Ask HN: Quotes that made a difference in your life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Quotes that made a difference in your life?

16 pointsgalfarragem29 comments

Some quotes are distilled wisdom. I really like:

"You can't be a prophet in your homeland"

What quotes are you always recalling?

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Beat me to it.

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

-Robert A. Heinlein

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”

- Marcus Aurelius -

A long time ago I was having lunch near Joshua Tree with a climber I really respected. A little note fell out of his wallet when he went to pay:

    Work hard.
    Be strong.
    Don't complain.

He said his grandfather told him those three things when he was young, and that advice always stayed with him.

Keeping a few supporting words in your wallet sounds really nice.

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” - Dr. Seuss

"The root of all of our problems is our inability to let go" Leo Babauta

"Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty."

-John Muir

"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming." John Wooden

"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

C.S. Lewis

I like videogames. And comics and cartoons and star wars and giant robots. And no, I'm not ashamed of it! :)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. - Robert Frost

My teacher always said this in class when I was in school. He just changed my life. Whenever I'm tired or sad or depressed, I remember this poem.

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”

“A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.”

Both from Isabelle Eberhardt.

"I don't want you to save me. I want you to stand beside me as I save myself" - Soften The Fuck Up, an Australian campaign to make it easier for me to seek help than to die by suicide.

"Do. Or do not. There is no try." --Yoda

An excerpt from the article 'The Moral Bucket List':

"In the realm of the intellect, a person of character has achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things. In the realm of emotion, she is embedded in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, she is committed to tasks that can’t be completed in a single lifetime."

This one had an impact on me, it kind of explains why we're here:

- "I was an unknown treasure and I desired to be known so I created the universe and the creatures to know Me." - God

I repeat myself these two often:

- A man who wants something will find a way a man who doesn t will find an excuse quote.

- Nothing is ever gained, nothing is ever lost.

“When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.” – H. L. Mencken, Baltimore- Evening Sun, June 12, 1922

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." --Gandhi

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

― Dr. Seuss

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." --Stephen Jay Gould

"It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy" - Jobs

“I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” -Mewtwo, from Pokemon: The First Movie

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristoteles

Half the Truth is often a great Lie.

i am either part of the solution or part of the problem

It takes an entire village to raise kids.

programmers don't byte, they just nibble a bit

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