Darya M > Darya's Quotes

“What we do now echoes in eternity.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“In the military we always say we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training,”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“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

“I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk has masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?

Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.

It will keep the vultures at bay.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“The fact that people tend to respond to costs and rewards is an essential element of forecasting. You can say with a high degree of confidence that if you drop a hundred-dollar bill on the street, someone will soon pick it up, whether you are in New York, Mexico City, or Moscow. This is not as trivial as it seems. It shows why the clever people who say that forecasting is impossible are wrong. Any forecast that accurately anticipates the impact of incentives on behavior is likely to be broadly correct. And the greater the anticipated change in costs and rewards, the less trivial the implied forecast is likely to be.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“the most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.”
― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

“Waiting for the 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute.”
― Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

“Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Silence is where we learn to be at peace with ourselves, where we learn the truth about who we are and what we want. If you’re not sure what you want, there’s no faster way to find out than to enter into complete silence for an extended period of time—not hours, but days.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Regrets are illuminations come too late.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say “yes” to life: “yea” to it all.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)”
― Montaigne

“Every movement reveals us.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“We need a miracle to get out of here. And miracles are real; they have happened to me before. Unconditional love, for example, or solidarity, or courageous collective action. Miracles always happen at the right moment in the lives of those with a childlike faith in the triumph of truth over falsehood, of those who believe in mutual aid and live in keeping with the gift economy. You cannot buy the revolution, you can only be the revolution.”
― Nadya Tolokonnikova, Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism

“Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Czasy secondhand. Koniec czerwonego człowieka

“In the deepest sense of the word, a friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself.”
― Adam M. Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

“as consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.”
― Seth Godin, Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” David Packard”
― Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

“Integrity is when our words and deeds are consistent with our intentions.”
― Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last Deluxe: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but
when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is
wrong.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“The comprehensive fact, however, is that nothing in Universe touches anything else.
There are no solids. There are, in fact, no things. There are only complex critical-proximity and frequency, unique event aggregates interoperative in pure principle.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants

“We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller