John > John's Quotes

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
― Victor Frankl

“Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.”
― Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism

“Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on it's knees.”
― Les Miserables

“I'm a car guy. Growing up, one of my favorite pastimes was working on old cars with my grandfather Daddy Bob. He taught me early on that no matter how complex a system is, it can always be reduced to a small handful of components. This is critical because when your car won't start, you need to be able to quickly identify which component is either most affected or responsible. Daddy Bob taught me that pretty much every internal combustion engine can be reduced to three components: air, fuel, and fire. Sure, there are other parts, but the whole system really comes down to those three areas. So when we were diagnosing an engine problem, Daddy Bob would ask, "OK, Robbie, where do you think the problem is : in the air, the fuel, or the fire?" Once we knew that answer, we could move on to fix the problem.”
― Robbie Poe, Private Practice MBA: A Step-by-Step Guide to Put Your Practice on Autopilot

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
― Victor Hugo