What is/are your favorite quote/s?

From Epictetus' Discourses:

What kind of a man do you suppose Heracles would have become if it hadn’t been for the famous lion, and the hydra, the stag, the boar, and the wicked and brutal men whom he drove away and cleared from the earth? What would he have turned his hand to if nothing like that had existed? Isn’t it plain that he would have wrapped himself up in a blanket and gone to sleep?

First of all, then, he would surely never have become a Heracles if he had slumbered the whole of his life away in such luxury and tranquility; and even if he had, what good would that have been to him? What would have been the use of his arms and of all his strength, endurance, and nobility of mind if such circumstances and opportunities hadn’t been there to rouse him and exercise him?

I just find it a nice reminder in personal adversity that facing our challenges gives us an opportunity to become better than we were.

"Think for yourself and allow others the privilege of doing so too." -Voltaire

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

• Kurt Vonnegut

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard no horse sing a song. - Louis Armstrong

That one floats through my head every time I see a pair of edgelords warring over the genre of a song in the comment section.

Warning: Spoilers from Peter Watt's Blindsight ahead.

Seriously, this is pretty much the book's big reveal.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.

And it's fighting back.

*

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

*

The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking neurological bureaucracy.

I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they're saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.

I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say "I do not exist" would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

"Wherever you go, there you are." --Buckaroo Banzai

"Do your work, then step back. The only way to serenity." -- Tao te Ching

"In a hundred years, who's gonna care?" -- Sarah Conner's co-worker

These three quotes are getting me through a lot of Nonsense & Bullshit (tm) this year.

"If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor."

"A witty saying proves nothing."

• Voltaire

"Life is like a baboon's ass: colorful and full of shit."
― Anonymous

My grandmother said, "Never do, write or say anything you don't want everyone to learn".

She also said, "Never inconvenience another when you aren't willing to inconvenience yourself".

This is from the speech given by former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva before he turned himself in on April 7th, 2018 on charges of corruption and money laundering. A judge has just ordered for him to be released because the charges were false and politically motivated.

There's no use in trying to stop my ideas. They're already in the air and you can't imprison them! There's no use in trying to stop my dreams, because when I stop dreaming, I'll be dreaming through your minds and dreams! There's no point in thinking everything's going to stop the day Lula has a heart attack. That's nonsense! Because my heart will be beating through yours, and there are millions of hearts! The powerful can kill one, two, or a hundred roses. But they'll never stop the arrival of spring, and our fight is in search of spring!

- How are you, sir?
- Better than yesterday, worse than tomorrow!

Grandpa, while dealing with severe neurological issues

I recently finished Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and as someone who can be very nostalgic and quick to hate when beloved things change, I really loved this passage. I bolded the part that feels like a quote.

The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

“It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.”

― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

I always find new favorites, but here's a few I like right now:

I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do.

Jana Stanfield

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein

"Be excellent to each other." - Bill S. Preston, Esq. (also Abraham Lincoln)

Oh, I have two!

I know this one is tried and true, but when I first saw it, it was brand spanking new. I found it in a newspaper and placed it on the refrigerator. I eventually rewrote it to have "I" statements instead of "you" statements,

"If I always do what I have always done, I will always get what I have always got."

I try to remember this when I find that I am in a rut so that I can do something new and different.

And this one from Tacitus because to me it so aptly describes the placation of our society.

"The following winter [A.D. 79] was spent in very beneficial consultations. For in order that the scattered and barbaric Britons, a people ready for war, might be accustomed to pleasure by means of peace and relaxation, Agricola, by praising the enthusiastic and scolding the lazy, urged on individuals and assisted communities to construct temples, market places, and homes… Gradually the Britons yielded to the enticing vices: the covered porticoes, the baths, and the elegance of banquets. And this condition was called “civilization” among simple Britons, although it was part of their slavery."
Tacitus, Agricola 21

"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out."
Carl Sagan

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Richard Feynman.

"Ya gotta believe!"
Tug McGraw

“Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.”

Patrick Rothfuss, the Name of the Wind. I always liked this quote. There's never a good reason to be an asshole to someone.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

― Stanley Kubrick

Why is this in ~music? It also needs some tags like ask.survey.