Quotations Weblog

How can you tell what a person believes? By what they do. I’ve stopped listening to people. Ok, that’s a lie. I’ve stopped believing people. Ok, that’s a lie too. I have a new filter in my mind. I listen to what people say. I watch what they do. I only believe in the intersection of the two.

The people who I keep as my friends have a high correlation between the things that they say they are going to do and the things that they actually do. I’m not talking about dreams and hopes. I’m talking about the every day things:

“I’ll meet you for lunch.”
“I’ll call you.”
“We should get together next month.”

If someone says these things and doesn’t follow through, it’s pretty obvious that they really don’t want me to be in their lives. No matter what they say, I believe their actions far more than their words.

Continuing the my favorite quotations series, here are my favorite quotations from Richard Feynman. Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist and created a well-known series of lectures on physics, but more importantly he was a character who divided his time between physics, practical jokes, and hobbies ranging from playing the drums to safecracking.

I first heard of Richard Feynman just after his death in 1988. Fortunately much of his knowledge and wit has been preserved in books, notably the classic Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. Whether you’re interested in physics or not it’s a very entertaining read.

• More quotations from Richard Feynman

We’re always making changes to this site, although most of them are behind the scenes. I’ll be posting updates here regularly to let you know what we’re doing with the site. Here are the updates from the last week or so:

• We’ve added two new subjects to our index: discovery and planning.

• We’ve added 85 quotations, bringing our total up to 23,420. Here are a few selections from the most recently added quotes:

This is one of my biggest fears. I fear that if I stop, for even a moment, that I will be “retreating into less.” My problem is that I’m interested in so many things that I feel like I’m retreating no matter how much I do.

I’m writing regularly. That much is certain. But I haven’t painted with oils for a couple of years. I’m taking photographs regularly, but I haven’t sketched for a week or so. How can I ever get better at sketching if I only do it every couple of weeks? My crocheting has devolved into afghan-mode. I haven’t crocheted anything more complicated for a couple of years. The sweater that I crocheted bounced off the back of my bike unnoticed one day on the way to work about a month ago. I don’t even have proof that I could crochet a sweater.

If I spend time “growing into more” with one discipline, I feel like I’m “retreating into less” on another. I cannot do everything. I would love to think that I can, but I know that I can’t do everything. It just seems that life is a series of choosing where I will grow and where I will retreat.

The first weblog I ever read was Real Live Preacher. I found out about him from Reverend Sean Parker Dennison, who is the minister at my UU church. Before that, I had never even conceived of weblogs, even though Mike and I basically wrote a weekly weblog for this site back in 1997.

If I found Real Live Preacher by happenstance, I kept reading because he’s an incredible writer. I have regularly added tidbits of wisdom from his writings to our quotations collections. Here are some of my favorites:

• Read all of the quotations from Real Live Preacher

• Buy Real Live Preacher’s Book at Amazon.com: Real Live Preacher

You can’t really tell by looking at it, but he just re-vamped his entire weblog, porting all his archives over to new software, adding logins for comments and a chat room. The chat room is very active and the community that has grown around this weblog has a new forum to play with.