Sam > Sam's Quotes

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Children are like poems. They're beautiful -- to their creators -- but to others they're just silly and fucking annoying.”
― Doug Stanhope

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Achievement is talent plus preparation”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“the 10,000hr rule is a definite key in success”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It's a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“If you can't joke about the most horrendous things in the world, what's the point of jokes? What's the point in having humor? Humor is to get us over terrible things.”
― Ricky Gervais

“Science is the poetry of reality.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.”
― James Baldwin

“If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Never explain―your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.”
― Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
― M. Scott Peck

“When people complain of your complexity, they fail to remember that they made fun of your simplicity.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

“Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence "I love you".”
― Richard O. Moore, Writing the Silences