want the answer. And the problem with doing that is that you won’t like the
answer. When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right, and you want the other person to be wrong. Then it’s them that has to sacrifice something and change, not you, and that’s much preferable. If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change, then you have to reconsider yourself—your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present, and your plans for the future. Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that. Then you actually have to do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice, to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual. It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain wilfully blind.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“What shall I do with my parents? Act such that your actions justify the suffering they endured. To act to justify the suffering of your parents is to remember all the sacrifices that all the others who lived before you (not least your parents) have made for you in all the course of the terrible past, to be grateful for all the progress that has been thereby made, and then to act in accordance with that remembrance & gratitude. People sacrificed immensely to bring about what we have now. In many cases, they literally died for it - & we should act with some respect for that fact.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“That's an interesting point,' said Adrian, 'in the sense of not being interesting at all.”
― Stephen Fry, The Liar

“Books are not holy relics,' Trefusis had said. 'Words may be my religion, but when it comes to worship, I am very low church. The temples and the graven images are of no interest to me. The superstitious mammetry of a bourgeois obsession for books is severely annoying. Think how many children are put off reading by prissy little people ticking them off whenever they turn a page carelessly. The world is so fond of saying that book s should be "treated with respect". But when are we told that _words_ should be treated with respect? From our earliest years we are taught to revere only the outward and visible. Ghastly literary types maundering on about books as "objects"...”
― Stephen Fry, The Liar

“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.”
― Charles Dickens (David Copperfield), David Copperfield

“I have often remarked—I suppose everybody has- that one's going away from a familiar place, would seem to be the signal for change in it.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“The trick of being a good guest is never to ask any questions about the composition of the household. Hosts, even the grandest, are nervous creatures and interpret curiosity as evidence of dissatisfaction.”
― Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus

“Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.”
― Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus

“Civilisation, after all, is not an attitude of mind, it is an attribute of wealth”
― Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus

“And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo's head, drowned in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam's brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master's breast. Peace was in both their faces.
Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee--but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”
― Stephen King, It

“For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first. ”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

“He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful. It was this knowledge that prevented the Don from losing the humility all his friends admired in him.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather

“All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”
― Isak Dinesen

“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”
― Aurthur Conan Doyle

“…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.”
― Mark Twain

“The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express

“People the world over turn to religion for salvation. But when religion hurts and maims, where are they to go for salvation?”
― Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril,”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.”
― Herman Melville

“The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of truer metal and bear the stamp of Heaven.”
― Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop