Quotes
One of the fondest memories of my Granddad Nelson was trading quotes regularly over email. Sadly I lost the email archive when I went on my mission, but it has continued to be an interest of mine. I hope you enjoy my collection of quotes. A bit of everything from religion to politics to leadership.
Adolescence is when you dream of being a superhero and come to understand your own worthlessness, both at once.
I want to call back
the blackberry flowers
that have fallen
though pear blossoms remainThe poet Li Qing-jao knew the pain of regretting words that have already fallen from our lips and can never be called back. But she was wise enough to remember that even though those words are gone, there are still new words waiting to be said, like the pear blossoms.
The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.
Anyone can change the world… But to change it for the better—that’s always the challenge.
Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to. I am this and this and this, but definitely not that and that and that.
Wives should live longer than husbands. Women [are] more complete inside themselves. They [are] also better at living in their children. They [are] never as solitary as a man alone.
If I had any part of you in me… I would not have needed to marry you to become a complete person.
You keep thinking that death is the most terrible thing that can happen to a person, but to God, death just means you’re coming home a few moments ahead of schedule. To God, the dreadful outcome of a human life is when that person embraces sin and rejects the joy that God offers. So of all the millions who might die in a war, each individual life is tragic only if it ends in sin.
There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally.
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them… I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.
It’s not a failure… It’s just the simple fact that until you think of a thing, you haven’t thought of it yet.
Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they’d leave me alone.
Marriage meant that you had to live with the fact that your spouse’s foibles would rub off on the kids.
God gives us the freedom to do great evil, if we choose. Then he uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what he chooses.
Good is an infinitely recursive term—it can’t be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it’s better than bad, though why it’s better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.
She said to him, Depend on me, lean on me, do what I tell you to do, and I’ll make you a great man. You said to him, Stand on your own, make up your own mind, you already are a man, and maybe you’ll make yourself into a great man by and by
My needs are simple and few... Food. Clothing. A comfortable place to sleep. And no idiots.
That’s what parenting is, indoctrinating your children in the social patterns that you want them to live by. The intellectuals have no qualms about using the schools to indoctrinate our children in their foolishness.
The thing with brothers is, you’re supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief, God uses it to serve his own righteous purposes.
…doing anything is usually a mistake. And so is doing nothing. Almost everything is a mistake.
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
I always felt such pity for you humans because you could only think of one thing at a time and your memories were so imperfect and... now I realize that just getting through the day without killing somebody can be an achievement.
It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.
Any animal is willing to kill the Other… But the higher beings include more and more living things within their self-story, until at last there is no Other. Until the needs of others are more important than any private desires. The highest beings of all are the ones who are willing to pay any personal cost for the good of those who need them.
power is worthless without boundaries and the self-control to respect them
You don’t grow up until you stop worrying about other people’s purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.
A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.
Respect is always a pretense… It begins as a game of pretending, and then as the players come to know each other, it can turn into real respect, or it can remain pretense forever, because nobody is worthy of it.
If you tell what you know, everybody is wiser. If you keep a secret, then everyone is a fool.
Don’t be one of the scurrying, struggling ants. Be the shoe.
Humans are not designed to be alone. It’s in our genes. We’re social beings. Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association.
brave and foolish are very near to being synonyms
[The] only teacher who’s worth anything to you is your enemy.
You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake
