User:Rnelson

Favorite Songs

• Radiohead - In Rainbows - 15 Step
• OneRepublic - Waking Up - Good Life

Favorite Quotes

• Woody Allen
  • "My parents did not want me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib."
• W. H. Auden
  • "Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?"
  • "How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion for us we could not return? / If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me." (From The More Loving One)
• Marcus Aurelius
  • "When you have been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to yourself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts; for you will have more mastery over the harmony by continually recurring to it." (From Meditations Of Marcus Aurelius)
• Jane Austen
  • "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid." (From Northanger Abbey)
• David Brooks
  • "Highly educated young people are tutored, taught, and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character-building. But without character and courage, nothing else lasts." (From New York Times, November 2004)
• G.K. Chesterton
  • "‎"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?"
  • "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
  • "Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much."
  • "I've searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees."
  • "You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."
• Confucius
  • "The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
• Calvin Coolidge
  • "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common that unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press on" has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race."
• Albert Einstein
  • "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
• T.S. Eliot
  • "Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered...Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter." (From The Four Quarters)
• K. Anders Ericsson
  • "The journey to truly superior performance is neither for the faint of heart nor for the impatient. The development of genuine expertise requires struggle, sacrifice, and honest, often painful self-assessment. There are no shortcuts." (From The Making of An Expert)
  • "Real expertise must pass three tests. First, it must lead to performance that is consistently superior to that of the expert's peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results. ... Finally, true expertise can be replicated and measure in the lab. As the British scientist Lord Kelvin states, 'If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.'" (From The Making of An Expert)
• Baghavad Gita
  • "Action rightly renounced brings freedom: / Action rightly performed brings freedom: / Both are better / Than mere shunning of action."
• George Best
  • "I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds, and fast cars; the rest I just squandered."
• Ambrose Bierce
  • "FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured." (from The Devil's Dictionary)
• John C. Bogle
  • "In my view, owning the market and holding it forever is the ultimate strategy for winners." (from "The Wisdom of Investment–The Folly of Speculation", December 5, 2001)
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  • "[Religions] are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers. At some moments in history, they have explained convincingly what was wrong with human existence and have given credible answers. From the fourth to the eighth century of our era Christianity spread throughout Europe, Islam arose in the Middle East, and Buddhism conquered Asia. For hundreds of years these religions provided satisfying goals for people to spend their lives pursuing. But today it is more difficult to accept their worldviews as definitive. The form in which religions have presented their truths--myths, revelations, holy texts--no longer compels belief in an era of scientific rationality, even though the substance of the truths may have remained unchanged. A vital new religion may one day rise again. In the meantime, those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works." (from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 14)
• René Descartes
  • "A man is incapable of comprehending any argument that interferes with his revenue."
• Charles Dickens
  • "Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than the dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by religion."
• Henry Ford
  • "History is just one damn thing after another."
• Mem Fox
  • "I'm certain that learning to read and learning to love reading owe a great deal (much more that we ever dreamed) to the nature of the human relationships that occur around and through books... If we could sneak into the homes of avid readers, I think we'd discover very often that the comfortable relationship between an older reader and a younger reader during the shared reading of a mutually loved book might be a key factor in the child's success." (From Radical Reflections)
• Benjamin Franklin
  • "Knowledge is not the personal property of its discoverer, but the common property of all. As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."
• Goethe
  • "Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
• Oliver Goldsmith
  • "Sometimes, to give a variety to our amusements, the girls sung to the guitar; and while they thus formed a little concert, my wife and I would stroll down the sloping field, that was embellished with blue bells of centaury, talk of our children with rapture, and enjoy the breeze that wafted both health and harmony." (From The Vicar of Wakefield)
• Jonathan Haidt
  • "Tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that, even when we don't have tribes, we go and make them, because it's fun. (Photo of shirtless Ohio State fans) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex... we get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives." (from TED "on the mechanics of moral roots, 3/2008)
• Dag Hammarskjöld
  • "Salty and wind-swept, but warm and glittering. Keeping in step with the measure under the fixed stars of the task. How many personal failures are due to a lack of faith in this harmony between human beings, at once strict and gentle." (From Markings)
• Christopher Hitchens
  • "It's usually wise, when promulgating eternal laws, to be clear about what you mean." (from Vanity Fair - Christopher Hitchens' Ten Commandments)
  • "I might as well say it to anyone who might be watching: if you can hold it down on the smokes and the cocktails you might be well-advised to do so." (from an interview with Anderson Cooper)
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
  • "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
• Kenneth Keniston (MIT Professor of Human Development)
  • "Post-modern youth display a special personal and psychological openness, flexibility and unfinishedness. Although many of today’s youth have achieved a sense of inner identity, the term ‘identity’ suggests a fixity, stability and ‘closure’ that many of them are not willing to accept: with these young men and women, it is not always possible to speak of the ‘normal resolution’ of identity issues. . . . Our earlier fear of the ominous psychiatric implications of ‘prolonged adolescence’ must now be qualified by an awareness that in post-modern youth many adolescent concerns and qualities persist long past the time when (according to the standards in earlier eras) they should have ended. . . . The concepts of the personal future and the ‘life work’ are ever more hazily defined; the effort to change oneself, redefine oneself or reform oneself does not cease with the arrival of adulthood." (from Youth, Change, and Violence)
• Nelson Mandela
  • "Without language, one cannot hope to talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their history or savour their songs." (1995)
• Friedrich Nietzsche
  • "The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest."
• John Norstad
  • "Maintaining a total-market portfolio with only efficient changes requires fortitude, patience, and humility. ... Wise investors cultivate these three virtues of fortitude, patience, and humility. For total-market investors, the three disciplines of history, arithmetic, and reason all say that they will succeed in the end." (from "Investing in Total Markets", January 9, 2002)
• Harry Overstreet
  • "The emotionally healthy person is not always, we must note, happy in a superficial sense. He may, in the highest sense, be a man of sorrows. Being aware of much, he takes the emotional impact of much. ... Thus the anxiously self-centered person may live in fear of sickness and death--but only his own, or that of someone on whom he depends. The emotionally healthy person loves life enough to feel as his own the common mortality of all living things ... The healthy person, in short, does not feel less pain and sorrow than his less sound fellow, but more. Also, however, he feels more joy, more quiet delight, more peace, more amazement, and more amusement. He is, quite simply, more alive: more engaged with experience. His security lies not in the avoidance of suffereing but in the fact that he can emotionally afford to feel it." (From The Mind Alive, 1954)
• Adrienne Rich
  • "To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and, simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce the routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled."
• Ken Robinson
  • "Culture is a system of permissions. It's about the attitudes and behaviors that are acceptable and unacceptable in different communities, those that are approved of and those that are not. If you don't understand the cultural codes, you can look just awful. (148, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything)
• Bertrand Russell
  • "Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do."
• William Shakespeare
  • "This above all, to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." (From Hamlet)
• John Simon
  • "Art matters fully as much as politics, the public must be told; for it is the politics of the spirit, while politics proper are the politics of the body. All that good government can give us is material well-being, the political and economic order and plenty enabling us to cultivate our minds and spirits." (from New York Magazine, June 24, 1968)
• Socrates
  • "everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness…” (From Meno, 88c)
• Thomas J. Stanley
  • "Use your emotional energy nurturing your need to succeed." (From Stop Acting Rich)
• Henry David Thoreau
  • "That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
• Terry Warner
  • "In my experience, there is one personal characteristic upon which all else turns - one that clarifies, simplifies, and focuses us... It is not intelligence, wit, charm, or even stubborn determination, since all these become negative when we're self-absorbed. The key personal characteristic is a consistent readiness to yield to the truth in all circumstances, no matter what the apparent cost." (From Bond that Make Us Free, 320)
• Lothar Wehrle
  • "Man muss links und rechts lesen, um geradeaus zu denken."
• Joss Whedon
  • "I think faith is an extraordinary thing. I'd like to have some, but I don't, and that's just how that works." (From Q&A about Serenity)
  • "I believe that the only reality is how we treat each other - that morality comes from the absence of any grander scheme, not from the presence of any grander scheme." (From above Q&A, referring to Angel Season 2 Episode 16, Epiphany)