Bluff Inspiring Quotes

Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them...they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will slink out of sight.

Myself I have to live with myself and so I want to be fit for myself to know. I want to be able as days go by, always to look myself straight in the eye; I don't want to stand with the setting sun and hate myself for the things I've done. I don't want to keep on a closet shelf a lot of secrets about myself and fool myself as I come and go into thinking no one will ever know the kind of person I really am, I don't want to dress myself up in sham. I want to go out with my head erect I want to deserve all men's respect; but here in the struggle for fame and pelf I want to be able to like myself. I don't want to look at myself and know I'm bluster and bluff and empty show. I never can hide myself from me; I see what others may never see; I know what others may never know, I never can fool myself and so, whatever happens I want to be self respecting and conscience free.

Fishermen don’t play to fold. They will always play the bluff no matter how hard things get. We throw the dice no matter how broke or how leveraged we may be. Like any true gambler, we know the dice will eventually get hot again if we throw them hard enough. It’s just a matter of surviving long enough to throw them enough times to find a winning streak

That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

With the first rays of dawn coming from a huge orange sun, rising out of the Indian Ocean from the East, the Dominion Monarch passed the Durban bluffs and entered the protected harbor. A police boat escorted the ship in and stood by as it was secured. Everybody crowded close to the railings and looked down onto the concrete dock. From the ship you could see that there were police cars blocking the entry to the wharf area and it became quite apparent that something was amiss. The reason was soon made clear when the loudspeakers announced that before clearing the ship, everyone on board would be required to get a smallpox vaccination or present their international immunization card, to verify that they were in compliance. There had been an outbreak of smallpox and yellow fever throughout Africa especially in the Cape Province and in tribal areas. During the previous year, nearby Northern Rhodesia had reported several thousand cases of these diseases. The police boat lay in wait, until every last one of the passengers was immunized. It took hours, however everyone was happy when the health officials finally came aboard to do the vaccinating. Finally the announcement came that the ship was cleared so that we could go ashore. Not until then did the band strike up and play “God Save the King.

After a crushing loss to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Trump tried to boost his team’s spirits. As they were driving back to New York, he told a teammate to pull over at a Montgomery Ward department store, where Donald bought golf clubs, tees, and dozens of balls, which they took to a bluff overlooking Chesapeake Bay. Trump grabbed a club and hit a few balls into the water, inspiring his teammates to join in. After all the balls were gone, Trump and his teammates got back into the car, leaving the golf clubs on the side of the road. Yet,

Falling moths! It was midnight as I passed by the street, There were street lights, that cast shadows elite, Long and elongated, as if to boast and bluff, A macabre sight with fiendish stuff, Shadows that scared their casters, As if they were signs of foreboding disasters, I still walked my course one step at a time, While the shadows committed their emotional and visual crime, Of intimidating the walker’s will and courage, But I knew they had a surmised existence and it tamed my rage, Then suddenly a moth fell over my shadow, I stopped, I could clearly feel its bravado, For the love of light, it dared the night, Even if it meant the moth was destined to be a fallen knight, But the night didn't know it kissed the light a 100 times, Before it fell just for the destiny’s sake, and for no felony and no crimes, Because if it is a crime to love light then I shall commit it too, And like the swarm of million moths I shall kiss the one I love even if it begets me a moth-like fate too, The fallen moth shivered and flapped its failing wings, As it lay covered in the shroud of light that silently, every night a dirge sings, To honour its all lover moths who fall just to kiss it, For even Gods and prophets have died to kiss it, The light, the light that reveals the true passions of a romantic moth, And the light that guides every traveler on life’s path, And tonight as moths flapped their failing wings over these bluffing shadows, I thought of you my love and then the endless sorrows, But the moth that fell over my shadow and died not suddenly but moment by moment, I heard it say, “the kiss of light, the kiss of life I had eventually felt!” So whenever I cross the street and street lights during the night, I think of you, I think of the moth, I think of light and then everything disappears from sight, And I see an infinite swarm of moths flying towards the sun, For the divine light shall fulfill the promises that here for the moth were left undone, And the eclipsed sun, that you and I see, Is actually an infinite swarm of moths kissing the sun, that appears to be a solar eclipse to fools like me, So let the fallen moth rest over these shadows in peace, And let the night moan these gallant lovers, whose valour is stronger than the warriors of Greece!

Life can deal you an amazing hand. Do you play it steady, bluff like crazy or go all in?