Ask Lemmy

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Choose your rut carefully.

Hurt people hurt people.

"Know your worth."

I've struggled with self-worth my whole life and I'm finally taking a stand for myself both in my professional and personal life. It feels great tbh.

We thought of life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end.

Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played

-- Alan Watts

This kind of question always immediately makes me think of something a friend said years ago when I was still a teen. We were talking about school and education and shit and it was on the subject of asking questions when you don't fully understand something and he said "rather ask a stupid question and be a fool for five minutes, then keep your mouth shut and be a fool for the rest of your life." I think it was something that his mother had told him, in their language, so I'm constructing that statement from memory but it was something close to that.

"It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life."

-Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Loneliness is the tax we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

You can't help people that don't want help.

Goes for people who are going through mental/physical health problems or substance abuse issues. If they don't want help you have to accept that and be there for them when they do.

It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.

There's this quote attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

There are two lessons here. First - the best way to affect meaningful change is to start local. Rather than spending a lot of time agonizing over national politics, get involved in your community - your neighborhood, your town, your apartment building, even just the house you share with your family. Your community will take better care of you and the other people that you care about than any national government ever will.

Second - ultimately the only person whose behavior you can change is your own. Don't be too harsh with other people when they don't behave the way that you believe they should. Be a more stringent judge of your own behavior.

But temper that with this:

Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much. Or berate yourself too much either.

Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Baz Lurhmann

In my language it goes : "Alone you go faster, together you go further".

Seriously though:

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. — Douglas Adams

I’m somebody who butts in too much and just in general speaks too much. I’ve always liked this “test” of sorts. I don’t always apply it but I try to!

Before saying anything (especially correcting someone or otherwise getting involved), the following questions need to be asked:

1. Does it need to be said?

2. Does it need to be said by me?

3. Does it need to be said by me right now?

"It's not your fault, but it is your problem."

I honestly love and repeat this line way too much

Just because you weren't the cause doesn't mean it isn't something you need to worry about/fix. I learned this one from my high school English teacher when a student was late and tried to get out of it by blaming traffic lol. The traffic was not their fault, but it ended up being their problem.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it

Unfortunately, too many people have been trained to reject ideas or thoughts without first thinking them through. Many simply react to whatever word, expression, or concept triggers them without giving the rest a second thought. For example a brilliant idea can be presented online, but if one word is out of place, the usage of that word will debated instead of the idea.

The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics.

Bill Nye: "Everyone you'll ever meet knows something you don't"

'Be Kind; Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle'

Sometimes that grumpy old man really is just having a bad day.

My Uncle once told me that the most important thing you can learn is where to find more information.

“Don’t work yourself out if a job.”

My pops told me this after I told him how much more work I had been doing than my coworkers, and how fast I got all of my stuff done. This was like 15 years ago. I immediately started pacing myself, and I’ve since been infinitely less stressed at work.

Just because two sides are fighting doesn't mean one side is good (something along this line)

... I don't think it is that profound, but I think about it a lot

There's this quote early in Good Omens: “It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

It's an awkward one these days, but it sounds Pratchett-esque enough to salvage.

Choosing means losing a little, said by a teacher in highschool when I was struggling to decide what to do after I'd graduate, still remember it 12 years later

Almost every horrific thing that humans engage in stems from fear.

"Sometimes. at the end of a sentence, I come out with the wrong fusebox. And the thing about saying the wrong word is a] I don't notice it, and b] sometimes orange water given bucket of plaster."

I think we can all take something away from that.

This can be applied to anything, but the quote as I read it in a book by Piers Anthony (I know, gross, I was in middle school), was:

Power is a means to an end. Don't let the means become the end.

I often think of it as:

Money is a means to an end. Don't let the means become the end.