Lee > Lee's Quotes

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”
― Christopher Markus

“When what you hear and what you see don't match, trust your eyes.”
― Dale Renton

“Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected return. If things don’t go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low grades – how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you. But it’s life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease to be a challenge. And remember – if you are failing at something, that means you are at your limit or potential. And that’s where you want to be.
Disappointment’ s cousin is Frustration, the second storm. Have you ever been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially relevant in India. From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve, sometimes things take so long that you don’t know if you chose the right goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five years to get close to a release. Frustration saps excitement, and turns your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person. How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved – movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly, seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result – at least I was learning how to write scripts, having a side plan – I had my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable distractions in your life – friends, food, travel can help you overcome it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign somewhere, you took it too seriously.”
― Chetan Bhagat

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“No matter how many plans you make or how much in control you are, life is always winging it.”
― Carroll Bryant

“Life is a constant process of dying.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The moment you stop trying to become a better person, is the moment you start to become worse than what you already are.”
― Carroll Bryant

“A bird is safe in its nest - but that is not what its wings are made for.”
― Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird

“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.”
― Socrates

“But a desperate heart will seduce the mind.”
― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

“It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Maya

“When people say they hate life, to what are they comparing it to? The alternative isn't any more appealing.”
― Carroll Bryant

“We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit”
― Will Durant

“We can't know or say what other people do. You have to think what you want to do to get the situation where you want it to be.”
― E. Lockhart, The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them

“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.”
― H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“No matter where you go, there you are.”
― Keith Caserta

“There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.

You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.

If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1) separate

“All I know is that I do not know anything”
― Socrates

“Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.”
― Bertholt Brecht

“perception shapes priorities, priorities shape people”
― Ben Thompson

“Be wise today so you don't cry tomorrow.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“Those masks we wear
not to shield others; but ourselves from who we are.”
― Basith, Autopsy of the seasons

“Live how you live, feel how you feel and fuck all the phonies in your way.”
― Christopher Krovatin, Heavy Metal And You

“As to the roaming of sages,
They move in utter emptiness,
Let their minds meander in the great nothingness;
They run beyond convention
And go through where there is no gateway.
They listen to the soundless
And look at the formless,
They are not constrained by society
And not bound to its customs.
- Lao-tzu”
― Lao Tzu

“After a breath and before another, there's plenty of time to rest.”
― Basith, Autopsy of the seasons

“The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live is only one among innumerable ways of life which humans have adopted. If we glance sideways and backwards, we will quickly discover that modern society, with its many possibilities and seducing offers, its dizzying complexity and its impressive technological advances, is a way of life which has not been tried out for long. Perhaps, psychologically speaking, we have just left the cave: in terms of the history of our species, we have but spent a moment in modern societies. (..) Anthropology may not provide the answer to the question of the meaning of life, but at least it can tell us that there are many ways in which to make a life meaningful.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology

“Listen." Jennifer reverted, "I didn't mean anything by all of that before. I understand what you were trying to do and ..." She struggled for the right words. "Sweetie, like love, people don't live inside of life, life lives inside of you. Open yourself up to it and there's no stopping your heart.”
― Carroll Bryant, Children of the Flower Power

“The conundrum of sanity and insanity, is that it serves us to be some of each. It's really only a question of degrees. You cannot possibly be 100% adjusted and live in this INSANE world. A little bit of crazy is a coping skill.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, Too Much World