There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. — Alfred Korzybski
EppsNet Archive: Quotations
This Is How I Avenged Myself
O crowd, whose love I coveted until the day of my death, this is how I avenged myself for your indifference: I let you buzz all around me, without hearing you. My attitude may be compared to that of Aeschylus’ Prometheus toward his tormentors. Did you think you could chain me to the rock of your triviality, of your agitations over the inconsequential? — Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner Read more →
The market for something to believe in is infinite. — Hugh MacLeod
I’ll Lead
I’m not sure where I’m going. I’ll lead! — Emmanuelle Heyman Read more →
An Irrevocable Diameter
I was just tangent to the Great Circle of Life, of which I am one irrevocable diameter. — Grace Paley, “An Irrevocable Diameter” Read more →
Patience
Patience with others is Love, Patience with self is Hope, Patience with God is Faith. — Adel Bestavros Read more →
How to Be a Genius
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” — Richard Feynman Read more →
Ask for Help
Asking in time of trouble means you waited too long to ask for help. Ask for help when you are doing well. — Jim and Michele McCarthy Read more →
What Everyone Says in a Book
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 →
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 →