Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Quote Dump #1

"You don't have to run faster than the bear. You just have to run faster than your brother."

During my middle school years in Australia (I refer to them as the roaring 90's), I started collecting quotes online. I had a public chatroom on Internet Relay Chat called #ponder, where a semi-feeble effort was undertaken to encourage people to talk about things more interesting than what age we were (age), whether we were male/female (sex) and where we lived (location). These three questions were often summed up by users in the singular question 'a/s/l?', which is a substitute for 'hello' in the world of IRC.

"Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever."
~Aristophanes

To sow the seeds of thoughtfulness for any guests willing enough to enter, I often posted a quote of the day that would greet them in purple banner text on the title bar.

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
~Heraclitus

It's funny how a good quote will bring with it a light air of pseudo-authority, merely because it's a quote. The worst ones are those that are long winded and lack substance. Anyway, what happened after middle school was that I ended up losing that hard drive and my entire quotes collection.

"Give a man a fire and he'll stay warm for a day.
Set a man on fire and he'll stay warm for the rest of his life."

Which was probably a good thing. I had them all on a huge notepad file that took forever to scroll down. Kind of like a disorganised closet. And just like how I used to read the newspaper everyday, once it was gone I realised it was entirely unnecessary.

"Be still and know."
~Thich Nhat Hanh

Anyhow, in complete contradiction to that realisation I started putting some of the more memorable quotes on Facebook. I'm going to cross post them here from time to time, in a feature called Quote Dump. Hopefully then, they'll be safer than in my brain and it's more fun to share them anyway.

"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help."
~Calvin

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Quote thing, what a clever idea.