#flu

If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music. ↗

— Marcus Brigstocke

#humor #influence #joke #video-games #humor

I know a flute player is technically called a "flautist," but something about it sounds a little sketchy, as does "pianist," so I will refrain. ↗

— Julie Halpern

#flautist #flute #geek #humor #music

Consider yourself. I want you to imagine a scene from your childhood. Pick something evocative... Something you can remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you WEREN'T there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over... The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, whilse simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. ↗

— Steve Grand

#clouds #cognition #flux #life #matter

Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he carried everywhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka’s adoration. Then, if ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her. ↗

— Willa Cather

#imagination

Time often is forgiving and dismissive of the influences, because they recede. We look at Sgt. Pepper and we go "wow! How did they ever think that up?" but of course, if you got into Paul McCartney's bedroom, found his record collection at the time, you would find out. But the clues are gone. It's like evolution: there are certain pure situations that hang around longer, but the ones that got them there don't have time to leave fossils. We have a giraffe, we have a horse. But where's the horse with the long neck? The link species disappear. ↗

— Michka Assayas

#inspiration #forgiveness

The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority. ↗

— Kenneth H. Blanchard

#leadership #leadership

A sign of power in a man is not only when people follow what he suggests, but also when people make a conscious effort to do the exact opposite of what he suggests. ↗

— Criss Jami

#conscious #control #controlled #effort #envy

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. ↗

— Stephen King

#life #teaching #life

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of all the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. ↗

— George Seferis

#influence #life

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#independent-thought #influence #originality #thoughts #life