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Ian O’Shaughnessy

Quotes · By theme

living in the present6 quotes

Related themes: time · agency & ambition · wisdom & folly

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

– Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, 1986

“Life is a verb.”

– Dan Carlin, The Joe Rogan Experience, 2017

“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t ‘attack’ anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

– Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”, Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982.

“Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in James Elliot Cabot’s Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1888

“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

– Robin Williams as John Keating, Dead Poets Society, 1989

“But it don’t pay to think too much, on things you leave behind.”

– Townes Van Zandt, “To Live Is To Fly”, High, Low, and In Between, 1971