“
When you're small enough to have to look up at everyone around you, there's no such thing as a dirty fight. That's a new motto for me. I think I'll keep it.
”
”
Susan Ee (Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, #1))
“
For the future, the motto is, "No days unalert.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power)
“
Forward momentum. That's my new motto. No regrets. And no going back.
”
”
Gayle Forman (Just One Day (Just One Day, #1))
“
Live every day like it's our last day on Earth together," she said, beginning their new motto as she jumped out the window.
"For forever if we can get away with it," Lucas finished, joyfully following her.
”
”
Josephine Angelini (Goddess (Starcrossed, #3))
“
Since childhood, I’d believed it was important to speak out against bullies while also not stooping to their level. And to be clear, we were now up against a bully, a man who among other things demeaned minorities and expressed contempt for prisoners of war, challenging the dignity of our country with practically his every utterance. I wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it. It was dignity I wanted to make an appeal for—the idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going back generations. Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
I care not if I live but a day and a night, so long as my deeds live after me.
”
”
James Joyce
“
He shakes his head sadly at me.'These are the rules we live by. We are soldiers, Penryn. Legendary warriors willing to make legendary sacrifices. We do not ask. We do not choose.' He says that like a motto, a pledge he'd said a thousand times.
”
”
Susan Ee (End of Days (Penryn & the End of Days, #3))
“
Belives in the motto: Do a good deed every day
”
”
Karuho Shiina
“
There’s a great rabbinical motto that says you start each day with a note in each pocket. One note says, “The world was created for you today,” and the other note says, “I’m a speck of dust in a meaningless universe,” and you have to balance both things.
”
”
Harold Ramis
“
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Letters to a Young Contrarian)
“
I will do what I say I will do,” tis the motto of all grand and worthy souls.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
“
Suddenly—I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round. Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very depths of the last days, to shine— and to hell with everything else! That is my motto— and the sun’s!
”
”
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
“
If it were not for the depressing heat and the urgency of the work, one could sit down and laugh to tears at the absurdity of the thing, and under the circumstances it is a little wearing. But our motto is the old west coast proverb, Softly, softly, catchee monkey; in other words, don't flurry; patience gains the day.
”
”
Robert Baden-Powell
“
Let us have done with vain regrets and longings for the days that never will be ours again. Our work lies in front, not behind us; and "Forward!" is our motto.
”
”
Jerome K. Jerome
“
I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'
I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world."
[Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]
”
”
George Whitman
“
There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do.
”
”
Richard Nelson Bolles
“
The only easy day was yesterday.” [Navy SEAL motto.] I
”
”
Mike Cernovich (Gorilla Mindset)
“
May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer (Essays of Schopenhauer)
“
I'm a Skeptic. And I'm a Journalist. I look up things in the library—a lot! I believe in the motto of Missouri, the 'Show-me, don't just blow me' state. I need evidence. I need demonstrations. I need show-and-tell. Even though I pray to God every once in a while, especially when I'm in trouble—which for most guys my age is every 28 days—I still think deeply about the issues and don't automatically jump to a religious or mystical answer to questions. I am, by nature, doubtful about the existence of God, and even whether He is a He or a Her. I don't believe in New Age stuff. For me, 'Past Life Regression' means not calling a girl after she gives me her phone number. Sure I own a lucky rabbit's foot, a lucky penny, a lucky 4-leaf clover and a lucky horeshoe [sic], and a pair of lucky underwear and several pairs of lucky socks that I only wash every seven days. But under it all I am a died–in-the-wool skeptic.
”
”
Earl Lee (Raptured: The Final Daze of the Late, Great Planet Earth (Kiss My Left Behind series))
“
This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:
To Gaylene deceased
To Ray deceased
To Francy permanent psychosis
To Kathy permanent brain damage
To Jim deceased
To Val massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy permanent psychosis
To Joanne permanent brain damage
To Maren deceased
To Nick deceased
To Terry deceased
To Dennis deceased
To Phil permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue permanent vascular damage
To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage
. . . and so forth.
In Memoriam.
These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
“
Let it be my motto, as well as yours. Ever upward, as a new life, a new day begins. Have faith that something unexpected and wonderful is moving toward you at incredible speed-EXCELSIOR! Yes, ever upward we must go, and go together.
”
”
Anderson Cooper (The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss)
“
I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.'" And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become - and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.
”
”
Richard Castle
“
The SEAL motto, “The only easy day was yesterday,
”
”
Mark Owen (No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL)
“
When you’re small enough to have to look up at everyone around you, there’s no such thing as a dirty fight. That’s a new motto for me. I think I’ll keep it.
”
”
Susan Ee (Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, #1))
“
Why be honest when no one else is?” This seems to be the motto of all sinking ships.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
“
My motto: I’ll do it today, or tomorrow, or the next day, or not.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (99 Cents For Some Nonsense)
“
Pick yourself up and fight another day" is as good a motto as any, in my experience.
”
”
Erica James (Song of the Skylark)
“
Kamand,
die every day
so you remember
to live.
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
Now she want a photo
You already know though
You only live once: that’s the motto nigga YOLO
We bout it every day, every day, every day
Like we sittin’ on the bench, nigga we don’t really play
Every day, every day, fuck what anybody say
Can’t see 'em 'cause the money in the way
Real nigga what's up?
”
”
Drizzy Drake
“
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. "All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens
“
THE LESBIAN AVENGERS
Their motto playfully proclaimed “we recruit,” and recruit this group did. Formed in the 1990s to bring attention to lesbian causes, the Lesbian Avengers spent Valentine’s Day handing out chocolate kisses in Grand Central Station that read, “You’ve just been kissed by a lesbian.” In Bryant Park, they unveiled a papier-mâché sculpture of Alice B. Toklas embracing her lover, Gertrude Stein. The Avengers also ate fire, which would become their dramatic trademark—first practiced as an homage to an Oregon gay man and lesbian woman who were burned to death after a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the apartment they shared.
”
”
Jess Bennett (Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace)
“
Curiously enough, it seems that at times the spiritual side prevails, and then the materialistic side—in wave-like motions following each other. ...At one time the full flood of materialistic ideas prevails, and everything in this life—prosperity, the education which procures more pleasures, more food—will become glorious at first and then that will degrade and degenerate. Along with the prosperity will rise to white heat all the inborn jealousies and hatreds of the human race. Competition and merciless cruelty will be the watchword of the day. To quote a very commonplace and not very elegant English proverb, "Everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost", becomes the motto of the day. Then people think that the whole scheme of life is a failure. And the world would be destroyed had not spirituality come to the rescue and lent a helping hand to the sinking world. Then the world gets new hope and finds a new basis for a new building, and another wave of spirituality comes, which in time again declines. As a rule, spirituality brings a class of men who lay exclusive claim to the special powers of the world. The immediate effect of this is a reaction towards materialism, which opens the door to scores of exclusive claims, until the time comes when not only all the spiritual powers of the race, but all its material powers and privileges are centered in the hands of a very few; and these few, standing on the necks of the masses of the people, want to rule them. Then society has to help itself, and materialism comes to the rescue.
”
”
Swami Vivekananda (The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 3)
“
The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol, “J’y suis, j’y reste”—“I am here, and here I shall remain.” People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, “What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?” and they answer, “We have everything. The mountains and the water.” This is their explanation, mountains and water. As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is.
”
”
Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
“
The Sloth hated himself. He considered himself lazy. He had a dead-end job and no plans to get a better one. His relationship was on-again-off-again, and he never got to the gym even though he kept paying the membership dues.
There was mould in his refrigerator and he watched reruns on TV. Sometimes he wore the same pair of socks twice in the same week.
The Sloth would sit on his couch, paralyzed by all the things he wasn’t taking care of. Then one day, a Wednesday, he just said, ‘Fuck it!’ He threw his hands up into the air and said, ‘Fuck it!’ This was the day that the Sloth discovered his superpower, an amazing ability to say ‘Fuck it’ and really, truly mean it.
”
”
Andrew Kaufman (All My Friends are Superheroes)
“
When you’re small enough to have to look up at everyone around you, there’s no such thing as a dirty fight. That’s a new motto for me. I think I’ll keep it.
”
”
Susan Ee (Angelfall (Penryn & the End of Days, #1))
“
The day when a person that is looking at me, and my works will say "Here's my Hero!", that will be my triumph day.
”
”
Jeren Altel
“
The day when a person looking at me, and my works will say "Here's my Hero!", that will be my triumph.
”
”
Jeren Altel
“
The Days never won anything. They always said that, marveling, whenever they had a tiny piece of good luck: We never win anything! It was the family motto.
”
”
Gillian Flynn (Dark Places)
“
Fuck them or we're fucked?"
"Pretty much our life these days, mate."
"No, you idiot. I mean is it that we're fucked, or that they will be, not as a general motto for our life," he clarified.
"Ah!" I agreed. "Yes.
”
”
Jez Cajiao (Age of Steel (Rise of Mankind #4))
“
Oh? Now tell me your gut reaction to the following words. Colonial.
Dellahay. Wood. Patio. Five Pieces. Sun resistant, wind resistant, Judgment
Day resistant. Amazing value at just $299. And consider the Dellahay motto
neatly inscribed on their cute little tags: 'Patio furniture isn't furniture. It's a
state of mind.' " Dad smiled, putting his arm around me as he pushed me
gently toward Garden. "I'll give you ten thousand dollars if you can tell me
what that means.
”
”
Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)
“
Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!” exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. “Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa’s park gates: nor to go even so far without mama’s permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman—her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:—Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device, were I a man.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God's estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own values. He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get its own price tag and real worth will come into its own. Then the righteous shall shine forth in the Kingdom of their Father. He is willing to wait for that day. In the meantime he will have attained a place of soul rest. As he walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness brings.
”
”
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
“
As I passed a low pavilion, where a crowd of helpless lunatics were confined, I read a motto on the wall, “While I live I hope”. The absurdity of it struck me forcibly. I would have liked to put above the gates that open to the asylum, “He who enters here leaveth hope behind”.
”
”
Nellie Bly (Ten Days in a Mad-House)
“
Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
“
Columbus says he decided to send “two men up-country” to see what they could see. “They traveled for three days,” he wrote, “and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance.”35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.
”
”
David E. Stannard (American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World)
“
Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: ‘An intoxicating brew of science, philosophy and futurism’ Mail on Sunday)
“
You should also have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar with the various stages of the experience and whom you know and trust … and Fuck that! That only clamped the constipation of the past, the eternal lags, on something that should happen Now. Let the setting be as unserene and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your set be only what is on your … brain, man, and let your guide, your trusty hand-holding, head-swaddling guide, be a bunch of Day-Glo crazies who have as one of their mottoes: “Never trust a Prankster.” The Acid Tests would be like the Angels’ party plus all the ideas that had gone into the Dome fantasy.
”
”
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
“
I looked at the rusty-bottomed bread tin swiped too often by the dishcloth, and the pots sitting on the stove, washed but not put away, and the motto supplied by Fairholme Dairy: The Lord is the Heart of Our House. All these things stupidly waiting for the day to begin and not knowing that it had been hollowed out by catastrophe.
”
”
Alice Munro (Queenie: A Story)
“
Something was in her mouth. Sami's tongue slid along the edges of something plastic. Flat, low ridges, holes-an adjustable strap. A baseball cap?
Another taste. Hair spray. Gross.
Someone had stuffed her baseball cap in her mouth, and from the feel of it they had taped it in place. Her arms were tied behind her and she lay face down on the floor-of what? Her car. The carpeting scraped her cheek every time they hit a bump.
Panic flooded Sami's senses. She came instantly awake. Inhaling deeply through her nose, she willed herself to calm down. Her working motto flashed through her brain, panic never accomplished anything. Of course she had never been kidnapped and tied up before.
In the dim light of passing cars, she glimpsed things-paper gum wrappers, an old straw, one whopper wrapper, a CD cover.
That's where Sting went. Been looking for that for days. Man did she need to vacuum this car out.
A metallic scent hit her nose. She'd recognize that smell until the day she died. Blood. And by the odor, someone had lost a great deal of it.
”
”
Suzanne Ferrell (Kidnapped (Edgers Family, #1))
“
His motto is actually “write drunk and edit sober”—he’s got the words hanging on a plaque in bold black letters behind his desk right above an ever-present bottle of Jack Daniels—but I say nothing. Monday afternoon is not the best time to argue, much like every other day of the week. And unfortunately for me, I don’t have a pregnant wife at home to fall back on.
”
”
Amy Matayo (They Call Her Dirty Sally)
“
The other day, I told you our family motto was "Be kind, be curious, be helpful." Kindness and helpfulness you understood right away. Then you asked, "Why is curious in there?" Because being curious is admitting that you don't know, but also that you want to know. That what you don't know, is worth knowing. That people you don't know are worth knowing, that they have something to teach you. That learning about them - that encountering new ideas - doesn't threaten you, it enriches you. That what you haven't experienced is worth experiencing. That you approach the world as a trove of things to take in, rather than things you frantically, fearfully wall out. "Be kind, be curious, be helpful:" what that really means is, "stay open.
”
”
Celeste Ng (Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times)
“
This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nation does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain effectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitutions prevent this.) A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
“
1. Just Keep Breathing Lauren told me that after Bob died, she couldn’t imagine getting through the rest of her life without him. She told herself she just needed to get through the next year, which would be the hardest one, but that was too overwhelming. Little by little, she kept reducing the length of time she needed to get through in order to make it. A month was too daunting; even a week or a day felt like too much. Finally, she realized that all she had to do at any given moment was just keep breathing and eventually she would make it through. “Just keep breathing” became her motto. I remember a time when I experienced a major loss and I kept saying, “Just get up and put one foot in front of the other.” I felt I needed to just keep moving so I didn’t sink into the despair I felt.
”
”
Joyce Meyer (Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You)
“
Our little systems have their day
They have their day and cease to be
They are but broken lights of Thee
And Thou, O L-rd, art more than they
We have but faith, we cannot know
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from Thee
A beam in darkness: let it grow
Let knowledge grow from more to more
But more of reverence in us dwell
That mind and soul, according well
May make one music as before
”
”
Alfred Tennyson
“
Forgive an old lady preaching to you, but I want you to believe what I do, that you have so much more to offer the world than you give yourself credit for. Yes, you have encountered a run of bad luck and made mistakes in the past, but so have we all, so please do not make the bigger mistake and allow yourself to be defined by these things. 'Pick yourself up and fight another day' is as good a motto as any in my experience.
”
”
Erica James (Song of the Skylark)
“
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.
In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
”
”
T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)
“
The markets fluctuated alarmingly for the rest of the month, falling one day, recovering the next, then plummeting another, leaving speculators alternating between relief and hysteria. By the end of November, with many nervous New Yorkers clamoring for reassurances, Strong confided he was as fearful about Northern capitulation as he was about Southern belligerence. “Our national mottoes must be changed to ‘e pluribus duo’ (at least) and ‘United we stand, divided we stand easier.
”
”
Harold Holzer (Lincoln President-Elect : Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861)
“
do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
“
Stop being an adrenalin junkie. Yes, I’m talking to you Miss I-can-do-everything-and-I-can-do-it-faster-and-better-than-you. Slow down. Delegate. Your new motto is Rest is Radical. Why? When you survive on adrenalin, you really are surviving, not thriving. Yes, we no longer live in caves, but our bodies haven’t changed, so when your train is late or you have a hectic day at work, your body responds by going into fight or flight mode. It’s the modern-day equivalent of encountering a saber-tooth tiger.
”
”
Lisa Lister (Code Red: Know Your Flow, Unlock Your Monthly Super Powers and Create a Bloody Amazing Life. Period.)
“
Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.
”
”
Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
“
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like
the decision to step out in front of a moving car.
You would call that not a disease but an error in
judgment.
When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social
error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the
motto
is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but
the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is
a memory.
It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of
the ordinary human existence. It is not different from
your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place
in days or weeks or months instead of years.
”
”
Philip K. Dick
“
I’m not saying that I was starting actively to think about it. I’m just saying that I could see why people did. See that they liked the combination of long dull uneventful days with a strong sense of purpose looming overall; the mix of aimless time, structured days and meaningful work. A bit like human life in general, you could say, the terrible regularity with which nothing happens, the genuine terror when something does. Hurry up and wait. That’s the motto which governs most lives. It’s the motto which governs the Wall, for sure. The only thing worse than when nothing happens is when something does.
”
”
John Lanchester
“
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine that most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Letters to a Young Contrarian)
“
Energy and Invincible Determination: — aren’t they magnificent words? Commit them to memory — press them like a die into the wax of your mind, and they will be a constant inspiration to you in hours of need. If you can get these words to vibrating in your being, you will be a giant among pygmies. Say these words over and over again, and see how you are filled with new life — see how your blood will circulate — how your nerves will tingle. Make these words a part of yourself, and then go forth anew to the battle of life, encouraged and strengthened. Put them into practice. “Energy and Invincible Determination” — let that be your motto in your work-a-day life, and you will be one of those rare men who are able to “do things.
”
”
William Walker Atkinson (Thought Vibration: or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World)
“
At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes – and in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County – and when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised:
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS
I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.
That had summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in their straight foes, assuming they had foes; anyhow, a person like well-educated-with-all-the-financial advantages Thelma Kornford became at once a foe by uttering that, from which they had run that day, pouring out of her apartment and back to their own littered pad, to her perplexity. The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they’d meditated on how to ball her, and remained.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
“
Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do. Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don’t look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?’ – you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got. Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
Imagine a soldier who believes killing another human being is wrong, kills his first human being in war when he has never killed before. Worse still, imagine this same soldier has his enemy in his sites and the enemy appears defenseless. Here, he might be allowed the luxury to have that moment with himself to debate whether he should pull the trigger or not. But on another day he may not have that luxury. Imagine further, a soldier is in this situation because his father was a soldier, and his grandfather was a soldier, and he is trying to please them but, unlike them, he doesn’t believe killing people in war is right, yet there he is on the battlefield anyway where ‘killed or be killed’ leads the list in the army’s operation manual. So, he pulls the trigger anyway even though he’s categorically against killing another human being. And maybe this is the first time he’s compromised on such a high principle and he continues killing other people as long as he’s in the war and each time it becomes easier and easier until his principle, his absolute truth, is a motto not to live by, but one that is just a topic of conversation in a philosophy class or a backyard barbecue. War has changed him. From Messages From a Grandfather, by Robert Gately
”
”
Robert Gately
“
At first I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it on the outside at all. I’ve described prison society as a scaled-down model of your outside world, but I had no idea of how fast things moved on the outside; the raw speed people move at. They even talk faster. And louder. It was the toughest adjustment I’ve ever had to make, and I haven’t finished making it yet . . . not by a long way. Women, for instance. After hardly knowing that they were half of the human race for forty years, I was suddenly working in a store filled with them. Old women, pregnant women wearing tee-shirts with arrows pointing downward and a printed motto reading BABY HERE, skinny women with their nipples poking out at their shirts—a woman wearing something like that when I went in would have gotten arrested and then had a sanity hearing—women of every shape and size. I found myself going around with a semi-hard almost all the time and cursing myself for being a dirty old man. Going to the bathroom, that was another thing. When I had to go (and the urge always came on me at twenty-five past the hour), I had to fight the almost overwhelming need to check it with my boss. Knowing that was something I could just go and do in this too-bright outside world was one thing; adjusting my inner self to that knowledge after all those years of checking it with the nearest screwhead or facing two days in solitary for the oversight . . . that was something else. My boss didn’t like me. He was a young guy, twenty-six or -seven, and I could see that I sort of disgusted him,
”
”
Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
“
I saw her as soon as I pulled into the parking lot. This beautiful woman with a gigantic smile on her face was just about bouncing up and down despite the orthopedic boot she had on her foot as she waved me into a parking space. I felt like I’d been hit in the gut. She took my breath away. She was dressed in workout clothes, her long brown hair softly framing her face, and she just glowed. I composed myself and got out of the car. She was standing with Paul Orr, the radio host I was there to meet. Local press had become fairly routine for me at this point, so I hadn’t really given it much thought when I agreed to be a guest on the afternoon drive-time show for WZZK. But I had no idea I’d meet her.
Paul reached out his hand and introduced himself. And without waiting to be introduced she whipped out her hand and said, “Hi! I’m Jamie Boyd!” And right away she was talking a mile a minute. She was so chipper I couldn’t help but smile. I was like that little dog in Looney Toons who is always following the big bulldog around shouting, “What are we going to do today, Spike?” She was adorable. She started firing off questions, one of which really caught my attention.
“So you were in the Army? What was your MOS?” she asked.
Now, MOS is a military term most civilians have never heard. It stands for Military Occupational Specialty. It’s basically military code for “job.” So instead of just asking me what my job was in the Army, she knew enough to specifically ask me what my MOS was. I was impressed.
“Eleven Bravo. Were you in?” I replied.
“Nope! But I’ve thought about it. I still think one day I will join the Army.”
We followed Paul inside and as he set things up and got ready for his show, Jamie and I talked nonstop. She, too, was really into fitness. She was dressed and ready for the gym and told me she was about to leave to get in a quick workout before her shift on-air.
“Yeah, I have the shift after Paul Orr. The seven-to-midnight show. I call it the Jammin’ with Jamie Show. People call in and I’ll ask them if they’re cryin’, laughin’, lovin’, or leavin’.”
I couldn’t believe how into this girl I was, and we’d only been talking for twenty minutes. I was also dressed in gym clothes, because I’d been to the gym earlier. She looked down and saw the rubber bracelet around my wrist.
“Is that an ‘I Am Second’ bracelet? I have one of those!” she said as she held up her wrist with the band that means, “I am second after Jesus.”
“No, this is my own bracelet with my motto, ‘Train like a Machine,’ on it. Just my little self-motivator. I have some in my car. I’d love to give you one.”
“Well, actually, I am about to leave. I have to go work out before my shift,” she reminded me.
“You can have this one. Take it off my wrist. This one will be worth more someday because I’ve been sweating in it,” I joked.
She laughed and took it off my wrist. We kept chatting and she told me she had wanted to do an obstacle course race for a long time. Then Paul interrupted our conversation and gently reminded Jamie he had a show to do. He and I needed to start our interview. She laughed some more and smiled her way out the door.
”
”
Noah Galloway (Living with No Excuses: The Remarkable Rebirth of an American Soldier)
“
The front door is locked—what’s up with that?”
“Logan fixed the lock,” I tell her.
Her bright red, heart-shaped mouth smiles. “Good job, Kevin Costner. You should staple the key to Ellie’s forehead, though, or she’ll lose it.”
She has names for the other guys too and when her favorite guard, Tommy Sullivan, walks in a few minutes later, Marlow uses his. “Hello, Delicious.” She twirls her honey-colored, bouncy hair around her finger, cocking her hip and tilting her head like a vintage pinup girl.
Tommy, the fun-loving super-flirt, winks. “Hello, pretty, underage lass.” Then he nods to Logan and smiles at me. “Lo . . . Good morning, Miss Ellie.”
“Hey, Tommy.”
Marlow struts forward. “Three months, Tommy. Three months until I’m a legal adult—then I’m going to use you, abuse you and throw you away.”
The dark-haired devil grins. “That’s my idea of a good date.” Then he gestures toward the back door. “Now, are we ready for a fun day of learning?”
One of the security guys has been walking me to school ever since the public and press lost their minds over Nicholas and Olivia’s still-technically-unconfirmed relationship. They make sure no one messes with me and they drive me in the tinted, bulletproof SUV when it rains—it’s a pretty sweet deal.
I grab my ten-thousand-pound messenger bag from the corner.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Elle—you should have a huge banger here tonight!” says Marlow.
Tommy and Logan couldn’t have synced up better if they’d practiced:
“No fucking way.”
Marlow holds up her hands, palms out. “Did I say banger?”
“Huge banger,” Tommy corrects.
“No—no fucking way. I meant, we should have a few friends over to . . . hang out. Very few. Very mature. Like . . . almost a study group.”
I toy with my necklace and say, “That actually sounds like a good idea.”
Throwing a party when your parents are away is a rite-of-high-school passage. And after this summer, Liv will most likely never be away again. It’s now or never.
“It’s a terrible idea.” Logan scowls.
He looks kinda scary when he scowls. But still hot. Possibly, hotter.
Marlow steps forward, her brass balls hanging out and proud. “You can’t stop her—that’s not your job. It’s like when the Bush twins got busted in that bar with fake IDs or Malia was snapped smoking pot at Coachella. Secret Service couldn’t stop them; they just had to make sure they didn’t get killed.”
Tommy slips his hands in his pockets, laid back even when he’s being a hardass. “We could call her sister. Even from an ocean away, I’d bet she’d stop her.”
“No!” I jump a little. “No, don’t bother Liv. I don’t want her worrying.”
“We could board up the fucking doors and windows,” Logan suggests.
’Cause that’s not overkill or anything.
I move in front of the two security guards and plead my case. “I get why you’re concerned, okay? But I have this thing—it’s like my motto. I want to suck the lemon.”
Tommy’s eyes bulge. “Suck what?”
I laugh, shaking my head. Boys are stupid.
“You know that saying, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?—well, I want to suck the lemon dry.”
Neither of them seems particularly impressed.
“I want to live every bit of life, experience everything it has to offer, good and bad.” I lift my jeans to show my ankle—and the little lemon I’ve drawn there. “See? When I’m eighteen, I’m going to get this tattooed on for real. As a reminder to live as much and as hard and as awesome as I can—to not take anything for granted. And having my friends over tonight is part of that.”
I look back and forth between them. Tommy’s weakening—I can feel it. Logan’s still a brick wall.
“It’ll be small. And quiet—I swear. Totally controlled. And besides, you guys will be here with me. What could go wrong?”
Everything.
Everything goes fucking wrong.
”
”
Emma Chase (Royally Endowed (Royally, #3))
“
We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary,—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life.
”
”
Henri Bergson (The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics)
“
Jessica reminded us all that it was Jesus who said that if we give a man a fish, we feed him for a day, but if we teach him how to fish, we feed him for a lifetime. Since we are celebrating the birthday of Jesus, we decided to use his little motto for our theme for the upcoming year. This year, I hope you will join the Jennings family as we urge others to “Grab your pole!
”
”
Jennifer Coburn (Field of Schemes)
“
In scores of cities all over the United States, when the Communists were simultaneously meeting at their various headquarters on New Year’s Day of 1920, Mr. Palmer’s agents and police and voluntary aides fell upon them—fell upon everybody, in fact, who was in the hall, regardless of whether he was a Communist or not (how could one tell?)—and bundled them off to jail, with or without warrant. Every conceivable bit of evidence—literature, membership lists, books, papers, pictures on the wall, everything—was seized, with or without a search warrant. On this and succeeding nights other Communists and suspected Communists were seized in their homes. Over six thousand men were arrested in all, and thrust summarily behind the bars for days or weeks—often without any chance to learn what was the explicit charge against them. At least one American citizen, not a Communist, was jailed for days through some mistake—probably a confusion of names—and barely escaped deportation. In Detroit, over a hundred men were herded into a bull-pen measuring twenty-four by thirty feet and kept there for a week under conditions which the mayor of the city called intolerable. In Hartford, while the suspects were in jail the authorities took the further precaution of arresting and incarcerating all visitors who came to see them, a friendly call being regarded as prima facie evidence of affiliation with the Communist party. Ultimately a considerable proportion of the prisoners were released for want of sufficient evidence that they were Communists. Ultimately, too, it was divulged that in the whole country-wide raid upon these dangerous men—supposedly armed to the teeth—exactly three pistols were found, and no explosives at all. But at the time the newspapers were full of reports from Mr. Palmer’s office that new evidence of a gigantic plot against the safety of the country had been unearthed; and although the steel strike was failing, the coal strike was failing, and any danger of a socialist régime, to say nothing of a revolution, was daily fading, nevertheless to the great mass of the American people the Bolshevist bogey became more terrifying than ever. Mr. Palmer was in full cry. In public statements he was reminding the twenty million owners of Liberty bonds and the nine million farm-owners and the eleven million owners of savings accounts, that the Reds proposed to take away all they had. He was distributing boilerplate propaganda to the press, containing pictures of horrid-looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards, and asking if such as these should rule over America. Politicians were quoting the suggestion of Guy Empey that the proper implements for dealing with the Reds could be “found in any hardware store,” or proclaiming, “My motto for the Reds is S. O. S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell.” College graduates were calling for the dismissal of professors suspected of radicalism; school-teachers were being made to sign oaths of allegiance; business men with unorthodox political or economic ideas were learning to hold their tongues if they wanted to hold their jobs. Hysteria had reached its height.
”
”
Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Harper Perennial Modern Classics))
“
Horst Schulze, cofounder and past president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, shares the origin of the Motto: “I started in the hotel business when I was 14 years old as a busboy. When my mother took me to the hotel to work for the first time, she said, ’We could never go to this hotel. This is only for important people. For important, fine people. So you’re lucky. Behave yourself. Wash your hands.’ She was a typical mother. I went to the hotel and the general manager talked to my mother and me for 15 minutes and told us we could never be like the guests who came to his hotel. ’So don’t ever get jealous. This is for Ladies and Gentlemen—very important people.’ “By the time I started working in the restaurant, I knew the guests were very important. But a few months later I realized that the maître d’ I watched every day was just as important because every guest was proud when he talked to them. Why? Because he was a first-class professional. He was somebody special—because of the excellence he created for the guests. So when I went to hotel school about a year and a half later, the teacher asked me to write a story describing what I felt about the business. And I wrote about the maître d’ at my hotel. I titled it, ’Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.’ I wrote we could be excellent like he was. . .absolute excellence. When you walked into a room, you knew he was there. In any moment all of us who serve can be Ladies and Gentlemen, just like the guests. I think it’s a powerful thing that shouldn’t be missed by the wonderful people in this industry. They should understand that.
”
”
Joseph A. Michelli (The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company)
“
I try to remember that except for a very few psychopaths, most people on most days are doing the best they can.” I take that for my working motto, though I remain haunted by the thought that if “a kid is just a kid,” then a sixteen-year-old kid is a kid just two years away from voting.
”
”
Robert Atwan (Best American Essays 2012)
“
These brief weekly sessions helped to bring about valuable changes and health improvements in the participants. The motto was: we are all different and special, so we do not attempt to become like somebody else, but connect more deeply with our true selves.
”
”
Patrizia Collard (The Little Book of Mindfulness: 10 minutes a day to less stress, more peace (The Little Book Series))
“
But are challenge and love enough? Not quite. All great teachers teach students how to reach the high standards. Collins and Esquith didn’t hand their students a reading list and wish them bon voyage. Collins’s students read and discussed every line of Macbeth in class. Esquith spent hours planning what chapters they would read in class. “I know which child will handle the challenge of the most difficult paragraphs, and carefully plan a passage for the shy youngster … who will begin his journey as a good reader. Nothing is left to chance.… It takes enormous energy, but to be in a room with young minds who hang on every word of a classic book and beg for more if I stop makes all the planning worthwhile.” What are they teaching the students en route? To love learning. To eventually learn and think for themselves. And to work hard on the fundamentals. Esquith’s class often met before school, after school, and on school vacations to master the fundamentals of English and math, especially as the work got harder. His motto: “There are no shortcuts.” Collins echoes that idea as she tells her class, “There is no magic here. Mrs. Collins is no miracle worker. I do not walk on water, I do not part the sea. I just love children and work harder than a lot of people, and so will you.” DeLay expected a lot from her students, but she, too, guided them there. Most students are intimidated by the idea of talent, and it keeps them in a fixed mindset. But DeLay demystified talent. One student was sure he couldn’t play a piece as fast as Itzhak Perlman. So she didn’t let him see the metronome until he had achieved it. “I know so surely that if he had been handling that metronome, as he approached that number he would have said to himself, I can never do this as fast as Itzhak Perlman, and he would have stopped himself.” Another student was intimidated by the beautiful sound made by talented violinists. “We were working on my sound, and there was this one note I played, and Miss DeLay stopped me and said, ‘Now that is a beautiful sound.’ ” She then explained how every note has to have a beautiful beginning, middle, and end, leading into the next note. And he thought, “Wow! If I can do it there, I can do it everywhere.” Suddenly the beautiful sound of Perlman made sense and was not just an overwhelming concept. When students don’t know how to do something and others do, the gap seems unbridgeable. Some educators try to reassure their students that they’re just fine as they are. Growth-minded teachers tell students the truth and then give them the tools to close the gap. As Marva Collins said to a boy who was clowning around in class, “You are in sixth grade and your reading score is 1.1. I don’t hide your scores in a folder. I tell them to you so you know what you have to do. Now your clowning days are over.” Then they got down to work.
”
”
Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
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The Secrets of Skunk: Part Two At the Lockheed skunk works, Kelly Johnson ran a tight ship. He loved efficiency. He had a motto—“be quick, be quiet, and be on time”—and a set of rules.6 And while we are parsing the deep secrets of skunk, it’s to “Kelly’s rules” we must now turn. Wall the skunk works off from the rest of the corporate bureaucracy—that’s what you learn if you boil Johnson’s rules down to their essence. Out of his fourteen rules, four pertain solely to military projects and can thus be excluded from this discussion. Three are ways to increase rapid iteration (a topic we’ll come back to in a moment), but the remaining seven are all ways to enforce isolation. Rule 3, for example: “The number of people with any connection to the project should be restricted in an almost vicious manner.” Rule 13 is more of the same: “Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.” Isolation, then, according to Johnson, is the most important key to success in a skunk works. The reasoning here is twofold. There’s the obvious need for military secrecy, but more important is the fact that isolation stimulates risk taking, encouraging ideas weird and wild and acting as a counterforce to organizational inertia. Organizational inertia is the notion that once any company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies and directions is often tempered by the much stronger desire not to disrupt existing markets and lose their paychecks. Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large, the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, IBM initially dismissed the personal computer, and America Online (AOL) is, well, barely online. But what is true for a corporation is also true for the entrepreneur. Just as the successful skunk works isolates the innovation team from the greater organization, successful entrepreneurs need a buffer between themselves and the rest of society. As Burt Rutan, winner of the Ansari XPRIZE, once taught me: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.” Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure, and this means having a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from mistakes is critical. In a talk given at re:Invent 2012, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos7 explains it like this: “Many people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don’t like risk. They seek to reduce risk. Starting a company is already risky . . . [so] you systematically eliminate risk in those early days.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
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makes each day yours to live as it happens. If it’s a good day, all well and good. You go ahead. If a bad one, you survive. Tomorrow is another day, and fate may be kind. There is always hope. If one could live by a motto I once read, “As we journey through life let us live by the way,” everything would be just perfect.
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Frederick Libby (Horses Don't Fly: A Memoir of World War I)
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How did Facebook successfully overcome the growth limiter of operational scalability? On the technology side, one of the philosophies that helped Facebook become successful was its famous motto “Move fast and break things.” This emphasis on speed, which came directly from Mark Zuckerberg, allowed Facebook to achieve rapid product development and continuous product improvement. Even today, every new software engineer who joins Facebook is asked to make a revision to the Facebook codebase (potentially affecting millions or even billions of users) on his or her first day of work. However, as Facebook’s user base and engineering team grew to a massive size, Mark had to change the philosophy to “Move fast and break things with stable infrastructure.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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Brokenhearted, I wanted to release a statement, hold a press conference, tell the world: I did the work! I didn’t cheat! The Palace wouldn’t let me. In this, as in most things, the Palace stuck fast to the family motto: Never complain, never explain. Especially if the complainer was an eighteen-year-old boy. Thus I was forced to sit by and say nothing while the papers called me a cheat and a dummy every day. (Because of an art project! I mean, how do you “cheat” on an art project?)
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Prince Harry (Spare)
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Suddenly—I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round. Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very depths of the last days, to shine— and to hell with everything else! That is my motto— and the sun’s! Naturally, Mayakovsky’s poem prompted
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Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
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Suddenly—I shone in all my might, and morning rang its round. Always to shine, to shine everywhere, to the very depths of the last days, to shine—and to hell with everything else! That is my motto—and the sun’s!
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Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
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Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a lifestyle. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your lifestyle, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
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Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)
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I can’t stand old people,” Nicole said bluntly. “You’ll be old one day,” James said. “Nah,” Nicole said. “Live fast, die young, that’s my motto.
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Robert Muchamore (The Dealer (Cherub Book 2))
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My mother had observed that when people talk often, they have a lot to say to each other, and when they talk rarely, they have little to say to each other. So now my mother, father, Elizabeth, and I have “update.” Every several days, we send out an e-mail with the subject “update,” and we recount the most mundane, daily details of our lives. The motto of “update” is “It’s okay to be boring.” There’s no expectation that anyone send a response. What we’ve found is that knowing these dull little details of one another’s lives makes us feel far more connected to one another, and when we do talk, we have a lot more to say. This idea of “update” has really resonated with other people.
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Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun)
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Figure it out. Work through it. You’ll find your answer.
What’s my plan? I
don’t have one, except to do what I do every day. Keep moving forward. “Get through today? Get through practice, and our games this week, and then I’m going to get through HockeyFest. Probably spend a little extra time on the lake. It’s kind of my happy place.”
She nods. “One day at a time, one game at a time. I like that plan. My happy place has always been the weight room. I figure, if I can tackle that, I can tackle anything. You want to know my personal motto? ‘I can do hard things.’ I’ve proven that I can get through a challenge, so I can do it again. I’d say the same for you.
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Sara Biren (Cold Day in the Sun)
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Gary had started talking about ‘the old days’. He might have happy memories of teenage parties and football games but I left all that behind the day I left Talgarth High. Never go back, that’s my motto.
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Elly Griffiths (The Stranger Diaries (Harbinder Kaur, #1))
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If we think the purpose of Jesus' stories is essentially to make a point as extractable as the moral at the end of a fable, then the inevitable conclusion is that once you get the point, you can throw the story itself away like the rind of an orange when you have squeezed out the juice. Is that true? How about other people's stories? What is the point of A Midsummer Night's Dream or The Iliad or For Whom the Bell Tolls? Can we extract the point in each case and frame it on the living room wall for our perpetual edification?
Or is the story itself the point and truth of the story? Is the point of Jesus' stories that they point to the truth about you and me and our stories? We are the ones who have been mugged, and we are also the ones who pass by pretending we don't notice. Hard as it is to believe, maybe every once in a while we are even the ones who pay an arm and a leg to help. The truth of the story is not a motto suitable for framing. It is a truth that one way or another, God help us, we live out every day of our lives. It is a truth as complicated and sad as you and I ourselves are complicated and sad, and as joyous and as simple as we are too. The stories that Jesus tells are about us. Once upon a time is our time, in other words.
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Frederick Buechner (The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction)
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Farmer Focused
One day, the four farmers had lunch together.
Farmer Fraidy was the first one to speak. He asked, "Farmer Focused, you planted a lot of seeds. I didn't because of my fears. How do you get rid of your fears? I'm overwhelmed with my fears, I end up paralyzed."
Farmer Focused said, "Who says I got rid of my fears? My motto in life has always been, "Do it afraid.'"
He was talking of Success Principle number two...Execution.
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Bo Sánchez (Nothing Much Has Changed (7 Success Principles from the Ancient Book of Proverbs for Your Money, Work, and Life)
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Live large, because there are no extra days. -Tilt Family Motto
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Peter Lerangis (Fire the Depths (Max Tilt, #1))
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I need to make “What would Sarah do?” my life motto—I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t spend a year of her life moping.
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Josie Silver (One Day in December)
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Fourth, the theoretical person educates himself as a reader in every sense of the word. He does training in the grammatical humanism of the ancient European type; he becomes the person in the collection; he teaches himself daily by practicing what the Greeks called legein and antilegein, speaking and contradicting, reading and collecting, learning and testing. Nulla dies sine linea (No day without a line) may seem to be a motto for draughtsmen, but it holds equally for readers and writers. To borrow a title from Ivan Illich: homo theoreticus is a harvest laborer “in the vineyard of the text.” He knows the intellect is breathing in the collection. He enters its service as an assistant for collecting perceptions.
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Peter Sloterdijk (The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice)
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Insuring against losses, however, goes against the grain of the risk principle. It asks people to accept a sure loss (the cost of the policy) rather than to gamble on an uncertain larger loss. Since we like to gamble on losses, this can be a difficult sell.
Most insurance companies today avoid this problem by phrasing their messages in the positive. Insurance is now described not so much as a buffer against unpredictable loss but, instead, as a way of protecting the valuables you possess. Even if you don't currently have valuables to speak of, the companies encourage you to insure against losing the good things you're hoping will come your way in the future. Why gamble on losing your hopes? One company advertises: "Whether you want to secure your family's future or safeguard your auto or home, Prudential has the insurance products to help you achieve your goals." A television commercial for another tells us: "Is it possible to secure a dream? At The Hartford, we do just that." Allstate's motto (right below the "good hands" shtick) goes straight for the buzzwords without bothering over sentence structure: "Succeeding today, planning tomorrow." I doubt anybody has the faintest idea what that actually says, but, for a few cents a day, who wants to gamble with success and tomorrow?
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Robert V. Levine (The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold)
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Many people are bowled over by the chance remark of a friend, such as “You do not look so well this morning.” If they are rejected or snubbed by someone, they blindly swallow the so-called fact that this means they are an inferior person. Most of us are subjected to negative suggestions every day. If our conscious mind is working and on the job, we do not have to accept them blindly. “It ain’t necessarily so” is a good motto.
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Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
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And every time she grabbed her brush and started doing things on the canvas, he felt her telling the story of his life, he just always did things, he did not know why and what would result be, but he just wanted to do them.
His motto when things come down is, go with the wind, let it take you where it wants to go.
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Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
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Plastic Painting
He smiled as he looked at the studio in the outer hall, each of these paintings she painted here, enjoying very much observing them immersed in the colors.
Her spiritual intelligence is high, as every other plastic artist, he holds the paint brush, and does things, lines and colors, he does not know what he is doing, or what he wants, he only paints, his hand and mind are just a tool, and something else inside him moves it.
At the end, their paintings are sold at the most expensive price. She once told him, the reason for the distinction of fine art is that the painter paints with his soul, not with his hands.
And every time she grabbed her brush and started doing things on the canvas, he felt her telling the story of his life, he just always did things, he did not know why and what would result be, but he just wanted to do them.
His motto when things come down is, go with the wind, let it take you where it wants to go.
He stood before a mediocre painting, a bridge suspended in the sky, punctuated by chaotic colors, a bit of haphazard smoke, and what seemed to be flying leaves.
When she painted this painting, she stood in front of it for a whole day, she almost went crazy, the painting was complete but something was missing in it.
In the end, it was this deficiency that relieved her of finding it, a red dot in the lower-left corner of the painting! It fell right under what appeared to be a leaf.
That is crazy, it was actually completed by it!
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Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
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Today, the students should make a promise to me. The promise has many parts, and I know you will fulfil them all. 1.I will have a goal and work hard to achieve that goal. I realize that aiming small is a crime. 2.I will work with integrity and succeed with integrity. 3.I will be a good member of my family, a good member of the society, a good member of the nation and a good member of the world. 4.I will always try to save or better someone’s life, without any discrimination of caste, creed, language, religion or community. 5.I will always protect and enhance the dignity of every human life without any bias. 6.I will always remember the importance of time. My motto will be ‘Let not my winged days, be spent in vain’. 7I will always work for clean planet Earth and clean energy. 8My national flag flies in my heart and I will bring glory to my nation. (from Address and interaction with the students of Bijnor, 21 July 2015)
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A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (Learning How to Fly: Life Lessons for the Youth)
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When the doctor was done, Hitler leaped onto a long table positioned smack in the middle of the crowd. His oratorical style was provocative, his language colloquial and at times coarse. He hollered insults at politicians, capitalists, and Jews. He castigated the Reich finance minister for supporting the Treaty of Versailles, a humiliating concession to the victors of the war that would bring Germans to their knees, he warned, unless they fought back. “Our motto is only struggle!” Hitler cried. The beer-hall crowd, a fizzy mix of working-class and middle-class men, erupted—some cheering, some jeering. His controversial speeches fueled attendance at future meetings of the German Workers’ Party, which grew to 3,300 members by the end of 1921, at which point it had a new name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, nicknamed the Nazi Party. It also had a new chairman, Hitler, who gave himself a new title: Führer (Leader).
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Rebecca Donner (All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler)