Gregory Eakins > Gregory's Quotes

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge”
― Nathaniel Branden, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“We have jerks, assholes, and those who are just dumb...dumb!"

"You mean relative to you others," my mother once protested.

"No, Mom, dumb like anyone is dumb."

"So how did he get a Ph.D.?"

"Sitzfleisch, Mom."

Sitzfleisch: the ability to sit through any task, to do it again and again until the job is somehow done. Those who give out Ph.D.'s are human too - sooner or later they give in.”
― Leon M. Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

“If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.”
― Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

“If there's something you don't want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you're doing.”
― Jim Mattis, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Just the two major legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol, are together directly responsible for over 500,000 deaths a year in this country. Deaths associated with prescription drugs are an additional 100,000 a year. The combined deaths associated with all the illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and PCP, may increase this total by another 5,000. In other words, if all illegal drug use were to be curtailed by some stroke of a magic wand, the drug-related deaths in the country would decrease by 1 percent. The remaining 99% remain just as dead,”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“A society of free people will always have crime, violence and social disruption. It will never be completely safe. The alternative is a police state. A police state can give you safe streets, but only at the price of your human spirit.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Loyalty to a party, Einstein felt, meant surrendering some independence of thought. Such conformity confounded him. “How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery,”
― Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe

“Should you listen to a highly trained scuba diver’s advice before plunging into the depths of the ocean? Yes. Should you believe that person when the diver talks about seeing a mermaid making love to a dolphin? No.”
― David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart

“What man is interested in someone else’s baby? First and foremost, that baby is the living embodiment of some other male’s success in mating. Mating is our biological imperative and the father of the wretched thing won; beat us in this biological imperative. We’re the loser. We’ve let him succeed in perpetuating his genes.”
― T.C. Luoma, The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff

“Adolescence, while it’s a place I like to visit periodically, shouldn’t be a lifestyle. Tragic maturity, while appropriate at times, will kill your soul if practiced perpetually.”
― T.C. Luoma, The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff

“I want to be my own hero, be the protagonist in the book of my life and not just some third-rate character whose life is notable only for his total lack of conviction or purpose.”
― T.C. Luoma, The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff

“When you were a kid, didn’t you dream about going off to slay dragons? Didn’t you dream about being some kind of hero?

And as you grew up and realized that you probably wouldn’t be slaying any dragons, real or metaphorical, didn’t you get tired of just watching others do physical things? Didn’t you get tired of only being involved in surrogate achievement, you know, living vicariously through the basketball players, the soccer players, the Italian bocce ball players, or whoever it is you admire?

You gotta’ understand, people like me never stop lifting weights. The part of us that wanted to slay the dragon? It didn’t die. It won’t.”
― T.C. Luoma, The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff

“We know deep down that the perfect body or ultimate personal record can never really be achieved, because our imagination always sets the goal a step or two or three ahead of what we’ve accomplished. And we also know that the universe is merciless enough to give us a few physical challenges that we won’t be, can’t be, prepared for.

So it’s not the goal that’s important, it’s the journey. The journey’s the thing. The journey’s the reward.”
― T.C. Luoma, The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff

“The more challenging the situation we overcome, the greater our stature. The demon you swallow gives you its power.”
― T.C. Luoma, The Testosterone Principles 2: Manhood and Other Stuff

“The aching nostalgia for her own youth remained—the bright Andalusian days when each hour was filled to bursting with the promise of magic, when her life lay ahead of her, inexhaustible, as yet untouched.”
― Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles

“That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Saradamani’s mother had felt sad that her daughter had been given in marriage to one who was half mad, as it were, and who did not lead a worldly life, so that her Sarada would not know what it was to be called ‘mother’ by her children. At this Sri Ramakrishna told her: ‘Dear mother-in-law, you need not feel sorry. Your daughter will have so many children that she will afterwards be tired of being called mother.’ His prophetic words came to be so true! We do not know whether the Holy Mother was ever tired of her children. But it is a fact that no mother under the sun had so many children as she had to address her as mother.”
― Pavitrananda, A Short Life of Holy Mother

“The problem is, we look for someone to grow old together, while the secret is to find someone to stay a child with.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I was fascinated by stories of blisters that bled through shoes, men and women who grew delirious with effort and tumbled into abandoned mines, and athletes immersing themselves in tubs of ice to lower their off-the-chart core temperatures. But it was runner porn: something to titillate my imagination and to minimize on the computer screen if anyone strolled by. Fifty Shades of Blisters.”
― Tom Foreman, My Year of Running Dangerously: A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan

“Whether something is uncomfortable or unpleasant has no bearing on whether it should be done. The decision and commitment must be made, if not heedless of the pain, then at least with recognition that sometimes good things require bad days.”
― Tom Foreman, My Year of Running Dangerously: A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan