Some Quotes for February 2024 (#22)
Daniel Chambliss, Richard Feynman, James Baldwin, William James, Benjamin Graham, Marilynne Robinson, Seneca, Barack Obama, Confucius
Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I was able to track down on the internet. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)
From “The Mundanity of Excellence”: Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence. –Daniel Chambliss
What I cannot create, I do not understand. –Richard Feynman
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened a hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important. –James Baldwin
New conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively unstable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys—selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort. –William James
Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it. –proverb
In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it is a weighing machine. –Benjamin Graham
From Gilead: I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment. –Marilynne Robinson
There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality…What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come. –Seneca
If folks want to pop off and have opinions about what they think they would do: present a specific plan. –Barack Obama
Wherever you go, there you are. –Confucius