I have 3 but would LOVE to hear more…
You can always have more but you can’t have less
This one’s from my dad and it really stuck with me. You can, and really should, apply this to any intoxicant.
On the pitch is off the streets
This is about getting restless kids, or kids who might be in a bad situation, into sports.
The axe forgets but the tree remembers
Translation on this one: People who cause hurt are less likely to remember than those it affected.
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Only break one law at a time.
For example; If you have an AI executive tied up in the trunk of your car, make sure the tail lights all work.
My friend refers to this as - Don’t be stupid while you’re being stupid.
Ooh, along this line:
No matter what you do, pay your accountant and attorney first.
HAHAHA. I actually have this one baked into my consciousness. I’m a little more “don’t speed if your tax is out of date” though. Think I need to up my game.
I always say “If your tags are expired, don’t have a body in the trunk!” which I think splits the difference between both examples.
This one was taught almost verbatim to me by a guy who sold a lot of drugs in college and saw a lot of people in the business get bagged. He never did though.
I have several that I live my life by. Being prompted has caused me to forget all of them
I hear that. Sure look, if you think of any of them in a months time I’ll still be glad of the learning.
“You do not treat a man like a gentleman because he is. You treat a man like a gentleman because you are.”
Feel like this clashes with “respect is earned, not demanded” which I feel more strongly
Edit: That said, I do also believe that people should be treated with respect by default.
Many (maybe even most?) adages have an opposite.
“Reach for the stars”, but “sky’s the limit”.
“Knowledge is power,” but “ignorance is bliss.”
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but “out of sight, out of mind.”
“Better safe than sorry,” but “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword,” but “actions speak louder than words.”
“Great minds think alike,” but “fools seldom differ.”
“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” but “many hands make light work.”
This is missing a Carlin punchline to it and a message, but I can envision him saying it.
Not really.
Take the first one. Someone can work hard to improve themselves, but have a realistic idea of how far they can go. Maybe I’ll take a chance and open a hot dog stand of my own; I shouldn’t expect to outdo Burger King or KFC.
You can take risks safely. A scuba diver can explore a cave with a trained buddy and proper equipment, or just swim in alone.
All the people who fought in the Tojan War are long dead, but Homer’s words still live on.
Most of those don’t mean opposite things, though. They aren’t describing incompatible concepts. Even, “great minds think alike” and, “fools seldom differ” are more comments about different contexts than opposite meaning.
Right, and that’s kinda my point. I said that there are opposites, not that they don’t have any value at all. Context is key.
They are literally, technically, definitionally not opposites if they carry unrelated meanings.
I don’t think they all do, but we clearly disagree.
Yes, not all of them are wholly unrelated, as already said. That doesn’t make them all valid opposites.
Sky is the limit means nothing is impossible, so they say pretty much the same thing about aiming high.
That one was a bit tongue in cheek, yeah.
Yeah, it’s funny like when people say “Jumbo shrimp is an oxymoron.” Like, ha ha, yeah, shrimp can also mean small person, but the animals called shrimp come in different sizes, so we need size words if we want to classify them. So it’s not in fact a contradiction, but it’s a really funny joke. Same thing here.
I think that there’s a fundamental disconnect between respect for somebody, and how you treat them. How you treat them reveals everything about you, and not much about them. For example, ICE goons don’t respect the immigrants that they see as breaking the law. But their, unhinged, gleeful violence comes from within their own disordered brains. We can’t tell anything at all about the people ICE targets by the fact that agents abuse them, but we can be 100% sure that the agents are psychopathic shitheels. “Respect” depends on your point of view, while behavior is tangible.
Put another way, nobody can make you behave a certain way, and if somebody doesn’t earn your respect, set a boundary and remove them from your life. Don’t pretend that others force you to behave a certain way.
You can be disrespectful as fuck in a gentlemanly way. That shit is better than heroin to people with generational wealth.
Respect is earned, but all people deserve to be treated with decency by default.
You’re 100% right.
Initial respect or friendliness should be the default behaviour until proven otherwise.
This one is stellar.
Perfection is the enemy of progress
I heard it as, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Ironically, I heard it from a friend who lived his life striving for perfect, and died of a treatable medical condition because his wife’s HMO wasn’t good enough for him.
We say “perfect is the enemy of good.” Even simpler.
There’s a saying in Chinese. It rhymes in Chinese (which makes it so much cooler) but the translated version is this:
Given equivalent units of gold and time, it is easy to trade time for gold, but it is challenging to trade gold for time.
Essentially, be wary of how much you’re devoting to your work, because it doesn’t matter how successful you are, you will never get your life back
There’s another one that I find to be very relevant with the times:
a boat with naturally straighten itself when it nears a bridge
It’s a descriptivist version of the English saying “we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” Essentially, problems have a way of sorting themselves out when things get desperate enough
Time is the only commodity that you can’t make more it. Make sure you spend it well.
Love these.
Just want to clarify that “we’ll cross that bridge when we get there” is closer to “work on one problem at a time” than implying the problem will sort itself out.
Isn’t that what I meant? English saying is a prescriptivist version of the Chinese song; Chinese saying is a descriptivist version of the English saying
To be clear, the Chinese saying isn’t implying that the problem will naturally go away. It’s implying that people will be driven to solve the problem as the deadline approaches
Love both of these. Thank you!
Here’s a few that stuck with me over the years:
“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.” --Jeff VanderMeer
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” --Gustav Mahler
“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.” - - Sir Terry Pratchett
That’s a great quote by Gustav Mahler, thank you!
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw
Haven’t seen it yet.
You can make no mistakes and still lose. That is not failure, that is life. -Picard
You have to do something poorly before you can do it well.
An extension to this:
To learn, you must be willing to do it poorly.
To teach, you must be willing to let others do it poorly.To teach, you must be willing to let others do it poorly.
This part is far more difficult than it sounds.
dude. for real.
famed new york maker, jimmy diresta has a version of this “you go to school on the first one”
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Brush your teeth.
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No.
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The most dangerous minority are the Rich.
That last one we need more people saying.
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If it’s your job to eat a frog every day, eat it for breakfast. If it’s your job to eat two frogs, eat the big one first.
All you can do is your best, and your best will always be good enough.
Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s obsolete, and just because something is obsolete doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.
Oh, I thought of another, which I’ve said to my kid hundreds of times over the years:
‘It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it’, typically with things like an umbrella or water.
My parents used that one a lot for condoms.
That’s how you make a hoarder.
A variation on the same theme: I’d rather be looking at it than looking for it.
jimmy diresta again, woot
Moving the body moves the mind.
It could always be worse.
The future will always surprise you.
At first, I thought that first one was about moving a dead body.
All three of these are… interesting from the perspective of a paralyzed person
“No matter how bad things may seem, they can’t be any better. They can’t be any worse. Because that’s the way things fucking are, and you better get used to it, Nancy. Quit your bitching.”
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” - Douglas Adams
“The graveyard is filled with people who had the right of way”
