From: natashavita@earthlink.net
Date: Tue Dec 11 2001 - 15:50:01 MST
Eli said:
> I reaffirm my own declaration that (a) I cannot be harmed by words, *any*
> words, no matter how constituted and (b) if I can be harmed by words, it's
> my own problem. But that's a declaration that I have to make for myself,
> not a default state of affairs.
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> I reaffirm my own declaration that (a) I cannot be harmed by words, *any*
> words, no matter how constituted and (b) if I can be harmed by words, it's
> my own problem. But that's a declaration that I have to make for myself,
> not a default state of affairs.
The philosophy of "Sticks and stones can break my bones but names will never hurt me." was taught to me as a child and I have carried this phrase, neatly tucked in my pocket, throughout my adult life. But being too proud can easily trip us.
Certainly this sentiment is not novel, or even unique.
It is my responsibility to exclude people from my life who intentionally or subconsciously say things to me or about me that are rude. It is also my responsibility to do something about it. How one takes actions speak a hell of a lot louder than the feebleminded words of someone whose intention is to attempt to lash out and defame. “Turn the other cheek” is another phrase told to me as a child. I’d rather not have two bruised cheeks -
I personally think that everyone can be hurt by harsh and meanspirited words. I can think of ways to put this theory to practice, but why stoop to intentionally trying to hurt someone by finding out something that can get his or her goat. Take a moment with your self and find your sacred cow.
"Bullies, like animals, sense fear, and you must stand your ground." "Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words can never hurt me," was never bullied -- nor has a very short memory.
The following quotations represent merely a grain in the wealth of life experienced by those who felt the responsibility of leaving humankind a reminder of what it means to experience life to the fullest.
Natasha
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler.
When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
Dr. Robert Anthony
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
Aristotle
And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest live every act of thy life as if it were the last.
Marcus Aurelius
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Frances Bacon
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
James Baldwin
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Honore’ de Balzac
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
William Blake
Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
Bertolt Brecht
The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
Van Wyck Brooks
About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.
Rita Mae Brown
Truth never hurts the teller.
Robert Browning
No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast as love can do with a single thread.
Robert Burton, English Clergyman
You will never ‘find’ time for anything. If you want time you must make it.
Charles Buxton
Man’s love is of man’s life a part; it is a woman’s whole existence.
Lord Byron
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Albert Camus
The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
Dale Carnegie
Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
G. K. Chesterton
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Chinese Proverb
Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.
Plato
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
Joseph Conrad
To be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e. e. cummings
I love to doubt as well as know.
Dante
Only a life lived for others is worth living.
Albert Einstein
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
George Eliott
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.)
Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
Erasmus
No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.
Mahatma Gandhi
A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
Charles Darwin
I think; therefore I am.
Rene Descartes
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
Frederick Douglass
Beware of the fury of the patient man.
John Dryden
A consensus means that everybody agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.
Abba Eban
If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas A. Edison
Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence.
Nathanial Hawthorne
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
Frank Herbert
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
Gilbert Highet
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
Albert Einstein
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies without the sympathy of the community .
William James
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung
You always become the thing you fight the most.
Carl Jung
Only a life lived in a certain spirit is worth living. It is a remarkable fact that a life lived entirely from the ego is dull not only for the person himself but for all concerned.
Carl Jung
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but on error also.
Carl Jung
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.
Helen Adams Keller
The time is always right to do what is right.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if the knows what it is NOT.
Carl Jung
The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.
Abraham Lincoln
The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.
Vince Lombardi
Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
John Stuart Mill
Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, moral courage. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
John Stuart Mill
There is only one rule for being a good talker…learn to listen.
Christopher Morley
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.
Pascal
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
Life was meant to be lived and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
Eleanor Roosevelt
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something!"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expedience.
Theodore Roosevelt
To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Let him who would move the world first move himself.
Socrates
It takes two to speak truth – One to speak, and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau
Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
Paul Valery
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
Voltaire
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, ‘Why then are you not taking part in them?’
Oscar Wilde
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