Stuff About Things #4

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone."
     — Tyrion Lannister

"Children always understand. They have open minds. They have built-in shit detectors."
     — Madonna

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
     — James Baldwin

"If you're offended easily... you're a bad resource allocator; it's a bad use of finite resources, which include your energy and the hours you're on this planet."
     — Tim Ferriss 

"I came along toward the tail end of a grand old tradition of manly self-destructiveness in American writing—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Neill, Cheever, Carver, Tennessee Williams. And then of course there was Dylan Thomas, the Welshman. So when I determined at the age of 18 to become a writer, I accepted my obligation to smoke many packs of cigarettes a day and learn how to drink gin and whiskey in goodly amounts, and to shun exercise done for the sake of exercise. No running. Writers were not runners. It was too awkward to run and smoke at the same time. We sat, brooding, and lit up and refilled the glass. I was a healthy young man who enjoyed tennis and softball and basketball, but I made the leap from beer to bourbon, skipped the low-tar smokes in favor of Luckies, Camels, Pall Malls, and, when feeling flush, Gauloises. I drank a gallon of coffee a day, all because that's what writers did.... I was an English major at the University of Minnesota and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression I became the editor of the campus literary magazine. I hiked around campus... with a pack of smokes in my pocket. If you hadn't anything to say but wanted to appear thoughtful, you reached for the pack and shook a cigarette out.... Back then, a pack cost 35 cents and a drink was a dollar.... (Mr. Tate) chain-smoked in class, so we did too. The whole English department reeked of smoke and was proudly alcoholic—anyone who didn't do both was considered an interloper, possibly a Mormon. In Mr. Wright's humanities class, he stood at a lectern with an empty tuna fish can for an ashtray and chain-smoked through his lectures on Dickens and Whitman and Dickinson, which he delivered through a haze of hangover." 
     — Garrison Keillor

"You learn more from getting your butt kicked than from getting it kissed."
     — Tom Hanks

"Over time, talent and hard work become indistinguishable."
     — Gerard Butler 

"When there's a hill to climb, waiting won't make it any smaller."
     — anonymous

From Pacific Standard magazine: "As people learn to see their thoughts and symptoms as separate from themselves, there is an uncoupling of the pain stimulus from their emotional responses.... Everyone wrestles with unruly minds and emotions.... Improving impulse control contributes to an overall sense of psychological well-being.... Social psychologists have found that most people are happier and less anxious from their mid-50s onward."
  
"Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness."
     — Edward Stanley

"Happiness, like so many things, is a choice. So many people don't choose it."
     — Ryan Reynolds

"Sometimes people confuse nonaction with weakness, but letting anger hook you is true weakness."
     — Alex von Bidder

From Men's Health magazine's "What Winners Know" lists: "Your retirement account isn't just in dollars and cents. It's in skills, interests, and relationships." ... "The bigger the group, the less interesting the ideas it will generate." ... "You often have to fight hardest for the ideas that make the most sense."

"My son James smiled and said, 'So they died of old age, then.' I smiled back and stared off into the woods. That had been my own prayer back in Vietnam. Dear Lord, let me die of old age. And let me die before my children do. Amen."
     — Anthony Doer

"If you can't pray sincerely, offer your dry, hypocritical prayer, for God in his mercy accepts bad coin."
     — Rumi

"I usually start out in a totally rote sort of way. But if I stick with it, there is a moment when I become intensely present in the prayer. It feels like plugging an electric cord into a socket. I can feel the energy change. There is total connectivity." 
     — Sally Kempton, Yoga Journal

"Just as smiling actually makes you more happy, doing manly things makes you more manly. And manliness is self-perpetuating, because every time you push yourself to try something difficult, you become less afraid of everything else."
     — Joel Stein

From Pacific Standard magazine: "The cathartic benefits of reaching out for help are hardly a secret. As scientists have come to better understand the brain, they have documented the potentially catastrophic consequences for individuals, particularly men, who go it alone when confronted by profound emotional challenges."

"Ask the great athlete or the concert pianist of the successful actor if they arrive at the place where they need no further practice. They will tell you that the higher you climb in proficiency and public acceptance, the greater the need for practice."
     — Eric Butterworth

"Let food be your medicine."
     — Hippocrates

"Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity..."
     — Leonardo da Vinci

"It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants."
     — Henry David Thoreau

"The constant question you should be asking yourself is, 'Will this make me stronger?'"
     — Steven Lamm, MD

"I have always loved the quote from John F. Kennedy: 'When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.' Looking back on my life, I can see that I have never had a crisis that didn't make me stronger. And here was all that I loved before me (on Everest): great risk, but also great opportunity."
     — Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat, and Tears

"While it is hard enough to inoculate the integrity of the word 'friend' against today's epidemic of misuse and overuse, it can be even harder to calibrate our expectations of those who have earned the benediction of the title - the chosen few we have admitted into the innermost chambers of the heart and entrusted with going that hard way with us. 'Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship,' Seneca counseled in contemplating true and false friendship, 'but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.' Two millennia later, the question of whom to welcome and to what extent remains one of the most delicate discernments with which life tasks us."
     — Maria Popova, brainpickings.org, I really hope M 'n' m have great friends, now and always; it enriches life and we're learning it also lengthens life (see all the studies linking longevity not with exercise or diet or bad-habit-cessation, but with an active, healthy social life)