What's your favorite profound quote?

I am typically this when someone accuses me of being a hypocrite. Either way, I certainly do tolerate it though, in fact I have a system for it.

Whoa I've never thought this thought. Thank you for sharing.

Life before death, Radiant.

That's pretty funny

Oi oi oi. Me gotta hurt in here. Me smell a ting is near. Gonna bosh, and gonna nosh, and then the ting will disappear.

— Uthden Troll

Those who will not follow are doomed to lead.

From the Magic: The Gathering card "Anarchist"

When working on an office, it's great and all that you have "the power of accurate observation" but god our Debbie downer is insufferable.

Aren’t you confusing cynicism with skepticism?

That's a pretty accurate way of looking at things.

That works both ways though. Even the fable where the quote originated had that as a takeaway.

Sir Terry is all to easy to quote. This one always gets me thinking:

"There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that, Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate. Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense.

It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers—say, three per citizen. Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw, though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing, and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. And they couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like Hogswatch every day.

Some citizens took the not-unreasonable view that something had gone a bit askew if only naughty people were carrying arms. And they got arrested in large numbers.

The average copper, when he’s been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don’t much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won’t instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and wear more expensive clothes than he personally can afford.

The rate of arrests shot right up, and Swing had been very pleased about that. Admittedly, most of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens.

That was Assault On A City Official, a very important and despicable crime, and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere. It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them.

Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang."

And that from a liberal Englishman. I was taken aback reading Monstrous Regiment. "Did this guy write a book full of trans characters 21-years ago?! (Honestly, it got a little silly at the end with all the characters ending up trans, and a couple gay I think.)

Alan Watts is so fun. He used words like that monk lady in the marvel movies that slaps people out of their bodies.

He’s masterful with words. So masterful he makes it look easy.

So many teachers like “beyond this point words fail”, and they’ve got a good point, but Watts goes “let me give it a shot” and then conveys things in words that can take years to grasp through the brute force method of direct perception.

People shit on words, and with very good reason, but they are the chutes and ladders that make enlightenment in a single lifetime possible if one’s lucky enough to have a teacher like Watts.

Or, if you like it more pithy: "The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than it is in theory."

Ursula LeGuin has definitely seen some shit

Reality is the cross product of the matrix of conditions and the vector of one’s own perspective.

(- also Catholicism)

I totally agree. Worrying, as an action, is useless. Worry as a feeling, an emotional signal, is useful.

Worry is like a messenger from your subconscious. It’s a signal there’s a gap between your opportunity and your action. As soon as you see the worry, you can turn it off by getting back in line with your conscience.

Worry is part of “the wisdom to know the difference”. It indicates you haven’t yet determined which of those two it is: a thing you can change, or a thing you can’t.

So worrying is useless, in the same way sitting there listening to an alarm bell is useless. The alarm is a useful signal. Indulging in it is not.

Shut off the alarm and address the problem. In this case the problem is not “something I value is gonna get hurt”. It’s “something I value is gonna get hurt, and I don’t yet know whether I should be doing something about it or not”.

The best way out the is:

worry -> map out the problem -> [branch] (help how you can OR accept it)

You can pluck the worry out of your mind if you’re a skillful meditator. Just kill it like a computer process. But it will come up again until you remove its root, which is vagueness about the line between “the courage to change things I can” and “the serenity to accept yhe things I cannot”.

So, like I said, worry is a component of “the wisdom to know the difference”. It is that wisdom’s triggering mechanism.

In my opinion, at least.

Unfortunately, a lot of smart people still have this problem. I'd say I'm pretty damn well rounded and all that's taught me is how easy it is to find a subject that I don't know that's still very important. Meanwhile, you can hardly throw a rock without finding an engineer that thinks he should rule the world.

Generally, by the existence of malice’s ability to understand and then use Hanlon’s Razor to provide itself cover.

Knowing the enemy’s heuristics allows you to deceive and manipulate them. Hence, heuristics themselves come with a cost during war.

Then the problem is: are we at war or not? Malice thinks we are. Incompetence maybe not.

Round and round we go. Which could be our own incompetence, or malice’s plan all along. Fuck.

Fear is the mind-killer

No wonder psychiatrists are called shrinks.

Funny. "Fear keeps you alive" is one I use fairly often.

On a post about GitHub Vs Gitlab - lol.

https://forgejo.org/

I really like that one, thanks for sharing.

You practising stoicism?

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing more of.”

-also Hunter S. Thompson, probably

• Gnorv

Haha but really my favorite quote is

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Really helps me feel better about the fact that I'm a 28 year old man who exclusively watches anime

Confucius was wise.

Intelligence is the ability to understand and predict things.

Wisdom is the tendency to make decisions that turn out well.

I figure by that definition knowledge, conditioned responses, muscle memory, perspective, commitment to certain values, beliefs, it’s all part of wisdom.

Be not afraid.