Stuff About Things #7

"Fathering may be good for men as well as for children."
     — Ross D. Parke

"But despite these sorrows my father remained an optimist. And that optimism was the greatest gift he gave to me – a sense of excitement about life that has carried me through everything."
     — Doris Kearns Goodwin, Vanity Fair magazine

"His heritage to his children wasn't words or possessions, but an unspoken treasure, the treasure of his example as a man and a father. More than anything I have, I'm trying to pass that on to my children."
     — Roy Rogers

"I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all."
     — E. B. White

From Men's Journal magazine: "In the sport of bull riding, grit is a prerequisite, and these guys have a lot of it.... In the locker room, the Brazilians' abundance of grit isn't immediately clear, but their camaraderie is.... The real difference between the Brazilians and the Americans goes back to fundamental toughness. The Brazilians train harder during the week. They don't whine, they don't bitch, and they come in expecting to win. If I was a young rider, I'd watch them closely and learn everything I could."
 
From Vanity Fair magazine: "True belief, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can't be had at any price, and there's no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do."

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
     — Christopher Hitchens

"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."
     — Christopher Hitchens

From Men's Journal magazine: "Stig Severinsen contends that optimal breathing, with its focus on physical, mental, and emotional self-awareness, can be an effective weapon in the world of corporate warfare." ... and from Men's Health magazine: "Turns out, deep breathing can stimulate the production of insulin, which lowers blood-sugar levels; with more time, it can also nix extra cortisol (a stress hormone) and harmful free radicals."

From Vanity Fair magazine: "One evening in December, young John (F. Kennedy Jr.) emerged from Jackie's room. Spotting a portrait of his father, he removed a lollipop from his mouth and kissed the image, saying, 'Good night, Daddy.' Jackie related the episode to Marg McNamara by way of explanation as to why it would be impossible to have such a picture near. She said it brought to the surface too many things."

"When I was young I spent months humping a pack and an M-16 up and down the Annamite Cordillera in Vietnam. It took me years to want to go out in the mountains again, but now nature was my friend, a consoling, calming presence I wanted to share with my son.... When I picked my pack back up, I realized I'd forgotten the bear spray. There were grizzlies up in the high country. A big male could be twice the size of a lion, weigh up to a third of a ton, and reach nine feet tall when it stood up. It could kill you and then eat you. You weren't at the top of the food chain and you could feel it.... I always took bear spray, and usually I took my pistol, too, an old Colt M1911A1 .45 like the one I carried in the war. The .45 was basically useless against a grizzly, but I like carrying it. Bear spray was better. It could make the fiercest grizzly turn and run, but only if you could get the canister out of the holster, pull back the safety, depress the trigger, and spray it in the bear's face, all in a split second. I knew how fear could paralyze a man when he wasn't hardened by daily contact with it. I hadn't been that man in a long time – the man who could respond with skill to a sudden onset of fear – so I wasn't sure that if a grizzly suddenly appeared I would be able to do any of those things."
     — William Broyles

"Everything that could possibly go wrong with that game did.... I had to just breathe through it and go into that area you learn about through meditation: 'Oh yes, I recognize this, this is life, this is how life goes, there's no reason to rail against it, this is OK.'"
     — Phil Jackson

"We don't have a healthcare system in the U.S. but a disease-care system. We treat diseases – we don't prevent them. Traditional doctors aren't trained in diet, supplements, exercise, meditation, and other therapies you need to stay healthy."
     — Dr. Frank Lipman, preventative and holistic care advocate

"Winners know what they don't know." — Men's Health magazine

"Joe Maddon says the most important thing he has to do as a manager is listen to his players." — Men's Journal magazine

"The human brain is one of nature's most advanced systems, but it nevertheless has a hard time distinguishing the difference between real and imagined threats." — Men's Health magazine

"Advanced results required advanced measures. Does nobody understand this anymore? You have to do the work and you have to sacrifice.... The key to confidence has less to do with inborn talent than it does with ingrained practice." — Men's Fitness magazine

"The other side of it (of getting up very early, other than having private time to be productive) is just straight-up self-discipline. It's not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn't sing you a song, it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So, how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide, or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day."
     — Jocko Willink

"Once, instead of paying attention to the class, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. At the end of the hour, (the professor) asked me what was so much more interesting that his lecture. I held up the book and told him it was the greatest novel written in any language since William Faulkner died. I still think so."
     — Bill Clinton

"Like a magnet, two poles lie at the ends of American success: You can succeed by empowering others or you can succeed by exploiting them." — Bloomberg Businessweek magazine

"'You can go run business development for a mobile company!' was one suggestion (from friends who assured her she could easily jump into a money job in the for-profit sector). Well, I would rather die. Seriously. I can't imagine getting up every morning and putting on a little suit and getting into my little car and driving on the highway with my Starbucks and having meetings where I do not care, nothing is at stake; it's about dollars and the bottom line, which is fine, but it's just not motivating to me at all. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with that world, obviously, but it's just not for me and it would be soul destroying."
     — Sue Gardner

"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it."
     — Michel de Montaigne

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
     — Thomas Merton

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm, and harmony."
     — Thomas Merton

"Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real."
     — Thomas Merton

"We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen."
     — Thomas Merton