Matt Doelp > Matt's Quotes

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I'll tell you a secret.
Something they don't teach you in your temple.
The Gods envy us.
They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”
― David Benioff

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”
― Steve Jobs

“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”
― St. Augustine

“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan Watts

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But, sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell. - Thorin”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“The great majority of people are “wandering generalities” rather than “meaningful specifics”. The fact is that you can't bit a target that you can't see. If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. You have to have goals.”
― Zig Ziglar

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”
― Zig Ziglar

“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it's there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It's a wave.

And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it's one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it's supposed to be.

The Good Place”
― Chidi

“The twentieth-century linguistic revolution,” says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, “is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language.”
― Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside.”
― Rumi

“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
― Richard Feynman

“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is the product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Now do not misunderstand me, danger is very real, but fear is a choice.”
― Will Smith in the movie 'After Earth'

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau