Why Do You Love Quotes?

We're surrounded by language, like a school of fish submerged in an endless blue ocean. We're awash in words, so surrounded that we forget their power. We assume that words describe the world. But in fact, they do so much more. Language doesn't just describe reality. It generates reality. The words you use to wallpaper your mind become your world. Always complaining? Your world will shrink to the confines of your linguistic cell.

“Be careful of how you interpret the world; it is like that.”

Erich Heller

This I know: I'm over-calibrated to appreciate language. Others feel this way about music, movies or adrenaline-inducing sports. For me, it's words. Certain strung-together phrases imprint themsleves on my mind and never leave. My own personal collection of quotes, both on my website and committed to memory in my mind, becomes a reserve to draw on, a source of inspiration and guidance, a trusty lantern slicing through the shadows ahead.

“Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

Emerson

The right turn-of-phrase becomes a small encapsulation of life. A microcosm of a worldview, a small summary of a way to approach the world. The best quotes are the distillations of dozens of books, hundreds of hours of podcasts, entire Ted Talks compressed down into two lines and ninety-six characters. How many words have been spoken, songs have been sung, conversations held late into the night analyzing, dissecting, unpacking the intricacies of a relationship between two people? And then Emerson arrives with this ten-word gem:

"A friend is someone with whom I may be sincere."

Emerson

Infinite wisdom packed into a finite and memorable line.  A one word razor to measure the people in your life, and determine who clears the "true friend" bar. And who we surround ourself with matters. Your world is nothing more than the swirling combination of everything you allow into your mind. This simple truth flattens me with its importance.  Where do you put your precious attention? What's your standard? How do you direct  your one wild and precious beam of focus? Steady as a lighthouse, or spastic as a strobe?

“Your world is a living expression of how you are using—and have used—your mind.”

Earl Nightingale

We sacrifice so much life on the altar of petty details. No, no, no. We must resist the pull of the pesky. I want to live a grand life, so I choose to fill my mind with grand thoughts. Dazzling minds, rousing achievement, stirring prose, stunning images. Ditch the mundane and give me the marvelous. Skyscrapers, space exploration, The Sovereign Individual, Sarah Bakewell, Self-Reliance, Shackleton, Sartre, God's Debris by Scott Adams, fill my life with that!

"Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead."

World of Tomorrow