Inside Out
Notes on seeking wisdom and crafting software

Quotes

Here is a collection of my favorite quotes.

◼️ Updated Nov 2023.

Conflict is inevitable but combat is optional.

  • Max Lucado in the book “When God Whispers Your Name”

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.

  • Haruki Murakami in the book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity, but I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

  • Rabindranath Tagore

The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.

  • Naval Ravikanth

I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.”

  • Richard Feynman

Heart Like A River

If you pour a handful of salt into cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to cook, wash and drink. The river is immense, and has the capacity to receive, embrace and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.

So the big question is: how we help our hearts grow?

  • Thich Nhat Hanh in the book How to Love.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Time is the most important asset.
Time does not equal money.
Time equals life.
And you only have one chance to make it right.

Every human being is fighting a battle inside themselves.
It’s your obligation to help and inspire them.
Regardless of what you do, you can always inspire others to do good.

Nobody is better than you.
And you’re not better than anybody else.
Be humble.

Being in the comfort zone is wonderful, but nothing ever grows there.
Keep studying.
Keep creating.

Haters will come if you have the audacity to build something new.
Don’t let them define you.
Don’t let them stop you.
Just block them and keep going.

Don’t expect others to make you happy.
You are the only one responsible for your happiness.
Don’t wait until friday to enjoy life.
Joy should be present in everything you do.

Be kind to your parents.
They gave up many things for you.
Having hundreds of people admiring you is worthless, if you’re not admired by your own family.

Don’t fear the unknown. Fear knowing everything.
Life is too damn short and every day counts.
Do what you wanna do and do it now.
Tick-tock don’t stop.
Tick-tock don’t wait.

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.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

  • Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet

When I die, I shall breathe back the breath that made me live. I shall give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and wasn’t. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I shall give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the life I loved, the breath I breathed.

  • Ursula Le Guin in the book Tehanu

A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.”

  • Merlin Sheldrake in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

  • John Gardner in Personal Renewal, 1990

At the end of every road you meet yourself.

  • S. N. Behrman

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

  • Neils Bohr

What I cannot create, I do not understand.
Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.

But it is said: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. The choice is yours: to go or wait.'
'And it is also said,’ answered Frodo: ‘Go not to the Elves for counsel for they will answer both no and yes.'
'Is it indeed?’ laughed Gildor. ‘Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.’

  • J.R.R Tolkien in The Ring Sets Out

Stay close to people who feel like sunshine.

  • Anonymous

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

  • Invictus, a poem by William Earnest Henley, 1875

The eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us. If all but myself were blind, I should want neither fine clothes, fine houses, nor fine furniture.

  • Benjamin Franklin

The problem with hoarding [ideas] is you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating by on the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up.

  • Paul Arden in the book It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of the intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child, a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
to know that one life has breathed easier
because you lived here.
This is to have succeeded.

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

.stcaf eht evah uoy fi tnavelerri er’yeht dna ,drocer a ton er’yeht ,noitaterpretni na tsuj er’yehT .detrotsid eb nac seiromem dnA .rac a fo roloc eht egnahc nac ti ;moor a fo epahs eht egnahc nac yromeM

  • by Christopher Nolan/Jonathan Nolan, Memento (2000)

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

  • by Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless (1992)

Never say of anything, “I have lost it”; but, “I have returned it.”
Is your child dead? It is returned.
Is your wife dead? She is returned.
Is your estate taken away? Well, and is not that likewise returned?
”But he who took it away is a bad man.”
What difference is it to you who the giver assigns to take it back?
While he gives it to you to possess, take care of it; but don’t view it as your own, just as travelers view a hotel.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, My Father, let my country awake.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And---which is more---you’ll be a Man, my son!

  • from IF, by Rudyard Kipling

“Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.”

“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

  • Page 214, “The Zahir” by Paulo Coelho

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

  • from Dune by Frank Herbert

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

That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.

When the subject (the ‘I’) thinks that it is perfect, it questions the world. If it thinks that the world is perfect, it questions itself. The former leads to stress and the latter to realization.

  • Ramanujam MK

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

If you have hard work to do,
Do it now.
Today the skies are clear and blue,
Tomorrow clouds may come in view,
Yesterday is not for you;
Do it now.

If you have a song to sing.
Sing it now.
Let the tones of gladness ring
Clear as song of bird in spring.
Let each day some music bring;
Sing it now.

If you have kind words to say,
Say them now.
Tomorrow may not come your way,
Do a kindness while you may,
Loved ones will not always stay;
Say them now.

If you have a smile to show,
Show it now.
Make hearts happy, roses grow,
Let the friends around you know
The love you have before they go;
Show it now.

  • Anonymous

“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some; it is in everyone.

And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

  • in “Return to Love” by Marianne Williamson

“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere:

A lily of a day,
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.

In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures, life may perfect be.”

  • Ben Johnson

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful, or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

  • the movie “A Walk to Remember(2002)”, (original source: The Bible)

If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

  • Mary Engelbreit

To follow the path:

look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

“Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: A desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”

  • Muhammad Ali

“Fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round - remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.”

  • James Corbett

“If you ever want something badly, let it go. If it comes back to you then it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never yours to begin with”

What’s the use of worrying? It never was worth while.

So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag.

And smile, smile, smile.

  • George Asaf (George H. Powell)

We need to worry about the future, since that is where we are going
to spend most of our time.

  • Mark Twain

“Love the Heart which Hurts ya…but never Hurt the Heart that loves ya !! ”

Don’t go where the path might lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Come to the edge."
"We can’t. We’re afraid.”

“Come to the edge."
"We can’t. We will fall!”

“Come to the edge.”
And they came.”

And he pushed them.

And they flew !

  • Guillaume Appollinaire

DON’T QUIT

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low, and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,

When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit!
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,

And many a failure has turned about,
When they might have won had they stuck it out.
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow,
You may succeed with another blow!,

Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering one,
Often the struggler has given up
When they might have captured the victor’s cup.

And they learned too late, when the night slipped down,
How close they were to the golden crown.
Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver tint to the clouds of doubt.

And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far.
So stick to the task when you’re hardest hit,
It’s when things seem the worst, that you must not quit!

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you
can do with what there is.

  • Ernest Hemingway

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”

  • Robert Frost

“Arise, Awake and STOP NOT till the goal is reached !”

  • Swami Vivekananda

If something is missing (or I am wrong somewhere) then please help me
correct it.