It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book. — Friedrich Nietzsche Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Quotations
Be Yourself!
The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: “Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you.” . . . — Friedrich Nietzsche Read more →
This Instant Right Now
The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Read more →
Painting Your Masterpiece
If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you. — Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball Read more →
Offer What You Have
Offer what you have, disclosing what you feel and think, connecting only with those who do likewise. — Jim and Michele McCarthy, Software for Your Head Read more →
The Best Years of Your Life
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. — Albert Ellis Read more →
Ask for Help
This is the first, and most important, lesson of teams: ask for help. So we live by this lesson. If they don’t ask us for help, they never learn who we are and what we have to give. It can be frustrating for us, and hard for them, but not as frustrating and hard for both as us wasting ourselves upon people who do not want what we urge upon them. — Jim McCarthy Read more →
EppsNet at the Movies: Tender Mercies
I don’t know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk, and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out, marry me. Why? Why did that happen? Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny’s Daddy died in the war, my daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why? See, I don’t trust happiness. I never did; I never will. — Mac Sledge Read more →
Design Questions
How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? — Professor Bernardo de la Paz Read more →
Pick Your Battles
We live in a fallen universe. We can at least be kind to one another and not jump on one another’s slightest errors or moods. In a desperate situation, pick your battles. — Jonathan Lethem Read more →
The Final Belief
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. — Wallace Stevens Read more →
Middle Management
In most failing projects, there are a few people at the top of the organization who think they are in trouble, lots of people at the bottom who know they are in trouble, and a bunch of worried middle managers trying to keep those at the top from talking to those at the bottom. — Ken Orr Read more →
We All Keep Going
It just seems so amazing and wonderful and, well, a miracle, but I guess it’s just ordinary life, how we all keep going, isn’t it? — Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys Read more →
Crime and Showbiz
I do think that crime and show business have never been more closely aligned. I don’t know if there has ever been a time where criminal arrests are worth as much in terms of $$ as going on a publicity tour or being in a movie. — Merrill Markoe Read more →
Twitter: 2010-09-18
USC earns top polls among “College Bests” | Daily Trojan http://goo.gl/cAAV # The only limits are, as always, those of vision. — James Broughton # Read more →
What You Might Be
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspaper that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. — Joseph Campbell Read more →
Twitter: 2010-09-11
RT @kausmickey: Once again troubled by possibility that LA Times might not collapse & vanish quickly enough to enable vibrant civic culture. # Overheard: "Therein lies the rub." # Read more →
Goodbye to All That
I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it. — Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That” Read more →
Nice Guys Finish Last
You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist. But nice guys end last, is what Leo Durocher said. If you want to lead a nice happy life with a lot of recreation and everything else, you’ll lead a nice life. — Richard Hamming Read more →
How Much Information Do You Really Need?
On the web there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need. But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There’s very little advice right now to tell people that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit. — Merlin Mann Read more →