Lennon

John Lennon has his band of followers even today. I have loved him only because he was a part of the Beatles; for me the band was bigger than him. But once in a while, I have come across some of his (possible) quotes such as:

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” 

Profound

A wise man once said, "If you are alive, you ought to live."

Fabulous One-Liners

"It is important for people to realise that optimism, skepticism and pessimism can co-exist."

"One day was heart-fucking, the next was hard-fucking and the next was mind-fucking."

"Are those hickeys?"
"Jackass!!"

Into the Wild

Chris / Alex McCandless wrote well.

"The very basic core of a man's living spirit is hit passion for adventure.
The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

"You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience."

This is from the book "Into the Wild" and the above quotes are Alex's own.
The last quote he negates before death when he notes:

"And so it turned out that only a life similar to life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness... And this was most vexing of all. HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."

Did he have to go through his ordeal to realise this? Could he have been one of the very few who actually realised this? I ask because most of us don't know the other possibility, of living without society and love.


The book is quite excellent. It's not as glorious as the movie but is sobering. Jon Krakauer is the author and he expressed his compassion for the kid in the introduction/ foreword. There are two chapters which I really liked. One in which Jon talks of other weirdos/ loners/ pursuers and the other when he describes his youth and his journey to Alaska to conquer Devil's Thumb. Fantastic stuff.
I enjoyed the part where when he came back to the town and recited his tale to the town folk, they didn't seem to care :)
I relished the part where he compared his ... well... this is the statement (He was 23 years old then):
"At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage."

This book and books like this make one realise how shallow a city-dweller's journey can be. Yes.

Soros

Soros works on a philosophy that is rather commonsensical; his books are interesting reads from time to time.
Excerpt:

"Medicine, law and journalism used to be professions."

Thots

Short-term pleasures may cause short, medium or long-term pain.

A humble pauper is a useless sight.

Fear

Fear of that which is not but which may be.

Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. - Epicurus

We face it everyday and it shall not cease to amaze me :)
We are afraid of that which has not yet come by and that fear moulds each one of us differently.

Barney Stinson

"Dude! Ditch Tiffany and join the barnacle in a pharma-girl free-for-all. Side effects may include loss of clothing, rug burn, shortness of breath and sore abdominals the next morning; what in the WORLD is up??!!" - Barney Stinson

Quotidian Quests

Something that my friend wrote on his blog.

"Value relationships and people from the past; they are the ones you will remember and seek most in the future."

"As life goes by, we construct stories & develop perceptions; not only about who we are but also about who we were, who we were trying to be, who we though we could, should or would be and who we believed we wanted to be. Of course, the perceptions aren't restricted only to questions about our'selves', the world and a thorough understanding of it (whatever that means to you); it's as much a part of our being as the self is."
- This particular paragraph was something that I had been thinking of for a long time but could never find the ability to word it. :)

Warren Buffett

Excerpt from Buffett's letter to BRK's shareholders for 2009.


" And now a painful confession: Last year your chairman closed the book on a very expensive business fiasco entirely of his own making.

For many years I had struggled to think of side products that we could offer our millions of loyal GEICO customers. Unfortunately, I finally succeeded, coming up with a brilliant insight that we should market our own credit card. I reasoned that GEICO policyholders were likely to be good credit risks and, assuming we offered an attractive card, would likely favor us with their business. We got business all right - but of the wrong type.

Our pre-tax losses from credit-card operations came to about $6.3 million before I finally woke up. We then sold our $98 million portfolio of troubled receivables for 55¢ on the dollar, losing an additional $44 million.

GEICO’s managers, it should be emphasized, were never enthusiastic about my idea. They warned me that instead of getting the cream of GEICO’s customers we would get the – – – – – well, let’s call it the non-cream. I subtly indicated that I was older and wiser.

I was just older. "

Humble and forthright, and possibly, a facade (But I choose not to see it that way!).


He ended the letter with:
" P.S. Come by rail. "

Young and Found

"I feel old and lost... but wait;
If I am old, I would have found myself and I wouldn't be lost.
And if I am lost, then I would have to be young because only young people are lost.
I can't be both at the same time!!!"

OW

"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." - Oscar Wilde

"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!... A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her." - OW

"What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will.
Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say." - The Picture of Dorian Gray

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all" (Can be expanded to include all creations) - OW

"No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." - OW

"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." - OW

"Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed." - OW

Love & Peace

"The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you" - WB
I believe he took a very long time to make this statement.
The emphasis has been added by me, because that captures the practicality of the Utopian part of the statement.
It tends to boil down to love; the word that has been glamorised.
How close is love to peace? - that is the question...

Quotes

"What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Develop your eccentricities while you are young, that way, when you get old, people wont think you are going ga ga." - David Ogilvy

"In the long run, we're all dead." - John Maynard Keynes

Quotes

“Society is a masked ball,
where every one hides his real character,
and reveals it by hiding” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone." - Octavio Paz

"Derivatives are like Sex. It doesn't matter who you sleep with; what matters is who they are sleeping with..." - Warren Buffett

"Thumb-Sucking" - Charlie Munger

"Anything that can't go on forever will end." - Herb Stein

"People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most. It's crazy to take little in-between jobs just because they look good on your resume. That's like saving sex for your old age. Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you've given yourself the best chance in life you can." - Warren Buffett

"Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless." - WB

"The plumbing thing - I hate it. Basically that's what goes wrong as you get older." - WB

People ain't no good

We'd buy the Sunday newspapers
And never read a single word
People they ain't no good


Hilarious!!!

Wise Statement

Excerpt from what a wise person once said:
" ... hopefully I'll go... hopefully I'll like the place I live in... hopefully the job I take up will make me happy... it worries me that this isn't the path for me...
..what if this isn't the path for us...

...we are all doing the best we can with what we have"

Some of us are trying to do the best that we can with what we have.
Best, depends on keeping the non-work aspects of our life in equilibrium.
I do not want to change who I am based on my career goals.

Exhibit A

There is a difference between return on money and return of money.

Anyone who is insane enough to think about their lives is bound to be numb.

Just because there is no proof, it does not mean there is no proof.

Somethings are just not visible. Ref. Details of a balance sheet. Ref. Ghosts.

Dreams dont cost a thing - Sleep does.