Quotes | Wanderings

Brent's Favorites

I want to become the kind of person my dog thinks I am.
~ Unknown

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
~ Nadia Boulanger

The past is history, the future a mystery, and the present a precious gift, hence the name.

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
~ Mother Teresa

I would read stuff in scholarly texts and know they were wrong. Living in Haiti, I realized that a minor error in one setting of power and privilege could have an enormous impact on the poor in another.
~ Paul Farmer to Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains, p 78

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light. but rather because its opponents eventually die, and new generation grow up that is familiar with it (the new scientific truth.
~ Max Plank

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
~ J. Robert Oppenheimer (Life, Oct. 10, 1949)

A child's feeling of self-esteem is centered on the experience for which he/she is noticed most intently.
~ Howard Glasser

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.
~ Exodus 23:2

People will believe the most outrageous of lies once the truth is removed from consideration.
~ Frank Peretti, from Piercing the Darkness

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile, and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep.
~ Hunter S. Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt, 1979

'Now' is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. You don�t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.
~ Barbara Sher

Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.
~ Thomas J. Watson

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty.
~ Winston Churchill

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
~ Mark Twain

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you are playing by the rules.
~ Paul Arden

In modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.
~ Jonathan Glover

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
~ Mother Teresa

A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but someone who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs.
~ Robert Townsend

Perfection is the enemy of the good.
~ Gustave Flaubert

Insanity in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
~ Nietzsche

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
~ Scottish proverb

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
~ Plato

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
~ Thomas Mann

Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
~ Nietzsche

Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen Roberts

You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.
~ [Usenet]

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
~ Satchel Paige

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
~ Gene Roddenberry

I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
~ Oscar Wilde

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
~ Abraham Lincoln

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.
~ Larry Wall, Creator of Perl

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
~ Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

When all else fails, men turn to reason.
~ Abba Eban

Play is the highest form of research.
~ Albert Einstein

The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.
~ George Bernard Shaw

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Look to the origin of your effort, not the results
~ Shunryu Suzuki

It's good to have the things money can buy provided we do not lose the things money cannot buy.
~ W. Wiersbe

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
~ unknown

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
~ Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Don't worry about avoiding temptation! As you grow old, it starts avoiding you!
~ Unknown

Most problems are created not by circumstances but by a particular perception of them.
~ Edward de Bono

The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Failure is never permanent.
~ unknown

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality.
~ Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.
~ Author Unknown

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others
~ Vincent Van Gogh

Adolescents sense a secret, unique greatness in themselves that seeks expression. They gesture toward the heart when trying to express any of this, a significant clue to the whole affair.
~ Joseph Chilton Pearce, Evolution's End

I don't develop; I am.
~ Pablo Picasso

One always learns one's mystery at the price of one's innocence.
~ Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
~ C. G. Jung

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that passed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
~ Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow.
~ James Hillman, The Soul's Code

Death is an enemy because we have too much unlived life within us.
~ W.D. Norwood paraphrase of Norman O. Brown sentiment

Start before you are ready
~ Robert Zuckerman book Kindsight

It is not enough to add years to one's life, one must also add life to those years.
~JFK

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

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
~ Carl Bard

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
~ Peter Drucker

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
~ Albert Schweitzer

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
~ Eric Hoffer

You make a living by what you get; you make a life by what you give.
~ Winston Churchill (attribution disputed)

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
~ Thomas A. Edison

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
~ Blaise Pascal

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
~ Soren Kierkegaard

The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.
~ Robert Jackson

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.
~ Larry Wall, Creator of Perl

The desire to protect ourselves is what stands in our way of being fully able to respond.
~ Patrick Cassidy

If I had only a year left to live, how would I live it? A day?

Common sense is a set of prejudice you accumulate (until the age of 18)
~ Paraphrased from Albert Einstein

The trouble with so many of us is that we have sought directions, answers, values, and beliefs from the important people in our world. Rather than trusting ourselves to search within and find our own answers to the conflicts in our life, we sell out by becoming what others expect of us. Our being becomes rooted in their expectations, and we become strangers to ourselves.
~ Gerald Corey, Theory and Practice of Counseling & Psychotherapy

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
~ H. L. Mencken, Minority Report (1956)

Effectiveness without values is a tool without a purpose.
~ Edward de Bono

Perception is real even when it is not reality.
~ Edward de Bono

If you never change your mind, why have one?
~ Edward de Bono

Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends.
~ Czech Proverb

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Fun is the process of discovering areas in a possibility space.
~ Will Wright

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.
~ Will Cuppy

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.
~ Douglas Adams, Last Chance To See...

To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All models are wrong; some models are useful.
~ George Box

Ye have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Snowmen fall from Heaven, unassembled.
~ Unknown

Grant me the Serenity to prioritize things I cannot delegate, the Courage to say No when I need to, and the Wisdom to know when to go home.
~ Unknown

Your question is [your quest]. No questions -- no journey. Timid questions -- timid trips. Radical questions -- an expedition to the root of your being. Bon voyage.
~ Sam Keen

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
~ Mark Twain

If someone wrote a book about your life, would anyone want to read it?
~ From Ad for U.S. Army

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We must love them both, those with whom we agree, and those with whom we disagree. For both have labored in the search of truth, and both have helped in the finding of it.
~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.
~ R.E. Shay

One saggy boob said to the other saggy boob: "If we don't get some support soon, people will think we're nuts."

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
~ French Poet, Paul Valery

To find your true self, you need to cultivate your eccentricities.
~ paraphrased from James Hillman (Jungian Psychologist)

To live in the hearts we leave behind, is not to die.
~ Thomas Campbell

Treasure Trove

One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, three or more is a congress.
~ John Quincy Adams

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
~ Bertrand Russell

People travel to faraway places to watch in fascination the kind of people they ignore at home.
~ Dagobert D. Runes

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
~ Edgar Allen Poe

Make stupidity your most redeeming quality.
~ Walter Hamady (either said himself or quoted someone else.)

He who dies with the most stuff ... obviously didn't have enough hit points.
~ Dave

No place is so strongly fortified that money could not capture it.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
~ James Joyce

Love is what is left in a relationship after all the selfishness is taken out.
~ Nick Richardson

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
~ John Gardner

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
~ Arthur C. Clarke (Clarkes' First Law)

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves
~Rilke

I had the self identity of your average mollusk
~ Tony Hendra (in interview w/ Terri Gross)

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
~ Woody Allen

Not all who wander are lost
~ J.R.R. Tolkien

A fool and his money are soon parted.
~ Some Poor Fool

I can't get no satisfaction.
~ Mick

Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.
~ James Bryant Conant

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
~ Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953)

You are the wind beneath my cheeks. ~ Induhvidual in Dilbert Newsetter

All's fair in horseshoes and hand-grenades. ~ Induhvidual in Dilbert Newsletter

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. ~ William Faulkner

In Science, truths are cummulative; In Business, truths are ephemeral. ~ Chris Rigatuso

An enemy is one whose story we have not heard. ~ Gene Knudsen Hoffman

God gave us two ears and only one mouth, that we should listen twice as much as we speak ~ Proverb

It's very interesting when you think about it, the slaves who left here to go to America, because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom, helped change America. ~ George W. Bush, Dakar, Senegal, July 8, 2003

It takes nine months to make a baby, no matter how many women you throw at the project. ~ Unknown

In the beginner's mind there are many possiblilities, but in the expert's there are few. ~ Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

What I cannot create, I do not understand. ~ Richard Feynman - found on his office blackboard after his death

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. ~ Umberto Eco

If we can reduce using a tool to habit then we no longer need to think about the tool and can concentrate on the task. ~ Jef Raskin

I married my wife for her looks... but not the ones she's been giving me, lately! ~ Anonymous

Every time I walk into a singles bar, I can hear Mom's wise words: "Don't pick that up, you don't know where it's been!" ~ Momma's Boy

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. ~ Rilke

Please remember that law is the wise restraint that make men free. ~ Creed of Harvard Law Graduates

Homer Simpson

My favorite color is chocolate. ~ Homer Simpson

The hardest thing I've had to face as a father was burying my own child. He climbed back out, but it still hurts. ~ Homer Simpson

I love natural disasters because we're allowed to get out of work. ~ Homer Simpson

Be generous in the bedroom -- share your sandwich. ~ Homer Simpson

The office is no place for off-color remarks or offensive jokes. That's why I never go there. ~ Homer Simpson

Phunny

The skirt is like the perfect essay, long enough to cover the main subject, but short enough to be interesting. ~ Unknown

In God we trust. All others pay cash.

Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again...

I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.

How about never? Is never good for you?

I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.

I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

I don't work here. I'm a consultant.

It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.

I can see your point, but I still think you're full of shit.

You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.

I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.

I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.

Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.

What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?

You sound reasonable...Time to up the medication.

Who me? I just wander from room to room

And your crybaby whiny-butt opinion would be...?

This isn't an office. It's Hell with fluorescent lighting

Does your train of thought have a caboose?

Not all men are annoying. Some are dead.

Shhhh! I'm trying to imagine you with a personality.

A cubicle is just a padded cell without a door.

Too many freaks, not enough circuses.

Nice perfume. Must you marinate in it?

Sarcasm is just one more service we offer.

Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

Don't believe everything you think.

I don't know what your problem is, but I'm sure it's hard to pronounce.

If you have something to say, raise your hand and put it over your mouth.

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Brent's Quotes

As an employee, I am a gollum-like character who incessantly talks WITH himself and treats deadlines like an Italian driver treats streetlights — as only suggestions. Viva Italiano, My Precious! ~ Brent Zupp

In my experience, I don't have a lot of confidence in a life after death or in a God as can be conceived in human consciousness. But, then, my experience is shallow, small, and pale. My experience is of my Self, which is my God, and it is in this admitted ignorance that I find my hope. ~ Brent Zupp

Why put off until tomorrow, what you can do the next day? ~ Brent Zupp

Why put off until tomorrow, what you can do next week? ~ Brent Zupp

...but chaos is stimulating, provocative, if only to strengthen our resolve to create order. ~ Brent Zupp

I love you my little Boo-Bah. You've come so far in the past year. Soon you'll be talking in all English and no Klingon. ~ Brent Zupp--16 Sept 1998

Are you gonna spend what’s left of your life sitting in a goddamn cube, cutting and pasting text into a spreadsheet? ~ Brent Zupp

Do I look like someone who spends a lot of time considering how I look? ~ Brent Zupp

We all live in an anal-sphincter-ine. ~ Brent Zupp