How fully can the world be explored if you are also trying not to die? — Amy Fusselman
EppsNet Archive: Quotations
Doing What I Wanted To
I’m just doing what I wanted to and what feels right and not settling for bullshit and it worked. How can they be mad at that? — Janis Joplin View image | gettyimages.com Read more →
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both. — Kierkegaard
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. — Schopenhauer
Bad Luck
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” — Robert Heinlein View image | gettyimages.com Read more →
Gatsby Tattoo
Anything You Want to Be
You’re only as much as you settle for. If they settle for being somebody’s dishwasher that’s their own fucking problem. If you don’t settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you’ll end up anything you want to be. — Janis Joplin, Village Voice, 1970 Read more →
Excellence is never an accident. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. — Aristotle
What is the Way?
his is now my way: where is yours?’ Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way’. For the way – does not exist! — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Read more →
If a Man Neglects Education
If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life. — Plato (@PlatoQuote) July 11, 2014 Read more →
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. — Buddha
As every married person here knows, love is a rotten substitute for respect. — Kurt Vonnegut
Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore. — Kurt Vonnegut
Thinking on Your Feet
I can forgive someone who lies, but if he can’t think on his feet, he has no business representing my interests. If he can’t lie to me, how can I expect him to lie, on my behalf, to the other guy? — David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge Read more →
One man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists. — H.L. Mencken
Lit Quizzes
New additions to the First Lines and Last Lines quizzes: First Lines These notebooks were found among the papers of Antoine Roquentin. One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch’s Ponds. Last Lines The building-yard of the New Station smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain in Bouville. However passionate, sinning, and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep serenely at us with their innocent eyes; they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of “indifferent” nature: they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end. His bruised memory has subsided again and until the next full moon no one will trouble the professor—neither the noseless man who killed Hestas nor the cruel Procurator of Judea, fifth in that office, the knight Pontius Pilate. Read more →
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? — Henry David Thoreau
Miss Marple
Really, I have no gifts — no gifts at all — except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait, but so often justified by subsequent events. — Miss Jane Marple Read more →
Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road. — Jack Kerouac