Ethan > Ethan's Quotes

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
― Lao Tzu

“As long as we lean on anything outside ourselves for support, we are going to be insecure. Most of us try to find support by leaning on all sorts of things - gold, books, learning, sensory stimulation - and if these things are taken away, we fall over. To the extent that we are dependent on these external supports, we grow weaker and more liable to upsets and misfortune.”
― Eknath Easwaran, The End of Sorrow

“Anything that tends to make us elated is inevitably going to throw us into depression.”
― Eknath Easwaran, The End of Sorrow

“[...]one should act as if the things he cherished the most were already lost or broken.”
― H.J. Brues, Yakuza Pride

“poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, Selected Poetry

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to
succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Love moderately. Long love doth so.
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

*Love each other in moderation. That is the key to long-lasting love. Too fast is as bad as too slow.*”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
― William Shakespeare, The Sonnets

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“In stage four, once again they’re crowded around me—but this time it’s to tell me what stocks I should buy. Even the dentist has three or four tips, and in the next few days I look up his recommendations in the newspaper and they’ve all gone up. When the neighbors tell me what to buy and then I wish I had taken their advice, it’s a sure sign that the market has reached a top and is due for a tumble.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“While catching up on the news is merely depressing to the citizen who has no stocks, it is a dangerous habit for the investor.”
― Peter Lynch, Beating the Street

“I’m always on the lookout for great companies in lousy industries. A great industry that’s growing fast, such as computers or medical technology, attracts too much attention and too many competitors.”
― Peter Lynch, Beating the Street

“If you find a stock with little or no institutional ownership, you’ve found a potential winner. Find a company that no analyst has ever visited, or that no analyst would admit to knowing about, and you’ve got a double winner. When I talk to a company that tells me the last analyst showed up three years ago, I can hardly contain my enthusiasm. It frequently happens with banks, savings-and-loans, and insurance companies, since there are thousands of these and Wall Street only keeps up with fifty to one hundred.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“A technique that works repeatedly is to wait until the prevailing opinion about a certain industry is that things have gone from bad to worse, and then buy shares in the strongest companies in the group.”
― Peter Lynch, Beating the Street

“Moderately fast growers (20 to 25 percent) in nongrowth industries are ideal investments. • Look for companies with niches. • When purchasing depressed stocks in troubled companies, seek out the ones with the superior financial positions and avoid the ones with loads of bank debt. • Companies that have no debt can’t go bankrupt. • Managerial ability may be important, but it’s quite difficult to assess. Base your purchases on the company’s prospects, not on the president’s resume or speaking ability. • A lot of money can be made when a troubled company turns around. • Carefully consider the price-earnings ratio. If the stock is grossly overpriced, even if everything else goes right, you won’t make any money. • Find a story line to follow as a way of monitoring a company’s progress. • Look for companies that consistently buy back their own shares.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market

“If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings—assuming the company in question has earnings. As you’ll see in this text, I subscribe to the crusty notion that sooner or later earnings make or break an investment in equities. What the stock price does today, tomorrow, or next week is only a distraction.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“It takes remarkable patience to hold on to a stock in a company that excites you, but which everybody else seems to ignore. You begin to think everybody else is right and you are wrong. But where the fundamentals are promising, patience is often rewarded—Lukens stock went up sixfold in the fifteenth year, American Greetings was a sixbagger in six years, Angelica a sevenbagger in four, Brunswick a sixbagger in five, and SmithKline a threebagger in two.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“The stock is selling at a p/e of 30, while the most optimistic projections of earnings growth are 15–20 percent for the next two years.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“Look for small companies that are already profitable and have proven that their concept can be replicated. • Be suspicious of companies with growth rates of 50 to 100 percent a year.”
― Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
― Sun-Tzu, A Arte da Guerra

“There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War