================================================================================================== These are few random stuff collected over time. Few others like whole movie scripts & song lyrics has been kept separate due to their large size. Check /docs folder for those. Original URL: http://ps-ax.org/docs/misc/quotes.txt Find more inspirational quotes here: http://ps-ax.org/docs/misc/quotes2.txt Compiled by: vm@ps-ax.org ================================================================================================== _______________________ Steven Wright's quotes: . The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. . If everything seems to be going well you have obviously overlooked something. . Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm. . When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane. . Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense enough to be lazy. --- ------------------- #http://www.quotesbase.com/celebs/85/ Movie Title: The Godfather: Part III (1990) as Michael Corleone: Michael Corleone : "The only wealth in this world is children. More than all the money, power on the earth." Michael Corleone : Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment. Michael Corleone : When they come... they come at what you love. Michael Corleone : Your enemies always get strong on what you leave behind. Michael Corleone : He'd better be careful. It's dangerous to be an honest man. ________________________ The Shawshank Redemption 'I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend.' - Red, 'The Shawshank Redemption' _____________ The Godfather "The Don says, "You are being carried away." Then the undertaker says, flatly, "I will pay you anything you ask." This infuriates Don Corleone. In a voice Puzo describes as "cold death," the Don answers: "We have known each other many years, you and I, but until this day you never came to me for counsel or help. I can't remember the last time you invited me to your house for coffee though my wife is godmother to your only child. Let us be frank. You spurned my friendship. You feared to be in my debt." The undertaker mutters, "I didn't want to get into trouble." Don Corleone interrupts him with a wave of his hand. "No, don't speak. You found America a paradise. You had a good trade, you made a good living, you thought the world a harmless place where you could take your pleasures as you willed. You never armed your self with true friends. After all, the police guarded you, there were courts of law, you and yours could come to no harm. You did not need Don Corleone. Very well. My feelings were wounded but I am not the sort of person who thrusts his friendship on those who do not value it on those who think me of little account." The Don smiles derisively, "Now you come to me and ask, 'Don Corleone give me justice.' And you do not ask with respect. You do not offer me friendship. You come into my home on the bridal day of my daughter and you ask me to do murder and you say" - here the Don's voice becomes scornful mimicry - "'I will pay you anything.' No, No, I am not offended, but what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?" The undertaker responds, "America has been good to me. I wanted to be a good citizen. I wanted my child to be American." The Don applauds sardonically and says: "Well spoken. Very fine. Then you have nothing to complain about. The judge has ruled. America has ruled.... Forgive. Forget. Life is full of misfortunes. -- Bonasera: Be my friend. Godfather. [The Don shrugs, Bonasera bows toward the Don and kisses the Don's hand.] Don Corleone: Good. Someday, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's wedding day. _________________ Calvin and Hobbes . Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words. . Reality continues to ruin my life. Bill Watterson (Calvin - "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat" . People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. . Careful. We don't want to learn from this. . If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don't get asked to do it again. Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat . Girls are like slugs - they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what. The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes . Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous? - Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons . There's an inverse relationship between how good something is for you, and how much fun it is. The Essential Calvin and Hobbes . Everybody I know needs a complete personality overhaul! Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat . As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway. The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes . A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do. . The worst part is that I don't even have the fun of doing the things I'm getting blamed for. http://www.pattishomepage.com/funny/calhob.htm . If you feel like doing some work, sit down and wait until that feeling goes away - Bill Watterson . Some people just don't have inquisitive minds. -- Calvin . Nobody knows how to pamper like a Mom. -- Calvin . You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help. - Calvin . I've got PLENTY of common sense! I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin . I hate being good. -- Calvin . I don't like these stories with morals. -- Calvin . You can never really enjoy Sundays because in the back of your mind you know you have to go to school the next day . I Dunno, It seems like once people grow up, they have no idea what's cool . "Work fascinates me, I can watch it for hours." . "Girls are like slugs, they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what!" . Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around. http://chquotes.synthasite.com/calvin-and-hobbes-quotes1.php Calvin: I'm being educated against my will! My rights are being trampled! Hobbes: Is it a right to remain ignorant? Calvin: I don't know, but I refuse to find out! If ignorance is bliss, this lesson would appear to be a deliberate attempt to deprive me of happiness, the pursuit of which is my unalienable right according to the Declaration of Independence. I therefore assert my patriotic prerogative to not know this material. I'll be out in the playground. - Calvin n Hobbes We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us, that we don't take the time to enjoy where we are. Days go by and we hardly notice them. Life becomes a blur. Often, it takes some calamity to make us live in the present. Then suddenly we wake up and see all the mistakes we've made. But it's too late to change anything. - Calvin & Hobbes, Wierdos from outer another planet. YOU'RE A BAT-FACED, BUG-EYED, BOOGER-NOSED, BALONEY-BRAINED. BEETLE-BUTT. ----- There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. - Mark Twain When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle __________________ The Sound of Music Edelweiss, Edelweiss... Every morning you greet me Small and white, clean and bright You look happy to meet me Blossom of snow May you bloom and grow Bloom and grow forever... Edelweiss... Edelweiss... Bless my homeland forever... ________________________ The Last of the Mohicans Chingachgook: Great Spirit, Maker of All Life. A warrior goes to you swift and straight as an arrow shot into the sun. Welcome him and let him take his place at the council fire of my people. He is Uncas, my son. Tell them to be patient and ask death for speed; for they are all there but one - I, Chingachgook - Last of the Mohicans. Chingachgook: The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the Red Man of these wilderness forests in front of it until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or be not us. Hawkeye: That is my father's sadness talking. Chingachgook: No, it is true. The frontier place is for people like my white son and his woman and their children. And one day there will be no more frontier. And men like you will go too, like the Mohicans. And new people will come, work, struggle. Some will make their life. But once... we were here. ___ "Remember that what's right isn't always popular, and what's popular isn't always right." _____________________ AMONG THE MORE THAN 30 MILLION ITEMS in the National Collections of Insects and Mites of the Smithsonian Institution is a pair of nondescript specimens: two dark grasshoppers of the species Melanoplus spretus, commonly known as the Rocky Mountain locust. In the 1800s vast armies of these creatures rose up every few years, rolling across the Great Plains and leaving nothing but ruin in their wake. Their approach was heralded only by an eerie grayness. Then the horizon disappeared beneath an advancing cloud of blackness, while a deafening buzz swelled out of the gloom. Frontier farmers ran for cover, choking and flailing at the air. The locusts shredded fields of ripening wheat, stripped the wood from the handles of farm tools, ate the very clothes off of farmers who ventured outdoors to drive them away. There were reports of trains unable to move, because the rails were greased for miles by the bodies of crushed locusts. # http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/explorer/webpost_010905.html ___________________________ Until it sleeps - Metallica Where do I take this pain of mine. I run but it stays right by my side. So tear me open and pour me out There's things inside that scream and shout, ____________ Blade Runner I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. - Roy _________ The Bible If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Mat 6:26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, [shall he] not much more [clothe] you, O ye of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! _____________ Bhagavad Gita "Whatever happened, happened for good. Whatever is happening, is happening for good and whatever will happen will happen for good. What have you lost that you are cryig for? Whatever you have gained, you have gained here. Whatever you have lost, you have lost here. What belongs to you today, belonged to someone else yesterday and will belong to someone else tomorrow. CHANGE is the eternal rule of life. So don't focus on the result but do your karma." What is it that you lost that you are grieving for? What is it that you brought into this world, that you have lost? Whatever you gained, you gained from this world. Whatever you lost , you lost to this world. What Belongs to you today, Belonged to someone else yesterday and will belong to someone else tomorrow. The Hindu Scripture - Bhagavad Gita -- Bible What does man gain from all his labor in which he labors under the sun? One generation goes, and another generation comes; but the earth abideth forever. There is no memory of the former; neither shall there be any memory of the latter that are to come, among those that shall come after. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. ________________ The Last Emperor Now then, there are two types of confession. We call them toothpaste and water tap. The toothpaste prisoner needs to be squeezed every now and then, or else he forgets to keep confessing The water tap man needs one good hard twist before he starts. But then everything comes out. PROPAGANDA "The prophecy was a lie... It was all another system of control." - Neo, Matrix Reloaded. The Recruit: What you see, what you hear, NOTHING is what it seems!" "It was the pioneers who took all the arrows and the settlers who took all the land." __ LP I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when I tried so hard And got so far But in the end It doesn't even matter I had to fall To lose it all But in the end It doesn't even matter In the end - Linkin Park. _______________ Church of Satan My worst enemies are those who presume me to be harmless. They cannot imagine how much I resent and disdain them, or just how great a threat they would face if I could get at them. Everything in their behavior speaks of insult and presumptuousness, and for now it is all I can do to make constructive use of my anger toward them. At this time, I just make a list of them and keep a watch on. Some day, with the help of time, space, and circumstance, I will be able to humiliate them properly - not in a manner they would enjoy, but in a style calculated to make them wish that they had never been born. - Anton Szandor LaVey # http://churchofsatan.com/Pages/Desiderata.html _____________ Cyborg - 1989 Willy - "Go to Hell!" Fender Tremolo (Vincent Klyn) - "Been there." "Remember thy creator in the days of thy youth. Eccl. 12:1" http://bible.cc/ecclesiastes/12-1.htm Tao Te Ching -Lao Tzu "Life isn't always what we desire it to be. It simply is." "This Too Shall Pass" The great love of Jesus, the peace of Buddha, the wisdom of Lao-Tzu. "A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails." Janitors and waitresses die every day, thinking "I never got my shot," - Million dollar baby __________________________ Interview with the Vampire Mortal Woman: I don't want to die! Santiago: We are death! Mortal Woman: Someone help me. Please... What have I done? Santiago: We all die. Death is the one thing you share with all those here. Mortal Woman: But I'm young... Santiago: Death is no respecter of age. He can come any time, any place. Need I tell you what fate has in store for you? Mortal Woman: I would take my chance. Let me go! Please... Santiago: And if you take that chance and live, what is your fate? The humpbacked toothless visage of old age? Santiago: Just as this flesh is pink now, it will turn grey and wrinkle with age. Woman: Let me live, please. I don't care. Santiago: Then why should you care if you die now? Santiago: And suppose death had a heart to love and to release you? To whom would he turn his passion? Armand: No Pain. Armand: ... I know nothing of God or the Devil, I have never seen a vision nor learnt a secret that would damn or save my soul... Louis: My God... So it's as I always feared. Nothing, leading to nothing. --------- If you tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe, he'll believe you. But if you tell him a park bench has just been painted, he has to touch it to be sure. ______________ Clint Eastwood Joe : I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him. Now if you apologize, like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it. Joe : When a man's got money in his pocket he begins to appreciate peace. --- America is for people who live their dreams this is not the place for people who fear insecurity - Sumesh K. S " I have no heart, I feel no love. Nor fear, nor joy, nor sorrow. I am hollow..." - Dracula, Van Helsing "You have to keep on breathing becuase tomorrow the sun will rise and who knows what the tide will bring" ~ Cast Away ----------- $ sudo su - We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things: #1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type. #3) With great power comes great responsibility. Password: ------------ Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" No offense taken, none given. A snotty little scion of a degenerate family "Magua's heart is twisted, and he's become what twisted him" - Hawkeye, The Last Of The Mohicans. ___________ The Recruit Don't make me kill you, son. It ain't worth it. It's all about the money. You think you know me? You think you know me, don't you? You don't. There was a time... There's this parish priest, goes up to the pope, drops down on his knees, starts weeping, asking forgiveness. "Holy Father, Holy Father, what am I to do? "What am I to do? "l do not believe in God anymore. What am I to do?" You know what the pope said? "Fake it." I couldn't...fake it... anymore. So now I'm gone. -------- http://www.thinkexist.com/English/Author/x/Author_1081_2.htm - Albert Camus quotes -- There is nothing I detest more than the stench of lies. - Apocalypse Now If you cannot understand my silence, you will never understand my words. Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it... and my heart is going to cave in. - Ricky, American Beauty _______________ Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275 BC) "A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first." "Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous." "The world's biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman." "There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth." ____________________________________ "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep." - Robert Frost ___________________________ As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish, he'd stay away. -- Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) The Psychoed -- The other day, upon a stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today; To his Glory let us pray. Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He's not been there a day or three, I think he's from the EAC! I asked another if he saw the little man, he answered "Naw." I've proved it true, I'm satisfied -- he can't be seen! I haven't lied! ----------------- "Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great" _____________________________ Prayer of the Gestalt therapy movement led by Fritz Perls: I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped. ------- They have an expression in prize fighting: "Everyone has a plan until they're hit." You've just been hit...the getting up is up to you... ----- If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers". http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Swami_Vivekananda As soon as I think that I am a little body, I want to preserve it, to protect it, to keep it nice, at the expense of other bodies; then you and I become separate. "God selected the crazy things on the earth so as to embarrass the wise men" "I shut my eyes in order to see." - Paul Gauguin We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision. _____ "Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream." - Malcolm Muggeridge "People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to" "Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time" _______________ American Beauty ANGELA: Jane, you'd be out of your mind to go with him. JANE: Why do you even care? ANGELA: Because you're my friend. RICKY: She's not your friend. She's somebody you use to feel better about yourself. -------American_Beauty-earlyDraft---- JANE: Tell me about being in the hospital. RICKY: (smiles..) When I was fourteen, my dad caught me smoking dope. He totally freaked and sent me to military school. I told you his whole thing about structure, and discipline, right? (laughs) Well, of course, I got kicked out. Dad and I had this huge fight, and he hit me... and then the next day, at school, some kid made a crack about my haircut, and I just... snapped. I wanted to kill him. And I would have, if they hadn't pulled me off him. (then) That's when my dad put me in the hospital. They drugged me up and I was there for almost two years. JANE: You must really hate him. RICKY: He's not really a bad man. He's just one of those people who needs everybody to make the same choices he did. So he can feel good about himself. JANE: Yeah, but you lost two whole years of your life. RICKY: I didn't lose them. It taught me how to step back, and just... watch, and not take everything so personally. And that's something I needed to learn. That's something everybody needs to learn. ------ "To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence." - J. Krishnamurti _____________ Kungfu Hustle Strictly speaking, we're just musicians. A song that wrenches the heart O where do I find a knowing ear? In great power lies great responsibility. There's no escaping from it. --- "My only family... my only enemy..." - Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon ___________ A worldwide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was: "Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?" The survey was a huge failure... In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant. In Eastern Europe they didn't know what "honest" meant. In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant. In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant. In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant. In South America they didn't know what "please" meant. And in the USA they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant. ______________________ http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/about-krishnamurti/dissolution-speech.php Truth is a pathless land The Order of the Star in the East was founded in 1911 to proclaim the coming of the World Teacher. Krishnamurti was made Head of the Order. On August 3, 1929, the opening day of the annual Star Camp at Ommen, Holland, Krishnamurti dissolved the Order before 3000 members. -- Freedom From The Known: The world accepts and follows the traditional approach. The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another; we mechanically follow somebody who will assure us a comfortable spiritual life. It is a most extraordinary thing that although most of us are opposed to political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life. Our desire to be free is pacified by organized religions, gurus, psychologists, and propaganda by the politicians. However, it does not die until an answer is found. 'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. ____________________ Kahlil Gibran quotes Your life is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness and far away in its compassion and hidden in its secrets and mysteries. Your Children are not Your Children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers. If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. Most people who ask for advice from others have already resolved to act as it pleases them. The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply. The reality of the other person lies not in what he reveals to you, but what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says, but rather to what he does not say. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge. ---- "From the hungry man I snatch what I eat and my glass of water deprives the man dying of thirst. And yet I eat and drink." Take the time to celebrate The wonder of you Which no one else could replace _________ Read this i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it. ____________ Pulp Fiction JULES: There's a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you." I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a coldblooded thing to say to a motherf***er 'fore you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice. Now I'm thinkin', it could mean you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or is could by you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin'. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd. Jules lowers his gun, lying it on the table. ----- Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers. - Road to Perdition Always remember that you belong to no one, and no one belongs to you. Reflect that some day you'll suddenly have to leave everything in this world. So make the acquaintanceship of God now. My master would say... there is nothing we can hold on to in this world. Only by letting go can we truly possess what is real. - Crouching tiger, hidden dragon Today is the first day of the rest of your life. When you look back on your life, you'll regret the things you didn't do more than the ones you did. Live life NOW I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. - (R. Kipling; The Elephant's Child) _______________ Robert Heinlein Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time and squawk for more! So learn to say No and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.) Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin. One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns he must die and accepts his sentence undismayed. In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it. ---- I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels. - Perl S. Buck The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention. ____________ St Augustine of Hippo Give me chastity and continence, only not yet People try to find satisfaction in material things to fill a void within them that only God can fill. There seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety... To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness. ______________ The Green Mile We each owe a death, there are no exceptions... COFFEY: I'm tired, boss. Tired of bein' on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. Tired of not ever having me a buddy to be with, or tell me where we's coming from or going to, or why. Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world ever' day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand? --- Every Dream Has A Beginning ________________ Blue Oyster Cult - (Don't Fear) The Reaper Seasons don't fear the reaper Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain We can be like they are .. ----- Spirit may exhibit remarkable selflessness or unspeakable cruelty, but against the backdrop of eternity it is ultimately of infinitesimal significance. All that counts is what we experience, or fail to experience. Where we are wronged we should feel sorrow for that undeveloped part of Spirit that has turned upon itself. - New age spirituality Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. "Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing." - The Denial of Death "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Memento Mori - is a Latin phrase that may be freely translated as "Remember that you are mortal," "Remember you will die," or "Remember your death". Sooner or later, the Thirst always wins. - Blade Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter - chinua Achebe Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don't say.-Unknown When you don't know what you want, you often end up where you don't want to be. A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were made for. "Politicians are just like diapers. They need to be changed often--and for the same reason." "The greatest oak was once a little nut that held its ground." Truth is what remains when you abandon your beliefs. How can you find your soulmate if you can't find your soul? Discover your nature and nature will discover you. Happiness doesn't come from what I obtain, but from what I let go of. Life isn't about what I get, its about what I leave behind. ___________ Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. -- "Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac." 'Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people' - Eleanor Roosevelt _________ Confucius When a person should be spoken with, and you don't speak with them, you lose them. When a person shouldn't be spoken with and you speak to them, you waste your breath. The wise do not lose people, nor do they waste their breath. Expect much from yourself and little from others and you will avoid incurring resentments. Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. --- You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. - Khalil Gibran Him whom I went out to seek, I found just where I was: He now has become myself whom before I called `Another'! - Kabir What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl. - Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi _______ Lao Tzu A journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Wise men don't need to prove their point.. men who need to prove their point aren't wise. ----- Self-realization is, in fact, the only religion. For it is the true purpose of religion, no matter how people define their beliefs. - Paramahansa Yogananda Attitudes are contagious. Are yours worth catching? Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future. When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting. - Elizabeth Bibesco "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." - Thomas Edison Diplomat : A person who tells you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. ____________ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost ------ " There is a difference between an objective and actions. Unless you understand your objective, you will be wasting your time in actions. Know your objective first " - Swami Vivekananda "What I do today is important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it." - Thomas Simmons People are going to disappoint you. I get that. I kind of expect that. Everything happens for a reason. Fake is the new trend. I guess everyone's in style. Most people don't know who they are, thats why they lie. They are afraid someone else will figure out before they do. _______________ Osho(Rajaneesh) If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other, and only emptiness will be mirrored. Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me. - Rajaneesh He was often called the "sex guru" after some speeches in the late 1960s on sexuality. These were later compiled under the title From Sex to Superconsciousness. According to him, "For Tantra everything is holy, nothing is unholy", and all repressive sexual morality was self-defeating, since one could not transcend sex without experiencing it thoroughly and consciously. In 1985, he told the Bombay Illustrated Weekly, "I have never been a celibate. If people believe so, that is their foolishness. I have always loved women - and perhaps more women than anybody else. You can see my beard: it has become grey so quickly because I have lived so intensely that I have compressed almost two hundred years into fifty." For the past five thousand years, humans have been trying to save himself from sex. And the result is that everywhere, in every nook and corner, he is confronted by sex - in all its various forms. The Law of Reverse-Effect has arrested the soul of man... As far as sex is concerned, man behaves no better than the ostrich. He thinks that by shutting his eyes, by ignoring it, sex will vanish. If such miracles could occur, life would be very easy indeed... Shutting one's eyes is a sign of weakness, and the whole of humanity is guilty of it. Not only has man blatantly shut his eyes to sex, he has also entered into innumerable inner conflicts with it... First of all, we have to recognize sex and understand it; we have to comprehend this elemental urge. Only then can we strive to transcend it, to sublimate it, so we can reach the stage of celibacy... Man has never been so sick, so neurotic, so wretched or so unhappy. Man is completely perverted. He is poisoned at the root. http://www.osho.nl/New-Osho-NL/EnglBooks/FromSex.htm -- _________________________________________ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. - Robert Pirsig --- ________________ Martin Niemoller First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me-- and there was no one left to speak out for me. --- No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt Build bridges instead of walls and you will have a friend. I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me. - Dave Barry First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. --Mohandas Gandhi. ___________ Van Helsing So you're the great Van Helsing. And you're a deranged psychopath. We all have our little problems. Igor. Yes, master. Why do you torment that thing so? It's what I do. Remember, Igor, "Do unto others..." Before they do unto me, master. --- Note for me a life untroubled, Note for my temopestous soul, Let my life be full of struggle, For a geat and loafty goal. Nature knows nothing about hopes and desires and wants. Nature simply enjoys whatever is available this moment, now and here. You may be an atheist, it doesn't matter. You may be a theist, it doesnt matter. The distance from no-mind is equal. It is better to die with memories than live with only dreams. Seek pleasure and satisfaction. So long as none is harmed it is our right. But seek also to give, in whatever way you can. He who neither rejoices on the pleasant nor laments on obtaining something unpleasant and is steady & undeluded, is already situated in transcendence. All theory is grey, dear friend, green is the golden tree of life. - Goethe Comfort is no test of truth. Instead, truth is far away from being "comfortable". I wish I could knock on all doors. And beg I dont know whom to forgive me. And make little bits of bread for him. Here, in my heart's oven From the hungry man I snatch what I eat and my glass of water deprives the man dying of thurst. And yet I eat and drink. Dont stand at my grave n 4ever weep. I'm not there; I do not sleep. I'm a 1000 winds that blow. I'm the sunlight on ripened grain. When you lose someone you love you shed tears. Are your tears for yourself or for the one who is dead? Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good ___ GOD Dont forget your umbrella. I might water the plants today Earthlings, dont treat me like an alien. If you think Mona Lisa is stunning, you should look at my masterpiece. In the mirror What do I have to do to get your attention? Take out an ad in the paper? Please dont drink and drive, you are not quite ready to meet me yet. -- "How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives." ~Annie Dillard _________________ Sandesham (movie) Vighatana_vadikalum prathtikriya vaadiklaum pradama drishtya akalchiyal_ayirunenkilum, avarkidayil ulla andhar_dhara sajeevam ayirunnu nnu vanam mansaillakan. Mathramalla bhoorshwasikalum thakkam parthu irikuka ayirunnu. Vargadipathayavum colonialist chinta saranikalum, radical ayitulla oru maatamalla aagrahichathu.. --- ________________ Serenity Prayer God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next. Amen. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr --- ___________________________ See you later, alligator After awhile, crocodile Bye-bye, butterfly Give a hug, ladybug Toodle-ee-oo, kangaroo See you soon, raccoon Time to go, buffalo Can't stay, blue jay Mañana, iguana The end, my friend! --- The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell. - Bertrand Russell Attempts to be completely unbiased lead to useless documents that don't contain any real information. - Perrin Harkins Knowing the Bible is one thing; Knowing the Author is another. ____________________ The Three Gorges Dam a Chinese hydroelectric river dam that spans the Yangtze River in Sandouping, Yichang, Hubei, China. The total electric generating capacity of the dam will reach 22,500 megawatts,[1] at which point it will be the largest hydro-electric power station in the world by capacity. This is the biggest project that has been undertaken in China since the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. The dam wall is made of concrete and is about 2,309 metres (7,575 ft) long, and 185 metres (607 ft) high. The wall is 115 metres (377.3 ft) wide on the bottom and 40 metres (131.2 ft) wide on top. The project used 27,200,000 cubic metres (35,600,000 cu yd) of concrete, 463,000 metric tons of steel, enough to build 63 Eiffel Towers, and moved about 10,260,000 cubic metres (13,400,000 cu yd) of earth. The reservoir created by the Three Gorges Dam exceeds 660 kilometres (410 mi) in length and 1.12 kilometres (0.70 mi) in width on average, and contains 39,300,000,000 cubic metres (9.43 cu mi) of water, when the water level is at 175 metres (574 ft) (Not-so-fun-fact: Three Gorges Dam, which is located in China, is one of the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world. So large, in fact, that it actually slowed down Earth's rotation by 0.06 microseconds. Read more: http://www.theenergylibrary.com/node/11435) ------- The greatest pain in life is when someone you know turns into someone you knew. Det bedste er ikke for godt. - Lego ________________ Comfortably numb When I was a child I had a fever. My hands felt just like two balloons. Now I got that feeling once again. I cant explain, you would not understand. This is not how I am. I have become comfortably numb. -- I learned a long time ago that worrying is a lot like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you any where _______ Sri Sri Purpose of words is to create silence. Only Silence is complete. If a Master is not hollow and empty, he is no Master at all. Wake up an see your life is too short. The realization that life is short will bring dynamism to your life. See a mistake as a mistake, not as "my" or "his" mistake. "My" means guilt; "his" means anger. -- All the stars are inside me, because I am the space. There is no history. There is no biography. I only exist here and now. - A concise Tesian prayer Even if you are wrong, dont get disheartened, you can always be used as a bad example. _________________ The Good Shepherd Thomas: Have you ever made up a story, Edward? Told your friends something you know wasn't true. And you know that if they found out, they wouldn't like you any more? Why? Because you lied to them. Do you understand? Edward: And he asked me if I knew what trust was. And I said trust is when you feel safe with someone Like with my friends. Like with you and mother. And he said don't ever lie. Thomas: If you lie to your fiends they won't trust you. And you will have nothing And you'll never be safe. -- _________ Mr Brooks SNYDER: This is bogus. The company doesn't exist in the city, the state, the United States or Canada. DETECTIVE ATWOOD: So the whole point of this piece of paper was to give me Meeks. SNYDER: That's what it looks like. DETECTIVE ATWOOD: Why? Who moved him, where did they move him to, and why did he give me Meeks? SNYDER: That's what we get paid to find out. Atwood picks up the Newspaper. DETECTIVE ATWOOD: I'm going to go to the bathroom and think about this. -- "The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates "Never criticize your wife for her shortcomings or when she does something wrong. Always bear in mind that because of her shortcomings and weaknesses, she could not find a better husband than you." "Salvation lies within." He that forgets his friend is ungrateful to him; but he that forgets his Saviour is unmerciful to himself.- John Bunyan Everybody takes pleasure in returning small obligations; many go so far as to acknowledge moderate ones; but there is hardly any one who does not repay great obligations with ingratitude. - Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld The animal with long ears, after having drunk, gives a kick to the bucket. - Old Italian Saying The journey is the reward. - Tao Saying I never met a man I didn't like. - Will Rogers "People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them" Nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing is so gentle as real strength. -Ralph W. Sockman "Live as you would have wished to live when you are dying" "Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live." "Respect the privacy, solitude and silence of others. They will value your company for that simple reason." -VM "Some things look better in our dreams." -VM _______________Belle And Sebastian________________________________ If there's one thing that I learned when I was still a child It's to take a hiding Yeah if there's one thing that I learned when I was still at school It's to be alone --- __________ Mark Twain Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. Buy land, they're not making it anymore. Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places. Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. The Public is merely a multiplied "me." What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain. Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- If you love something, let it go. If it comes back it's yours. If it doesn't, it never really was in the first place. -- Anonymous The public is always right 'coz you are going to sell it to the public anyway. Even if it is religion or if it is motorcycles, the general mass is the real customer. - VM Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. - Voltaire If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves. - Thomas Edison _______ Funny.. For Sale: Parachute. Only used once, never opened, small stain. Always forgive your enemies - Nothing annoys them so much. Death is hereditary. There are three sides to any argument: your side, my side and the right side. Everybody is somebody else's weirdo. -- Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage. - Confucius. Leaf's departure is because of Wind's pursuit. Or because Tree didn't ask her to stay...... Procrastinators united..... tomorrow. ____________ Silver Blaze Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time." Holmes: "That was the curious incident." --- Carpe diem! There is no need to feel ashamed of existential despair because of the assumption that it is an emotional disease, for it is not a neurotic symptom but a human achievement and accomplishment. Above all, it is a manifestation of intellectual sincerity and honesty. Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms ____________________________ The Name of the Rose Adso: Do you think this is a place abandoned by God? William: Have you ever known a place where God would have felt at home? Salvatore: Watch out for Satan, who comes to know your soul. --- Don't put anything on a wound that you wouldn't put in your eye. All my life I've wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific. If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open. In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love. - Diego Marchi Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.- Chinese proverb The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.- Chinese proverb All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe You've got to love the Lord for making things like that. - A Time To Kill "You must work out your own salvation in fear and trembling." The best way to escape from your problem is to solve it." It's the so called normal guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me, at least they're commited Ingratitude is world's reward. ___________________________________ Fearless: When I was 13 years old, My vision started to deteriorate. In my eyes, there seemed to be a fog that could not be lifted. At that time I cried every day. Grandma told me when you're feeling unhappy you should cry.After that, you need to move on. _______________________________________ Apocalypse Now You have a right to kill me... But you have no right to judge me. _______________________________________ I think, therefore I am dangerous - Unknown. The sun dries without prejudice the garments of the rich and the poor. An interesting email footer: "No trees were killed in the creation of this message. However, many electrons were terribly inconvenienced." Everything that annoys us about others can help us to understand ourselves. Live your dreams. To be without dreams is to be without hope; to be without hope is to be without purpose. _________________________________________ Zen Koan English-speaking non-Zen practitioners sometimes use kōan to refer to an unanswerable question or a meaningless statement. However, in Zen practice, a kōan is not meaningless, and teachers often do expect students to present an appropriate response when asked about a kōan. Even so, a kōan is not a riddle or a puzzle. Appropriate responses to a kōan may vary according to circumstances; different teachers may demand different responses to a given kōan, and a fixed answer cannot be correct in every circumstance. One of the most common recorded comments by a teacher on a disciple's answer is: "Even though that is true, if you do not know it yourself it does you no good." The master is looking not for an answer in a specific form, but for evidence that the disciple has actually grasped the state of mind expressed by the kōan itself. Thus, though there may be so-called "traditional answers" (kenjo) to many kōans, these are only preserved as exemplary answers given in the past by various masters during their own training. In reality, any answer could be correct, provided that it conveys proof of personal realization. Needless to say, kōan training can only be done with a qualified teacher who has the "eye" to see a disciple's depth of attainment. -------- Arguing on the Internet is like running at the special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still a retard. When you look back at life, what do you see? - "Tata Safari" "Awww, fxxk it Dude. Let's go bowling." - Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski. Many men are called merciful: but who shall find a faithful man? - Proverbs 20:6 -------- Huginn and Muninn are a pair of ravens associated with the Norse god Odin. In Norse mythology, Huginn and Muninn travel the world bearing news and information they have collected to Odin. Huginn is "thought" and Muninn is "memory". They are sent out at dawn to gather information and return in the evening. They perch on the god's shoulders and whisper the news into his ears. ---------- That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning. - "The Bridge Across Forever", Richard Bach Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. - "Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. ---------- Error messages in Haiku? Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred. Rather than a beep Or a rude error message, These words: "File not found." -------------------- "Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow" - Arthur Stringer Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.Abraham Lincoln The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away." Robert Maynard Hutchins Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything." - Malcolm X "I feel sorry for someone who has to win at everything." Seize the opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind. ~Bulgarian Proverb Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other. ~Samuel Johnson Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then. ~Katharine Hepburn There is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply. - Author Julian Barnes "Freedom is not worth having, if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes." In your work, excellence is not an option; it's a requirement. "There are 10 different kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't." "A ship in the harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." "You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest. Like a mountain in springtime, like a walk in the rain.." "Never wrestle with a pig - you get dirty and the pig enjoy it." Mazha peyyumbo valyalukalil..Vithukal potti mulakkunnu.. Kahalanadam kelkkumbol.. Mritharil jeevanudikkunnu Maranam varumorunaal.. oorkkuka marthya nee.. kudey porum nin.. jeevitha cheythikalum Aakeyalpa neram maathram ente yaathra theeruvaan. Aake ara naazhika maathram ee uduppu maaruvaan "I can't afford to hate anyone. I don't have that kind of time." - Ikiru ---------- Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny. - Frank Outlaw -- Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world. "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." "All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself." - George Bernard Shaw "aude aliquid dignum" - dare something worthy... Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections. We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears. Still trying to become the person my dog thinks I am... "Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways,chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming, "WOO HOO - What a Ride!" We cannot change the direction of the wind, but we can adjust our sails. Some days are a total waste of makeup. A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good. Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. Never test the depth of the water with both feet. The trouble with life is you're halfway through it before you realize it's a "do it yourself" thing. "The best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch and swing with, never say a word, and then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you've ever had." The difference between Lonely and Alone is Inner Peace It's so easy to laugh. It's so easy to hate. It takes guts to be gentle and kind "Beware of the man without vices, for he also has no virtues." A. Lincoln The future started yesterday and we're already late.... (John Legend) There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity. The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you're willing to work. "Plan your work and work your plan." "Make sure your words are sweet, one day you might have to eat them." Whether you think you can or you cannot ... you're right! The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become -C Dubois 'I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence' "Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." ~ Twyla Tharp If you think evil today, you think it more readily & persistently tomorrow and likewise it is with good thoughts. "Nobody knows anybody. Not that well." - Tom Reagan, Millers Crossing ---------------------------------------- Bonasera: How much shall I pay you? [the Don turns away dismissively, but Bonasera stays on] Don Corleone: Bonasera, Bonasera, what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you'd come to me in friendship, this scum who ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if by some chance an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies. And then, they would fear you. Bonasera: Be my friend... Godfather. [the Don at first shrugs, but upon hearing the title he lifts his hand, and a humbled Bonasera kisses the ring on it] Don Corleone: Good. [He places his hand around Bonasera in a paternal gesture] Don Corleone: Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, consider this justice a gift on my daughter's wedding day. [a gratified Bonasera offers his thanks and leaves] --------------------------------------- "She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition. When she died, it was not at his hands as her mother might have expected, but of smallpox. That was 1878." - Unforgiven If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me. If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway. "Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin." ----- A line from an interesting 'About Me'. "Languages: Greek, German, English, Perl. All of them fluently." ------The Red Dragon---------------- It is in your nature to do one thing correctly. Before me, you rightly tremble. But fear is not what you owe me, Mr. Lounds. You owe me awe. ------ Beware of he whose lips are tight and looks are gentle for his thoughts are deeper than his looks. Fate, It Seems, Is Not Without A Sense Of Irony - 'Morpheus' The biggest challenge in life is to face yourself. -vm A sure loser is the one who doesn't have any plans for the future. Anyone with a plan is sure to win someday. -vm "You can have any color as long as it's black" - Henry Ford "Quod me nutrit me destruit" (What nourishes me destroys me) --Friedrich Nietzsche-- Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. In heaven all the interesting people are missing. In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity. To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. -- Men's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart. - Confucius If you are serious about anything, get it done NOW! -vm There are 10 kinds of people.. those who understand binary and those who don't. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. - Alan J. Perlis When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realized that The Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me. ----- First I was dying to finish my high school and start college And then i was dying to finish college and start working Then I was dying to get married and have children And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough so I could go back to work But then I was dying to retire And now I'm dying .. and suddenly realised, I forgot to live Don't let this happen to you Appreciate your present situation Enjoy each day ------- To make money we lose our health, and then to restore our health we lose our money, we live as if we are never going to die, and we die as if we never lived..." "But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." - The Bridge Of San Luis Rey Failing to plan is planning to fail! "Even if you're very, very good at being a dinosaur, you're still extinct." No matter how good a party is, you'll have to call it a day after some time. It is the same with almost everything. - VM _____________________________ Pale Blue Dot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician,every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." __ Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you and he needs money." -- George Carlin, Politically Incorrect, May 29, 1997 __ To err is human and to repeat it is even more human. - VM Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win youre still retarded. You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea. - Pearl S. Buck "To talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish" The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. - Chinese Proverb "Nattil oru sadhanam undu. BELT!" - GM "Nattil verey oru sadhanam undu. BIKE!" - VM "Squeaky wheel gets the grease!" "Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician." Him whom I went out to seek, I found just where I was: He now has become myself whom before I called `Another'! - Kabir -----F&F4----- One thing I learned from Dom is that nothing really matters unless you have a code. And what's your code, Brian? I'm working on it. ------ "Work out your own salvation, with fear and trembling." - 'Philippians' Die, fiend! Die, die!! - Calvin "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests." - John Stuart Mill _________________ 20 - A Mother's Advice - http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/zenindex.html Jiun, a Shingon master, was a well-known Sanskrit scholar of the Tokugawa era. When he was young he used to deliver lectures to his brother students. His mother heard about this and wrote him a letter: "Son, I do not think you became a devotee of the Buddha because you desired to turn into a walking dictionary for others. There is no end to information and commentation, glory and honor. I wish you would stop this lecture business. Shut yourself up in a little temple in a remote part of the mountain. Devote your time to meditation and in this way attain true realization." ---- True friendship is never serene. - Marquise de Sévigné Time takes away as much as it gives. - Marquise de Sévigné The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. An interesting footer in a website: "If you are Jewish, we'd appreciate you not surfing this website on Shabbat." "It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window." - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye "Now, we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. " - Boondock Saints -- __________________________________ Stroustrup, Bjarne. The C++ Programming Language. Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. Proof by analogy is fraud. "There is no substitute for intelligence, experience, common sense, and good taste." - Stroustrup about programming. The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build. If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem. The systems we construct tend to be at the limit of the complexity we and our tools can handle. A program that has not been tested does not work. --- http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg262.txt - The Jargon File "Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week." ~Spanish Proverb "The best way to get something done is to begin." "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." ~C. Northcote Parkinson __________________ CnH: This strip was originally published in the newspapers on March 26, 1989. Mom opens the bedroom door and tells him to get out of bed, he's going to miss the bus. He stands at the blackboard doing a math problem. Miss Wormwood tells him to sit down if he doesn't know the answer. Moe holds him up by his shirt, clenches his fist, and asks Calvin if he wants to see if there's an afterlife. As Calvin tries to go out his bedroom window, he's told he can't go out to play until his homework is done. Calvin stirs his dinner, and Dad tells him just to eat it and not to play with it. Mom tells him to quit stalling and to take his bath. Dad turns off the TV and tells him he can't stay up later and to go to bed. Mom comes in after Calvin climbs in bed. She kisses his forehead and tells Calvin to get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow's another big day. After the light is turned out, Calvin sighs. -- "What gets measured, gets managed." - Peter Drucker "No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility." - Peter Drucker Making a wrong decision is better than making no decision. Indecision is a bad decision. "In my youth I committed black deeds. In maturity I practiced innocence. Now, released from both good and evil, I have destroyed the root of karmic action and shall have no reason for action in the future. To say more than this would only cause weeping and laughter. What good would it do to tell you? I am an old man. Leave me in peace." - Milarepa If you've blown it, own it and move on. http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/ "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." -- Ken Thompson ___________ "In 1972, Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."), Mobutu Sese Seko for short." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko ---- The Illustrated Weekly of India was an English language weekly newsmagazine publication in India. It started publication in 1880 and ceasing publication in 1993. Also simply known as Weekly by its readership, The Illustrated Weekly of India was considered to be an important English language publication in India for over a century. Many young students of English used it as a regular reading and guide for honing English language skills in vernacular India. -- Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I hated every minute of training, but I said, "Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion." - Muhammad Ali It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe. Muhammad Ali The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity. - Mark Twain Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. - Mark Twain _______________________ 6 Phases of a Project . Enthusiasm . Disillusionment . Panic . A Search for the Guilty . The Punishment of the Innocent . Praise and Honor for the Non-Participants -- Project leaders: TAKE the blame when things go wrong and SHARE the credit when things go right. C++ Coding Standard - http://www.possibility.com/Cpp/CppCodingStandard.html If you don't step forward, you'll always be in the same place. "Always program as if the person who will be maintaining your program is a violent psychopath that knows where you live." - Martin Golding "I hate quotes. Tell me what you know." - Emerson "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct (logical form) but semantically nonsensical. "Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at a time!" - The Mythical Man-Month "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill" - Proverb. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html Software developers don't really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. "It'll be done when it's done!" they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce their boss to a fit of giggles, and in the ensuing joviality, the schedule will be forgotten. We know that Einstein always has the last laugh, but this is hilarious: the faster-than-light particles that could have wrecked his relativity theory are no more. It was a mistake in the test results caused by a loose cable. - http://gizmodo.com/5887398 It takes two to tango. The world is modeled by 'abnormal' people. People with 'abnormal' passion. People with 'abnormal' will! -vm He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. - William Blake How does one focus? By avoiding distractions! If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us. "A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so." - M. K. Gandhi There are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots. I saw a man run with the Jaguar...He runs because he is afraid. - Apocalypto After ten years in software industry, I feel ten year obsolete rather than ten year experienced. Can't believe the speed in which technology changes! Having the privilege to work on software for few years, I was feeling experienced until I saw few cloud based solutions. Now I feel obsolete rather than experienced! Dear Procrastinators, If you are reading this, I've done my job. - Sincerely, Distraction. "Every communication is either an extension of love or a call for love." Every attack is a call for help A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again. Chuck Norris can parse HTML with regex! "My online nickname "Xaprb" is my first name typed in QWERTY on a Dvorak keyboard layout. You can contact me like this: SELECT REVERSE( 'moc.brpax@norab');" - xaprb.com Darn computers always do what I tell them to instead of what I want them to do. "Leave each piece of code a little better than you found it." - Boy Scout Rule UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. - Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) One forgives to the degree that one loves. - Francois de La Rochefoucauld In God We Trust. All Others Bring Data. - Business consultant Dr. W. Edwards Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Deming_philosophy_synopsis "How do you attain the skills required to do this while not also learning not to?" - A comment about a mistake someone made. "The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage." - Carrie Jones, "Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear." - Paulo Coelho "Democracies Don't Fight Democracies." "Activities that increase analytical thinking can decrease religious belief." "Nothing discourages the concentration necessary to perform well, more than worrying about the outcome." "Everything is reducible to the motive of self-interest" - François de la Rochefoucauld "When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Difference between Power and Torque: HP is measured by how fast you hit the wall. Torque is measured by how far you move the wall when you hit it. Eat good food. Get enough sleep. Exercise regularly. Get a streesfree job. Travel & Read. Get surrounded by friends & family. Pray & be thankful. Thats it! Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself - Rumi Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice - Ayaan Hirshi Ali Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it into fruit salad. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. - Stephen Covey Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don't need to escape from. - Seth Godin Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world. ---- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_worldwide The exact date of Christ's birth has not been historically established it is not recorded in the Gospels. However, historically, all Christian churches celebrated Christ's birth on January 6 until the fourth century. According to Roman Catholic sources, the date was changed from January 6 to December 25 in order to override a pagan feast dedicated to the birth of the Sun which was celebrated on December 25. At the time Christians used to continue their observance of these pagan festivities. In order to undermine and subdue this pagan practice, the church hierarchy designated December 25 as the official date of Christmas and January 6 as the feast of Epiphany. However, Armenia was not affected by this change for the simple fact that there were no such pagan practices in Armenia, on that date, and the fact that the Armenian Church was not a satellite of the Roman Church. Thus, remaining faithful to the traditions of their forefathers, Armenians have continued to celebrate Christmas on January 6 until today. ---- The ultimate weapon is an educated mind. You can't prevent injustice, violence, corruption & ___etc by creating more laws. You can do it only by self reformation through right understanding of purpose of life. - vm I always say, the way a man treats his car is how he treats himself - The Transporter I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question - Harun Yahya Most problems in life are because of two reasons: we act without thinking or we keep thinking without acting. No amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future. - Umar Ibn al-Khattab If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. I always wondered why somebody didn't do something about that. Then I realized I am somebody. ---- Aaron Swartz was found dead yesterday. Swartz, only 26 years old, was the co-founder of Reddit.com, the co-creator of RSS technology, and the key activist who achieved a stunning defeat of the freedom-crushing SOPA / PIPA bills in the U.S. Congress. "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves" - Aaron Swartz[1986-2013] ----- A moment of patience in moment of anger saves thousand moments of regret. If it is important to you, you will find a way. If if it is not, you will find an excuse. Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act - Albert Einstein I've got nothing agains God... It's the fan club I can't stand. Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so - Noam Chomsky The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. - Dalai Lama Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. - Pema Chodron Everything we hear is an opinion not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective not the truth. - Marcus Aurelius No stress no bombs no homeless no crime or prisons no junk food no external debt no pollution no poverty. And some people call them Primitive. Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture your heart. - Native American Proverb Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Everybody has their own struggle. So be kind. Ladies, if a man says he will fix it, he will. There is no need to remind him every 6 months about it. Your true medicine is food and always has been. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua Cymothoa exigua, or the tongue-eating louse, is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. This parasite enters fish through the gills, and then attaches itself at the base of the fish's tongue...The parasite destroys the fish's tongue, and then attaches itself to the stub of what was once its tongue and becomes the fish's new tongue.The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. -- It is funny how everybody considers honesty a virtue, yet no one wants to hear the truth. Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and the poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful. Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity. - Dany Gokey Be selective in your battles, sometimes peace is better than being right. Elephant calves have to be pretty quick learners. They can stand within 20 minutes of birth and walk within 1 hour. Within 2 days they can keep up with their herd! Running away from your problems is a race you'll never win. Childhood is like being drunk. Everyone remembers what you did, except you. "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain" - John Adams ----- The Clock of Life. The clock of life is wound but once, And no man has the power To tell just when the hands will stop At late or early hour. To lose one's wealth is sad indeed, To lose one's health is more, To lose one's soul is such a loss That no man can restore. The present only is our own, So Live, Love, toil with a will -- Place no faith in 'Tomorrow' -- For the clock may then be still. - Robert H. Smith (1932-1982) ------- We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid - Benjamin Franklin We think we understand the rules when we become adults, but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination - David Lynch How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are? Introspection is productive, rumination is not: it's repetitive & negativistic. Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you critize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. - Hemingway "I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one." - - MAYA ANGELOU There is nothing more erotic than a good coversation. Be a voice, not an echo. A single conversation with a wise person is better than 10 years of study. ~ Chinese Proverb Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. - Buddha Two things define you. Your patience when you have nothing, and your attitude when you have everything. You can never know how to worship unless you know how to love. When you pray, pray like it all depends on God, but when you get through praying, get up and work like it all depends on you. --- The usefulles of the cup, is it's emptiness - Bruce Lee What you allow, is what will continue. "If slaughter houses had glass walls, everyone would be vegiterian" - Paul McCartney. If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal. - Paulo Coelho Life is calling. Where are you? 'Play is the highest form of research.' - Albert Einstein Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood. - Oscar Wild ------------ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Zaitsev Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev (23 March 1915 - 15 December 1991) was a Soviet sniper during World War II, notable particularly for his activities between 10 November and 17 December 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad; during this five-week period he killed 225 soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht and other Axis armies, including 11 enemy snipers. Prior to 10 November, he had already killed 32 Axis soldiers with the standard-issue Mosin-Nagant rifle effective range of 900 meters. Between October 1942 and January 1943, Zaytsev made an estimated 400 kills, some of which were over 1000 meters. --- Simo Hayha nicknamed "White Death" was a Finnish marksman. He acquired the highest recorded number of confirmed sniper kills - 505 - in any major war. In temperatures between -40°C and -20°C. All of Hayha's kills were accomplished in fewer than 100 days - an average of just over five kills per day - at a time of year with very few daylight hours. He preferred to use iron sights rather than telescopic sights to present a smaller target for the enemy (a sniper must raise his head higher when using a telescopic sight), to increase accuracy (a telescopic sight's glass can fog up easily in cold weather), and to aid in concealment (sunlight glare in telescopic sight lenses can reveal a sniper's position). As well as these tactics, he was also known to keep snow in his mouth whilst sniping, to reduce steamy breaths giving away his position in the cold air.[The Soviets' efforts to kill Häyhä included counter-snipers and artillery strikes. -------- @_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print; -- "The Hilux[Toyota] has gained a reputation for exceptional sturdiness and reliability, even during sustained heavy use and/or abuse, and is often referred to as "The Indestructible Truck". This was further reinforced on the BBC motoring show Top Gear, when a 1988 diesel Hilux with 305,775 km on the odometer was subjected to extraordinary abuse. This consisted of driving it down a flight of steps, scraping buildings, crashing headlong into a tree, being washed out to sea, and being submerged in sea water for four hours, driving it through a garden shed, dropping a caravan onto it, hitting it with a wrecking ball, setting its cabin and bed area on fire, and, finally, placing it on top of a 73 m block of apartments that was next destroyed by a controlled demolition. Although it was now suffering from severe structural damage, the truck was still running after being repaired without spare parts, and with only typical tools that would be found in a truck's toolbox, such as screwdrivers, motor oil, and an adjustable wrench. The Hilux currently rests as one of the background decorations in the Top Gear studio." -------- Mongooses also have receptors for acetylcholine that, like the receptors in snakes, are shaped so it is impossible for snake neurotoxin venom to attach to them. The Indian gray mongoose and others are well known for their ability to fight and kill venomous snakes, particularly cobras. They are adept at such tasks due to their agility, thick coats, and acetylcholine receptors, which render them resistant or immune to snake venom. However, they typically avoid the cobra and have no particular affinity for consuming its meat ---- See a mistake as a mistake, not as "my" or "his" mistake. "My" means guilt and "his/her" means anger. - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar The best code is no code at all. - Jeff Atwood, codinghorror.com --- Japan has one of the lowest adult obesity rates in the industrialized world, at only 3 percent. As in Hong Kong, this is mainly due to a healthful diet based around vegetables, fish, rice and noodles. Many Japanese people also stop eating when they feel about 80 percent full, rather than continuing until they can't manage another mouthful. The Japanese are also much less reliant on cars than people in Western countries, preferring to walk whenever possible, and therefore get plenty of exercise. -- Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don't belong. - Mandy Hale You will not be punished for your anger. You will be punished by your anger. - Buddha Dont promise when you are happy. Dont reply when you are angry and dont decide when you are sad. Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting. In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. - Buddha To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. - Thomas paine "There comes a time when silence is betrayal." - Martin Luther King Jr. Anyone can love a rose, but it takes a lot to love a leaf. The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is fear - Gandhi Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly. - Morticia Addams Be thankful for the difficult people in your life, for they have shown you who you do not want to be. -- Seven Dangers To Human Virtue 1. Wealth without work. 2. Pleasure without conscience. 3. Knowledge without character. 4. Business without ethics. 5. Science without humanity. 6. Religion without sacrifice. 7. Politics without principle. ------ "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." ~Greek Proverb -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_(clam) Ming was an ocean quahog clam (Arctica islandica, family Veneridae) and the oldest living animal ever discovered. Judging by the annual growth rings on its shell, Ming was estimated to be 405-410 years old when it was dredged off the coast of Iceland in October 2007. They are uncertain how long the clam (which died before its age was assessed) might have lived had it been left on the ocean floor. The clam was named after the Ming Dynasty, due to its great age. ---- Significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions. http://www.quora.com/NASA/How-necessary-is-the-NASA-program ----- You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day, unless you're busy; then you should sit for an hour. http://www.quora.com/Life/What-is-the-most-profound-yet-short-brief-sentence-phrase-motto-nugget-of-wisdom-aphorism-epigram-quote-youve-ever-heard-or-read Let go or be dragged - Zen proverb The only one you have to accept is yourself. And the only one you have to impress is yourself. - vm Be the change you want to see in the world . - M. K Gandhi A moment of patience in a moment of anger prevents thousand moments of regret. Ali ibn Abi Talib --- --------- The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there. - Robert M. Pirsig We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. - Thomas Merton The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. - African proverb Strong mind discuss ideas, average mind discuss events, weak minds discuss people. - Socrates "'Shubhasya shighram, ashubhasya kalaharanam' - when there will be good desire, we should do it immediately, otherwise later there might be some hindrance and obstacle to it and when there will be evil desire, you should make late to do it, you should not do it immediately." Never push a loyal person to the point where they no longer care. Q: If we all end up dying, what's the purpose of living? A: Indulge me the privilege of rephrasing the question. "If you're going to run out of cake to eat, what's the purpose of eating cake? ---- Slashdot post: Simulations Back Up Theory That Universe Is a Hologram Comment: I have no idea what any of this stuff means, but I'm going to post it on my Facebook and claim that this is what I thought all along anyway. -- Everytime you open a book and read it, a tree smiles knowing there's life after death. A penny saved is a penny earned. People always say why this had to happen to me...why not you? what makes you so special that you excluded from problems? Better yet, who would you suggest? Its not personal, its called life." ~Les Brown "What is to give light must endure burning." - Viktor E. Frankl "Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'." - Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning Quiet people have the loudest minds - Stephen Hawking "Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat." - Jean-Paul Sartre "Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." - Lao-Tze "Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing" - Muhammed Ali "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs He who has a Why to live for can bear any How - Nietzhche When was the last time you did something for the first time? Stop fighting about who created the world and fight against the people who are destroying it - Unknown "When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves." - Viktor E. Frankl "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." - Lao Tzu "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." - Lao Tzu If every 8 year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation. - Dalai Lama "A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer." ------ Name of the rose [movie] Having reached the end of my poor sinner's life...my hair now white...I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony...as to the wondrous and terrible events... I witnessed in my youth...towards the end of the year of Our Lord ___. May God grant me the wisdom and grace...to be the faithful chronicler of the happenings that took place... in a remote abbey in the dark north of Italy. An abbey whose name it seems even now, pious and prudent to omit... ... I never regretted my decision...for I learned from my master much that was wise...and good and true. When at last we parted company, he presented me with his eyeglasses. I was too young, he said... but one day they would serve me well. And in fact, I am wearing them now on my nose as I write these lines. Then he embraced fondly, like a father, and sent me on my way. I never saw him again, and know not what became of him... but I pray always that God received his soul...and forgave the many little vanities to which was driven... by his intellectual pride. And yet, now that I'm an old, old man...I must confess that of all the faces that appear to me out of the past...the one I see most clearly is that of the girl...of whom I have never ceased to dream...these many long years. She was the only earthly love love of my life... yet I never knew nor ever learned... her name. --------- He who lends a book is an idiot, he who returns the book is more of an idiot. - Arabic proverb I got nothin but time. - FF6, Dominic Toretto. If you do not like where you are, move. You are not a tree. "The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda." - Martin Buber "Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way." - Martin Buber "Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?" - Martin Buber -- Crocodiles can potentially live forever. "Senescence" is a term used to describe the gradual deterioration of the body because of aging. It occurs in humans but not in crocodiles. Crocs die only from disease, accidents, starvation, or predation. Sea urchins, lobsters, clams, tortoises, turtles, and alligators also do not age biologically. As crocodiles age, they continue to become bigger and require more food. When that amount of food is unavailable, they will often die from starvation. -- A problem with growing up is we lose ability to imagine nonsense. -vm ---------- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field http://petapixel.com/2013/06/06/a-mind-bending-look-at-the-hubble-ultra-deep-field-photo-of-the-universe/ It all started back in 1996 when a group of astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at an empty patch in the sky close to the Big Dipper in hopes of seeing something, anything. At the time, it was considered to be a risky move, given that demand for use of the telescope was so high. What if the experiment yielded no results? What if nothing but an empty image was the final result? After ten full days of exposing the telescope's CCD camera sensor to this seemingly vacuous patch of sky, a breathtaking image was produced. Over three thousand galaxies appeared in one image some as dots, others as spirals. It was a visual reminder of just how big our universe really is. The photo is called the "Hubble Deep Field" It covers an area which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The experiment was repeated in 2004 with another seemingly empty patch of sky near Orion, and opened the shutter for a whopping 11 days, and that time more than 10,000 galaxies were seen in what is now known as the ultra-deep field. The image which returned after ten days was equivalent in frame to a grain of sand held up to the night sky at arms length. It didn't end there. Last year, NASA scientists created the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, which has an equivalent exposure time to 23 days and features. It's the "deepest image of the sky ever obtained" that reveals "the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen". Even in this narrower field of view, astronomers were able to detect about 5,500 galaxies. ------ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_industry_of_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo As of 2010, the conflict resource fueling the world's deadliest war is gold in the Congo...no jewellery industry standard exists for verifying gold origination, as it does for diamonds (though jeweler's total outlay on gold is five times that on diamonds) After Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi's successful invasion of eastern and southeastern DRC in the Second Congo War, a great deal of what the UN labeled "mass scale looting" took root. While initial invasion tactics were still being worked out, military commanders were making business deals with foreign companies for the Congo's vast mineral reserves. Between September 1998 and August 1999 stockpiles of minerals, agricultural products, timber, and livestock were illegally confiscated from Congolese businesses, piled onto trucks, and sold as exports from the confiscating countries. Rwandan and Ugandan troops forced local businesses to shut their doors by robbing and harassing civilian owners. Cars were stolen to such an extent that Uganda showed a 25 percent increase in automobiles in 1999. --- Our society teaches people to overvalue innovation so as to distract them from more important things such as freedom, democracy, and giving everyone a comfortable life - RMS -- http://www.wired.com/2014/05/absurd-creature-horsehair-worm/ -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondola_no_Uta life is brief. fall in love, maidens before the crimson bloom fades from your lips before the tides of passion cool within you, for those of you who know no tomorrow ... life is brief fall in love, maidens before the raven tresses begin to fade before the flame in your hearts flicker and die for those to whom today will never return ---- "There are only 2 hard problems in computer science: Cache invalidation. Naming things. And off-by-one errors" --- Tardigrades(Water bear) are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal, including: Being heated for a few minutes to 151°C. Cooling to 272°C for a few minutes. Very high pressures, more than 1,200 times atmospheric pressure. Vacuum of open space and solar radiation combined for at least 10 days. Some species can withstand pressure of 6,000 atmospheres, which is nearly six times the pressure of water in the deepest ocean trench, the Mariana trench. Survive in a dry state is nearly 10 years. Can withstand 1000 times more radiation than other animals. Their lowered water state provides fewer reactants for the ionizing radiation. One factor for this is their ability to efficiently repair damage to their DNA resulting from that exposure. They can undergo chemobiosis, a cryptobiotic response to high levels of environmental toxins. They are the first known animal to survive in space. For 10 days, groups of tardigrades were exposed to the hard vacuum of outer space, or vacuum and solar UV radiation. After being rehydrated back on Earth, over 68% of the subjects protected from high-energy UV radiation revived within 30min ----- Legendary shooter Jerry Miculek used his special Smith & Wesson - created in his honor - to shoot a target 1000 yards (914.4 meters) away - a new world record. Notice that it takes about 4 seconds for the bullet to reach its target. Amazing. Jerry had to aim to the sky 150-feet above the balloon in order to hit it. --- Edward McGivern was a famous exhibition shooter, shooting instructor and author of the book Fast and Fancy Revolver Shooting. McGivern performed extensive research into the art of handgun shooting, particularly with the double action revolver. Ed McGivern is renowned as one of the best handgunners that ever lived. Mr. McGivern was capable of many amazing shooting feats. To name just a few: He could break six simultaneously hand thrown clay pigeons (standard trap targets) in the air before they hit the ground. He could hit a tin can hand thrown 20 ft. in the air five times before it hit the ground. He could drive a tack or nail into wood by shooting it. He could shoot the spots out of playing cards at 18 feet, or even split a playing card edge on. He could shoot a dime on the fly. ------------ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Harrison_%28sniper%29#Ballistics_and_use_of_environment_and_equipment_to_achieve_the_aiming_solution The longest ever recorded sniper kill was shot from 2,475 meters(1.54 miles) away by British CoH Craig Harrison. The bullet took over 6 seconds to reach its target. -- The Miura Fold consists of tessellated parallelograms and is used in the solar panels of satellites. A folded Miura fold can be packed into a very compact shape, its thickness restricted only by the thickness of the folded material. The fold can also be unpacked in just one motion by pulling on opposite ends of the folded material, and likewise folded again by pushing the two ends back together --- The Hercules beetle is the most famous and the largest of the rhinoceros beetles. Their title is well deserved, with some able to lift more than 850 times (up to 8 kg lifted) their own weight and some males, rarely, reaching 17 cm (6.75 inches) in length. In 2007, a bar-tailed godwit made the longest nonstop bird migration ever recorded. In nine days, it flew 7,145 miles (11,500 kilometers) from its breeding ground in Alaska to New Zealand without stopping for food or drink. By the end of the epic journey, the bird had lost more than 50 percent of its body weight. Hummingbirds are among the smallest of birds, most species measuring in the 7.5-13 cm. They hover in mid-air at rapid wing flapping rates, typically around 50 times per second, but possibly as high as 200 times per second, allowing them also to fly at speeds exceeding 15 m/s backwards or upside down. Their heart rate can reach as high as 1,260 beats per minute, with a breathing rate of 250 breaths per minute, even at rest. It get power from both the down and upstroke. This means it can do things no other bird can do - stay perfectly still in space, fly backwards, forwards, sideways, upsidedown, and everything in between. -- -- A superacid is an acid with an acidity greater than that of 100% pure sulfuric acid. Commercially available superacids include triflic acid, and fluorosulfuric acid, both of which are about a thousand times stronger than sulfuric acid. Carborane acid is a superacid one million times stronger than sulfuric acid. The strongest known superacid is fluoroantimonic acid, 10^16(20 quintillion) times stronger than 100% sulfuric acid. Dissolves glass and many other materials and protonates nearly all organic compounds (such as everything in your body). This acid is stored in PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) containers. -- In the case of Hiroshima, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was an incredibly crude and inefficient weapon. When it exploded, about 99 percent of the uranium that was supposed to undergo this chain reaction, didn't. It just blew apart in the air, and a very small percentage, maybe two percent of the fissile material, actually detonated. Now to imagine how small an amount that is, seven-tenths of a gram of uranium is about the size of a peppercorn. Seven-tenths of a gram weighs less than a dollar bill. So even though this weapon was unbelievably inefficient, and almost 99 percent of the uranium had nothing to do with the destruction of Hiroshima, it was a catastrophic explosion. -- At what point does a person get 'old'? When you have more regrets than dreams. --- http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html Julian Assange: Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world. Which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort of say, well what are your philosophical axioms for this? And I say I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way. And so that avoids, then, getting into further unhelpful discussions about why you want to do something. It is enough that I do. So in considering how unjust acts are caused and what tends to promote them and what promotes just acts I saw that human beings are basically invariant. That is that their inclinations and biological temperament haven't changed much over thousands of years and so therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have? And what do they know? And "have" is something that is fairly hard to influence, so that is what resources do they have at their disposal? And how much energy they can harness, and what are the supplies and so on. But what they know can be affected in a nonlnear way because when one person conveys information to another they can convey on to another and another and so on in a way that nonlinear and so you can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. And therefore you can change the behaviour of many people with a small amount of information. So the question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behaviour which is just? And disincentivise behaviour which is unjust? So all around the world there are people observing different parts of what is happening to them locally. And there are other people that are receiving information that they haven't observed first hand. And in the middle there are people who are involved in moving information from the observers to the people who will act on information. These are three separate problems that are all coupled together. I felt that there was a difficulty in taking observations and putting them in an efficient way into a distribution system which could then get this information to people who could act upon it. And so you can argue that companies like Google are involved, for example, in this "middle" business of taking... of moving information from people who have it to people who want it. The problem I saw was that this first step was crippled. And often the last step as well when it came to information that governments were inclined to censor. We can look at this whole process as the Fourth Estate. Or just as produced by the Fourth Estate. And so you have some kind of... pipeline... and... So I have this description which is... which is partly derived from my experiences in quantum mechanics about looking at the flow of particular types of information which will effect some change in the end. The bottleneck to me appeared to me to be primarily in the acquisition of information that would go on to produce changes that were just. In a Fourth Estate context the people who acquire information are sources. People who work information and distribute it are journalists and publishers. And people who act on it... is everyone. So that's a high level construct, but of course it then comes down to practically how do you engineer a system that solves that problem? And not just a technical system, but a total system. So WikiLeaks was and is an attempt - although still very young - at a total system. ----------- As I walked out the door towards the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison-Nelson Mandela --- Sannakji(food) is Korean raw(live) baby octopus, which is particularly deadly because it continues to move after it has died even after it has been chopped up into small pieces. Even when the limbs have been removed from the body and covered in sesame oil, its suction caps still conserve their gripping power so they are able to latch onto your mouth and throat, becoming a choking hazard for novice eaters and causing asphyxiation. Then again sannakji connoisseurs actually get off on the sensation of the octupus' legs attempting to climb back up the throat. --- Only when the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, the last fish has been caught, and all the air is unsafe to breath will we realise that we cannot eat money. - Cree Indian Prophecy -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_huntsman_spider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/2015/01/13/84921web.jpg Size of marize giants --- Voronoi_diagram, Tessellation. Whales, penguins & seals - diving distance, over fishing, Ice man Wim Hoff, free Solo climbing Allex Hannold/Dan Osman, ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes --- Dean Karnazes: the man who can run for ever. Most runners have to stop when they reach their lactate threshold, but Dean Karnazes' muscles never tire: He can run for three days and nights without stopping. Dean Karnazes has never had a cramp despite running hundreds of miles The 53-year-old has a rare condition which allows his body to rapidly flush lactic acid from his system - before it builds up in his muscles It's allowed him to compete in the toughest endurance races in the world He has completed fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty states in 2006 Karnazes also ran a marathon to the South Pole in temperatures of -13F He sprinted 350 miles in just 80 hours and 44 minutes without sleep -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett James Stephen "Steve" Fossett(1944-2007) was an American businessman, and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer. He was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon. He made his fortune in the financial services industry, and was best known for many world records, including five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth: as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett set 116 records in five different sports, 60 of which still stood when he disappeared. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes Howard Robard Hughes, Jr.(1905-1976) was an American business tycoon, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist. During his lifetime, he was one of the wealthiest people in the world. Hughes was also one of the most influential aviators and aviation tycoons in history: he set multiple world air speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 "Hercules" (better known to history as the "Spruce Goose" aircraft), and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines, which later merged with American Airlines. Hughes is also remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. -- Mantis Shrimp: Scientists have discovered a new mode of sight in a most unusual creature: a primitive marine crustacean known as the mantis shrimp. Until now, it was believed that animals could see only the intensity, color and -- in a few species -- the linear polarization of light. Researchers showed that the mantis shrimp, perceives what's known as circular polarized light. They are the first organisms to demonstrate this ability. Circular polarized light -- CPL for short -- has photons traveling in parallel, rotating wavelengths. A mix of photoreceptors and filters let them see 100,000 different colors -- 10 times more than can be detected by humans. They have 16 visual pigments (instead of 3 - Red, blue & yellow). They have three different focal points in each eye. so it has hexnocular(six eye) vision to tell how far away things are. Have ability to move each eye independently. Well-known for their record breaking punch... When unleashed on a potential meal like a crab or a snail, the peacock mantis shrimp's 2/10-inch-wide fist accelerates faster than a .22-caliber bullet, reaching speeds of 45mph underwater and smacking its prey with 200 pounds of force. "We used to call them shrimps from Mars, because their biology is so different from any other animal" ----- Knowledge is a fundamentally good thing: Learning more about the world is intrinsically valuable, because it adds that much more depth and nuance and color to our experience of life. -- There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" --- Once more into the fray Into the last good fight I'll ever know Live and die on this day... Live and die on this day... --The Grey ---- Walking on land is so mainstream - HipsterJesus --- Peter Druker: What gets measured gets improved... If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate in to hardwork. A decision is a commitment to action. No decision has, in fact, been made until carrying it out has become somebody's responsibility. Productivity is not the responsibility of the worker but of the manager. Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. Just go out and make yourself useful. First, put down on a piece of paper a "boss list," everyone to whom you are accountable. Next, go to each person on the list and ask, "What do I do and what do my people do that helps you do your job?" And, "What do we do that makes your life more difficult?" The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial. --- Be proactive. Begin with the end in mind. Put first things first. Think win-win. Seek first to understand and then to be understood. Synergize. Sharpen the saw. -7Habits As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison -Nelson Mandela It takes a village to raise a child. -- According to Michael Onyebuchi Eze, the core of ubuntu can best be summarized as follows: "'A person is a person through other people' strikes an affirmation of one's humanity through recognition of an 'other' in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the 'other' becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The 'I am' is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance." --- "My son took a bullet on his chest and was injured and I cried.. A cricketer took a ball on his chest and was injured the entire nation cried and prayed.. My son didn't get a bullet proof jacket BUT he fought... A film star didn't get the desired jacket, he didn't shoot and it was all over the news" -- http://www.idealistrevolution.org/your-lifestyle-has-already-been-designed-the-real-reason-for-the-forty-hour-workweek/ I'm noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing. The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time. I have a lot more money and a lot less time. I wouldn't have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it's out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days! The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I'd have more free time. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours(the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have. Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom. The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business' most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something. Unless you're a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed. The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by. -- Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "Courage is the most important of the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently." - Maya Angelou -- "More proof that god exists....why is the proof important again?" - Mathai Baker Fenn on "Three year long botanical study confirms Ramayan is not a myth" The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer, because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4-0.7°C. This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. -- A frustrated software engineer in church shouts, "Why always me, God, why?". A blind person just beside him assertively says, "Thank you God." Engineer - "Why do you thank him, he made you blind, you can't see, any beautiful thing in life" Blind person - "Can you? " -- "You have zero security. Get over it." - Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems CEO "Using SOAP for RPC is orthogonal to the SOAP protocol binding." Sigh! -- What is the difference between "I like you" and "I love you"? Budha: "When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily" -- Income - Expenses = Savings <-- Wrong Income - Savings = Expenses <-- Right "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it." -- The maxim that "If you haven't lost track of how many languages you've learned, you haven't learned enough of them yet" applies to both programming languages and natural languages alike. - Tom Christiansen "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." - Michael Pollan --- E pur si muove! (And yet it moves) "This is the celebrated Galileo, who was in the inquisition for six years, and put to the torture, for saying, that the earth moved. The moment he was set at liberty, he looked up to the sky and down to the ground, and, stamping with his foot, in a contemplative mood, said, Eppur si move; that is, still it moves, meaning the earth." - Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, The Italian Library. ---- "We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile." - Star Trek "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" - Elie Wiesel -- Portuguese man o' war: The Atlantic Portuguese man o' war, also known as the man-of-war, blue bottle, or floating terror, is a marine hydrozoan of the family Physaliidae found in the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its venomous tentacles can deliver a painful (and sometimes fatal) sting. Anyone unfamiliar with the biology of the venomous Portuguese man-of-war would likely mistake it for a Jellyfish. Not only is it not a Jellyfish, it's not even an "it", but a "they". The Portuguese man-of-war is a siphonophore, an animal made up of a colony of organisms called zooids or polyps working together. These polyps are attached to one another and physiologically integrated to the extent that they are unable to survive independently, and therefore have to work together and function like a so-called individual animal. The man-of-war comprises four separate polyps. It gets its name from the uppermost polyp, a gas-filled bladder, which sits above the water and somewhat resembles an old warship at full sail. The tentacles are the man-of-war's second organism. These long, thin tendrils can extend 50 meters. They are covered in venom-filled nematocysts used to paralyze and kill fish and other small creatures. Muscles in the tentacles draw prey up to a polyp containing the digestive organisms. A fourth polyp contains the reproductive organisms. They have no independent means of propulsion and either drift on the currents or catch the wind with their pneumatophores. To avoid threats on the surface, they can deflate their air bags and briefly submerge. -- Cataract is the third biggest cause of blindness. Religion and Politics remain the first two. -- Year Zero The idea behind Year Zero is that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. All history of a nation or people before Year Zero is deemed largely irrelevant, as it will ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up. In Cambodia, so-called New People-teachers, artists, and intellectuals-were especially singled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero. -- "Airports have seen more sincere kisses than the wedding halls, and the walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of churches." -- "It was the hour before the gods awake Across the path of the Divine event The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone In her unlit temple of Eternity, Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge ... A fathomless zero occupied the world" - Savitri, Sri Aurobindo -- Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? - Brian Kernighan "man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others." - Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End -- http://ps-ax.org/docs/misc/ikigai.jpg http://ps-ax.org/docs/misc/super-charge-your-life.html -- Benjamin P. Hardy If your daily behaviors are consistently low quality, what do you expect your life's output to be? How you do anything is how you do everything. The more evolved you become, the more focused you must be on those few things which matter most. The more successful you become, the less you can justify low quality. [your] days must consistently be spent on high quality activities. - You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. - Greg McKeown A lot of people don't do well simply because they major in minor things. - Jim Rohn -- "Most procrastination is caused by either fear or conflict" If your life requires willpower, you haven't fully determined what you want. The willpower approach doesn't focus on changing the environment, but instead, on increasing personal efforts to overcome the current environment. Eventually you succumb to your environment despite your greatest efforts to resist. If you're required to use willpower: You haven't made up your mind. Your desire (your "why") for your goals isn't strong enough. You haven't fully committed to what you're going to do. Your environment opposes your goals. Thus, you haven't created an environment that makes your goals inevitable. - Your life is a reflection of you. If you want to change your life, you have to change yourself. If you want healthy relationships, you need to become the kind of person that has healthy relationships. If you're not committed, you rely on willpower. You remain indecisive. You leave things up to chance. If you're not willing to change, then you aren't committed to anything beyond what you currently have. When you're committed to something, you will be and do what is required for the attainment of that thing. You'll stop wondering and start building. -- Productivity is about intention plus attention. The problem with most people is that they're either doing one or the other. Having intention without attention means you're set on a specific goal, but aren't looking at the steps to get there. Having attention without intention means you're just spinning your wheels with aimless busywork. A framework is a tool that will put these two components to work together; this could be an app, planner, notebook, whatever. Put your goal into your framework, and the goal will be broken down into actionable pieces as it works its way through. -- It's always Day 1 - Jeff Bezos - No matter how good, how experienced, how graceful they were on the wave, every surfer ended their ride in precisely the same way: By falling. There's no other possible way to wrap up a ride. Some had fun with their fall, while others tried desperately to avoid it. Feel it all. Because feeling is what tells you you're alive. ----------- "If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need." - Warren Buffett -- What is a Scientologist? According to their official literature: "Scientology is a religion that offers a precise path leading to a complete and certain understanding of one's true spiritual nature and one's relationship to self, family, groups, Mankind, all life forms, the material universe, the spiritual universe and the Supreme Being. -- Motivated Reasoning - The reasoning process is more like a lawyer defending a client than a judge or scientist seeking the truth. - Paul Erdos Erdos was a mathematical prodigy. At three he entertained his mother's friends by multiplying three-digit numbers in his head, and at four he discovered negative numbers. "I told my mother," he recalled, "that if you take 250 from 100, you get -150. Before Erdos died, on September 20, 1996, at the age of eighty-three, he had managed to think about more problems than any other mathematician in history. He wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers(a figure that remains unsurpassed) many of them monumental, and all of them substantial. With 511 co-authors, Erdos collaborated with more people than any other mathematician in history. Erdos's prolific output with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdos number, the number of steps in the shortest path between a mathematician and Erdos in terms of co-authorships. To communicate with Erdos you had to learn his language. "When we met," said Martin Gardner, the mathematical essayist, "his first question was 'When did you arrive?' I looked at my watch, but Graham whispered to me that it was Erdos's way of asking, 'When were you born?'" Erdos often asked the same question another way: "When did the misfortune of birth overtake you?" His language had a special vocabulary--not just "the SF" and "epsilon" but also "bosses" (women), "slaves" (men), "captured" (married), "liberated" (divorced), "recaptured" (remarried), "noise" (music), "poison" (alcohol), "preaching" (giving a mathematics lecture), "Sam" (the United States), and "Joe" (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had "died," Erdos meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left," the person had died. -- People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. -- Zawinski's Law -- "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." This is not about software bloat, it's about the realities of the market. People may say they want a simple product, but when you look at actual usage, the things that get used are the things that allow users to do more, and they end up replacing less-capable tools. Part of the problem is that "simple" is a confusing word. Like "cleave," it can mean two almost completely opposite things. What people want is something that simplifies complex tasks. That's "the good simple," and it requires a great deal of complexity to do right. What some people interpret it as, though, is that people want something simplistic, or minimalist. This concept may have some niche appeal, but on the whole it's the wrong kind of "simple" to focus on when designing a product. No matter how good your work is, the new feature requests keep coming in. -- Initially, mountains were mountains, rivers were rivers and trees were trees; then, mountains were not mountains, rivers were not rivers and trees were not trees. Now, once again, mountains were mountains, rivers were rivers and trees were trees. -- Mandana Misra Vs. Shri Adi Shankara While trying to find the house of Mandana, Sankara asked for directions and was told the following: "You will find a home at whose gates there are a number of caged parrots discussing abstract topics like 'Do the Vedas have self-validity or do they depend on some external authority for their validity? Are karmas capable of yielding their fruits directly, or do they require the intervention of God to do so? Is the world eternal, or is it a mere appearance?' Where you find the caged parrots discussing such abstruse philosophical problems, you will know that you have reached Mandana's place." -- If you get something free on the internet, YOU are the product. ---- Longest confirmed sniper kill On June 22, 2017 the Globe and Mail reported that two snipers assigned to Joint Task Force 2, Canada's elite special forces unit, had shot an Islamic State fighter in Iraq at a distance of 3,540 meters The sniper team was stationed on top of a highrise building when it took the shot, which took almost ten seconds to reach its target. The sniper and his spotter had used a McMillan TAC-50 .50 heavy caliber sniper rifle. The unnamed soldier who killed the IS militant used a McMillan TAC-50 sniper rifle, from an elevated position. Its manufacturer says its effective firing range is 1,800 metres, around half the distance the Canadian sniper managed. Although a .50 caliber sniper rifle bullet can fly as far as five miles, a host of factors including gravity, wind speed and direction, altitude, barometric pressure, humidity and even the Coriolis Effect act upon the bullet as it travels. The farther and slower a bullet flies, the more Earth's gravity will pull the bullet downward. This is known as "bullet drop". In most shooting shooting situations, bullet drop is only a matter of a few inches or more. The Canadian snipers, on the other hand, had to deal with a phenomenal amount of bullet drop: at 3,450 meters, the bullet would be expected to drop 6,705 inches! As the bullet is traveling subsonic at a spend of 940 feet per second, the bullet is diving an average of nearly two inches per foot of forward travel, with the problem getting much worse as distance increases. To counteract the staggering amount of drop, being on a highrise building, or hilltop was a must. The rest of the drop correction had to be done within the rifle's scope, which can be adjusted for drop, and a scope mount that was angled upward for extreme long distance shooting. Windage: At 400 yards, a .50 caliber bullet will be nudged 2.5 inches off its path by a five mile an hour wind. At 3,800 yards that balloons to an incredible 366 inches. Other environmental factors played a hand in the shot. Air pressure (generally a function of altitude), temperature, and humidity are factors most shooters at ranges of 500 yards or less rarely encounter, become major issues at 3,800 meters. These factors are mitigated by the use of wind sensors, barometric pressure readers, and a knowledge of local weather conditions. To complicate matters, these conditions may change so that a shot taken on a cold morning will be much different in the heat of the afternoon. Earth itself, and the position of the shooter and target on the globe become factors at long range. The Coriolis Effect dictates that bullets shot in the northern hemisphere drift to the right, while those shot in the southern hemisphere drift to the left, and this phenomenon increases the farther one gets to the poles. Furthermore, shooting east with the rotation of the earth will cause bullets to strike high, while shooting west will cause the same bullet to strike low. And from that distance you actually have to account for the curvature of the Earth. The sniper had to point his rifle at a spot slightly higher than London's Shard skyscraper, which measures 310 metres to its tip, in order to hit his mark The barrel rifling, a spiral-like pattern that makes the bullet spin in flight, stabilizing it, imparts "spin drift.". A rifle with a right-hand spiral twist will send a bullet up to ten inches to the right at 1,000 yards. The average man-sized target is just twenty-four inches wide, leaving zero room for error in a two mile shot. In taking their record-breaking shot, the Canadian sniper team had to consider all of these factors - merely misjudging one would have caused a clean miss - and it is an incredible testament to their skill that they were successful. --- Morality, Sustainability, Philosophy. "Dissent is the safety valve of democracy and if you don't allow these safety valves, it will burst," a bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra said. It is not about them. It never was. It is about us. Focus on how YOU can become a better person. -vm What if I told you that the left wing and the right wing belong to the same bird. Madness, as you know, is a lot like gravity. All it takes is a little push. - The Jocker, Batman