Lex Javier > Lex's Quotes

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“ARTIFICIALLY-INDUCED INTELLIGENCE DETERIORATES AT A RATE OF TIME DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE QUANTITY OF THE INCREASE.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”
― Meister Eckhart

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. ”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny.

The lizard brain only wants to eat and be safe.

The lizard brain will fight (to the death) if it has to, but would rather run away. It likes a vendetta and has no trouble getting angry.

The lizard brain cares what everyone else thinks, because status in the tribe is essential to its survival.

A squirrel runs around looking for nuts, hiding from foxes, listening for predators, and watching for other squirrels. The squirrel does this because that's all it can do. All the squirrel has is a lizard brain.

The only correct answer to 'Why did the chicken cross the road?' is 'Because it's lizard brain told it to.' Wild animals are wild because the only brain they posses is a lizard brain.

The lizard brain is not merely a concept. It's real, and it's living on the top of your spine, fighting for your survival. But, of course, survival and success are not the same thing.

The lizard brain is the reason you're afraid, the reason you don't do all the art you can, the reason you don't ship when you can. The lizard brain is the source of the resistance.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“The morning always has a way of creeping up on me and peeking in my bedroom windows. The sunrise is such a pervert.”
― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

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

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
― Albert Einstein

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
― Alan Greenspan

“Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself. ”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

“A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage. The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.”
― Dale Breckenridge Carnegie, The Art of Public Speaking

“Why should things be easy to understand?”
― Thomas Pynchon

“If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures.”
― Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts