• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Schindlersword

the origin of humanity

  • Signup Page
  • Shop
    • Books
    • Writing
    • B@’s Coaching
  • About
    • Schindlersword
    • Your support makes a difference
    • Who is Schindler?
    • Testimonials
    • Contact
    • Legal
      • Privacy Policy
      • Disclaimer
      • Terms of Use
      • Affiliate Disclaimer
  • Blog

quotes

Did you know that open heart surgery can be a curse and blessing? At the same time?

By Beat Schindler In quotes, words

Wisdom I wish I’d known earlier

When a year ago I fainted, not for the first time, I ignored that open heart surgery can be both a blessing and curse at the same time.

Sure, there is nothing new about it. I had fainted twice before, back in my teenage years, when I banged my helmetless head against an ice rink and pool floor, but a year ago was my third faint and this time it was serious.

As a teenager, I used to believe what I was told. That means I believed even such bullshit as it makes a difference whether people are awake or asleep. But much water has gone under the bridge since, with lots of other stuff too.

Things have changed and I’m younger than that now.

Let me begin at the beginning

A year ago, I was in the process of doing research for my book, THE ORIGIN OF HUMANITY, when all of a sudden, while boiling water for my afternoon tea, I fainted in my kitchen for no apparent reason, smartphone in hand, slow enough to call the paramedics who arrived quickly, picked me up sack of potatoes-like, took me in a special chair down my three flights of stairs to the waiting ambulance, laid me flat on a stretcher, which is the last event I remember, for transport to the nearby hospital, which I don’t remember at all for by then I had fainted completely.

As luck would have it, lucky me lives in Switzerland, a country where everything is nearby. Be it as it may, nearby wasn’t of much help because it would be four weeks anyway, before I re-membered anything again at all.

While in a state of faint, the 70% water and 30% fire-air-earth — that I’m made of, like you and everybody else — shut down. Or at least that’s how it felt. You don’t feel a thing. You also don’t use words to describe it. Only bystanders can see it and later tell you all about it.

After regaining the senses of my 70% water and 30% fire-air-earth, I re-membered only what I could not communicate to bystanders without blowing their minds and socks off which became quite clear rather quickly.

So I shut up and reduced myself to being told by a doctor, or was it maybe a nurse? that I had in the meantime survived the transport by ambulance to the nearby hospital, by ‘copter to the University hospital, the several hours of open-heart surgery, and the three weeks in a coma, to finally wake up in an intensive care unit that my sister tells me I’m mistaking for my apartment.

The mix of doctors and nurses also tell me that by the end of the week I’d take a taxi to spend my next 3 months at a nearby rehab clinic with fabulous views of the snowcapped Alps illuminated by the sun twice daily like Holly would.

None of it made any sense. They could as well have told me snowflakes keep falling on my head when Mother Frost beats her bedding.

Illustration by Otto Kubel

Without further ado, let’s get back to me, the patient.

I remember more from quotes than from fairy tales. Call me Stupendous Quote Man if you must, but among the ones in plain view of my third eye is the following:

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein

Why am I telling you this?

It’s nothing, respectively it’s nothing but an attempt to let you partake in wisdom I wish I’d known earlier, namely that open heart surgery can be a curse and a blessing at the same time, because that wisdom might come in handy sooner or later.

The difference between miracle, blessing, and curse depends on how you look at it. And it’s not just about Albert Einstein of course. My handpicked quotes collection stands at 4,411 and counting, and includes the following.

That’s right, Polo Hofer, too, is right:

You know the end is near when the idiot killer shows up.”

Only people who’ve never been idiots in all their life shall escape, and I’d be a complete idiot to take myself out of it.

That’s right, Buddha is right, too:

The trouble is, you think you have time.”

No-one begins and ends life alive. If you think time is granted or that it’s all up to you, you’ll be in trouble before you know it.

Open heart surgery has granted me the wisdom to know that I’m mortal. Prior to that, I had the time to live till 2072. Now I know that without the doctors and nurses I wouldn’t have the time to watch my family, friends, and the world grow older and know much more than I ever will, nor would I have witnessed Jeff Beck in concert shortly before his death and listen to his music now, as we speak, without the pain of his absence while wondering who’s next.

Many of my inspirations are my generation, hence don’t have the trouble of thinking time’s on their side. And If my generation is mortal, what does that say about you and me?

That’s right, Yogi Berra is spot on too.

Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.”

Yogi spent his life in sports — a pro baseball catcher who later took on the roles of manager and coach.

If future results are predictable, you can get run over by a bus anytime, but if that’s so, then you know you’re not talking sports anymore.

That’s right, Seneca is equally right.

Words become works.”

When you decide your words well, they will follow you like a shadow that never leaves, beyond the shadow of a doubt. And as if that weren’t enough, when you keep your word, many decisions are already made.

Finally, needless to say but I say it anyway, Marcel Marceau is right too.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?”

‘Nough said.

Six quotes are more than what most word-users can absorb in one reading.

Because nothing happens until it is believed, you might want to read this post again, but that, my friend, is all up to you.

We don’t make choices, we make decisions.

Quotes don’t inspire because they have been written by word-users like you and me — made of 70% water and 30% fire-air-earth — but because they have been written by word-users who decide their words well, for everybody to see.

Tagged With: blessing, curse, heart, surgery, time

Wittgenstein Quotes Worth Reading Twice

“A confession must be part of your new life.”

“A good parable refreshes the mind.”

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards. If it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.”

“A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.”

“A sentence only makes sense in context.”

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

“All I know is what I have words for.”

“Anything your reader can do for himself, leave to him.”

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”

“At the end of reason comes persuasion.”

“Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.”

“Call it a dream, it does not change anything.”

“Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist. They learn to fetch books sit in armchairs.”

“Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.”

“Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death.”

“Does a cat know that a mouse exists?

“Don’t look for the meanings. Look for the use.”

“Don’t think but look!”

“Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.”

“Everything that can be said can be said clearly.”

“Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

“Genius is courage in talent.”

“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”

“I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”

“I am my world.”

“I give no sources because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.”

“I have extremely little courage myself, much less than you. But I have found that whenever I have screwed my courage up to do something, I always felt much freer and happy after it.”

“I really do think with my pen because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.”

“I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”

“Ideas, too, sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.”

“If a blind man were to ask me “Have you got two hands? I should not make sure by looking.”

“If a lioness could speak, we could not understand her.”

“If a question can be asked, then it can also be answered.”

“If I wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach, taking away my appetite, then it was this punch that I originally wanted.”

“If one knows, no one knows.”

“If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

“If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children that there are no fairies. He can omit to teach them fairy.”

“If someone tells me he has bought the outfit of a tightrope walker I am not impressed until I see what is done with it.”

“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”

“In the world, everything is as it is. In it, there is no value and if there were, it would be of no value.”

“It is a strange coincidence that all the people whose skulls have been opened, had a brain.”

“It is certain that we did not come down to this planet from another planet 100 years ago.”

“It is obvious that even a world conceived as different from the real one must have something in common with the real one.”

“It is so difficult to find the beginning.”

“It’s impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?

“Just improve yourself. That is the only thing you can do to better the world.”

“Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and your god only.”

“One must awaken to wonder. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”

“More wisdom is contained in the best crime fiction than in philosophy.”

“Most sentences and questions that have been written about philosophical things are not wrong, but nonsensical.”

“Music conveys to us itself!”

“No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.”

“No pain can be greater than the pain of one person. In other words, no suffering can be greater than that of one human being. The whole planet cannot suffer more than a lone soul.”

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

“Nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said.”

“Only describe. Don’t explain.”

“Only those who live not in time but in the present are happy.”

“Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.”

“Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.”

“Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.”

“Seek to be loved rather than to be admired.”

“Suppose someone were to say, ‘Imagine this butterfly exactly as it is, but ugly instead of beautiful’?!”

“Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

“Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless. That so often happens with someone you love.”

“That we cannot write down all the digits of pi is not a human shortcoming, as mathematicians sometimes think.”

“The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.”

“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

“The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious.”

“The idea sits on our nose, as it were, as glasses, and what we look at, we see through them. It doesn’t even occur to us to take them off.”

“The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.”

“The real question of life after death isn’t whether it exists, what problem this really solves.”

“The revolutionaries will be the ones who can revolutionize themselves.”

“The sense of the world must lie outside the world.”

“The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it.”

“The war saved my life. I don’t know what I would have done without it. Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.”

“The world of the happy is different from that of the unhappy.”

“To be understood, one must speak like he has thrown away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.”

“To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”

“To discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.”

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”

“Understand or die.”

“Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”

“What is your goal? To show the flea the way out of the flea circus.”

“We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”

“We learn by rearranging what we know.”

“What a word means, a sentence cannot say.”

“What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.”

“What is the proof that I know something? Most certainly not my saying I know it.”

“What is thinkable is also possible.”

“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”

“When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame.”

“When I came home, I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.”

“When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Habitual Quotes Worth Reading Twice

Bad habits are easier to abandon today than tomorrow. – Proverb

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain. – Mark Twain

Habit rules the unreflective herd. – William Wordsworth

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables. – Napoleon Hill

Healthy habits are learned in the same way as unhealthy ones, through practice. – Wayne Dyer

I am your constant companion, your greatest asset, or your heaviest burden. I will push you up to success or drag you down to disappointment. I am completely at your command and easily managed. Just be firm with me. I am the servant of all great men, and alas, of all failures as well. Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures. I work with the precision of a robot and the intelligence of water. Half of everything you do I probably do for you – quickly, correctly, and repeatedly. You may run me for profit or run me for ruin, it makes no difference to me. Take me, train me, be firm with me and I will place the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you. Who am I? I am Habit. – Anonymous

I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me but is indeed very soothing and consoling, the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that, young as I am, I may not live to see another day. Yet not one of all my acquaintances could say that in my company I am morose or disgruntled. For this blessing I daily thank my creator. – Johann Amadeus Mozart

If I had my life over again, I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs. – Muriel Spark

If you make a habit of buying things you do not need, you will soon be selling things you do. – Proverb

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all the copy books, and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. – Alfred North Whitehead

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. – Peter Ustinov

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. – Aristotle

Men’s natures are alike. It is their habits that separates them. – Confucius

My game wasn’t where it should have been at all at the start of the year. I got into a couple of bad habits on my swing, and it just took me a little bit of time to get out of them. – Rory McIlroy

My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. – Errol Flynn

Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins. – Leo Tolstoy

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with. – Marshall McLuhan

Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other. – Maxwell Maltz

Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary, you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live. – Tony Robbins

Successful people aren’t born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don’t like to do. The successful people don’t always like these things themselves. They just get on and do them. – Steve Ibbotson

Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit, talk about your joys. – Rita Schiano

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. – Warren Buffet

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams. – Og Mandino

There are two types of habits: the habit of doing, and the habit of not doing. – Anonymous

To change a habit, make a conscious decision, then act out the new behavior. – Maxwell Maltz

To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow. – Eugene Ionesco

Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character , it becomes your destiny. – Lao Tzu

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle

We can never free ourselves from habits. The human being is a creature of habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. We can trade in the habits of the amateur and the addict for the practice of the professional and the committed artist or entrepreneur. – Steven Pressfield

You Can Quotes Worth Reading Twice

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd. – Rumi

Be a light unto yourself, a refuge unto yourself. – Buddha

Be a lotus, unfolding its petals when the sun rises in the sky, unaffected by the slush where it is born or even the water which sustains it. – Sai Baba

Be absolute for death; either death or life shall thereby be the sweeter. – Shakespeare

Be careful how you interpret life, it is that way. – Erich Heller

Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you: you must acquire it. – Sudie Back

Be free from all dualities and from all anxieties for gain and safety, and be established in the self. – The Vedas

Be good and you will be lonesome. – Mark Twain

Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you’re happy with a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken away from you. – Deepak Chopra

Be happy. It’s one way of being wise. – Colette

Be kind and merciful. Let no one ever come to you without coming away better and happier. – Mother Teresa

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. – Plato

Be like water. Water is fluid, soft & yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: What is soft is strong. – Lao Tzu

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are. – John Wooden

Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes. – Confucius

Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. – Helen Keller

Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones. – Wallace Stegner

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. – Flaubert

Be thankful for what you have. You’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough. – Oprah Winfrey

Be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi

Be who you are and say what you feel. Because those who mind don’t matter. And those who matter don’t mind. – Theodor ‘Doctor Seuss’ Geisel

– Banksy

Be yourself, because everyone else is already taken. – Oscar Wilde

Meaningful Quotes Worth Reading Twice

90% of corporate life is feigning it. That’s what happens when you’ve sold your soul, exist to get the next paycheck and your job becomes ‘not to get fired’. Pretend you’re interested, show up to the meetings and hopefully find meaning elsewhere in your life. A better solution is to find meaning in everything you do, every day, even if it means a pay cut. – Hugh Macleod

Don’t look for the meanings. Look for the use. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Face your fear, empty yourself, trust your own voice, let go of control, have faith in outcomes, connect with a larger purpose, derive meaning from the struggle. – Jigaro Kano, founder of modern Judo

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. – Aristotle

I can bear my pain as long as it has meaning. – Haruki Murakami

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words. – Haruki Murakami

It’s not the circumstances and events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to our circumstances and to events, how we interpret them, that shapes who we are today and who we’ll become tomorrow. Things do not have meaning. We assign meaning to everything. – Tony Robbins

It’s precisely the disappointing stories which have no proper ending and, therefore, have no proper meaning, that sound true to life. – Max Frisch

Man cannot stand a meaningless life. – Carl Jung

One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.
Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.
Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.
– Stephen Hawking

The meaning of life is to go back to sleep and hope that tomorrow will be a better day. –  Charles Schulz

There is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of a good cause. – Albert Einstein

To have a meaningful life, you have to do something meaningful. Meaning it doesn’t happen on autopilot. – Hugh Macleod

Vision is the course one follows to make dreams reality. Vision strengthens us to be committed.  Vision gives significance to the otherwise meaningless details of our lives. – Andy Stanley

We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon. – William Zinsser

We die. That may be the meaning of life. – Toni Morrison

We remember experiences which have a personal meaning for us, even if the meaning is a pure construction of the mind. The mind remembers what the mind does, not what the world does. – James Jenkins

Women who can only give all or nothing don’t know the meaning of pleasure. – Colette

Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn. – Richard Feynman

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues. Until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose, you don’t know what love is. – Don Raye / Gene Depaul

Thoughts

The wordless

In the wordless world, also known as evolution, nature, or the wild, think and thought don’t exist for self-evident reasons.

The wordy

Among the word-users, the tendency is to think it is our thinking that got us here, makes us unique, and separates us from the wordless, that is from everything in the universe except us.

As Henry Ford would have it, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Kidding aside, thinking thoughts matters, of course, but at the same time everybody knows the world we live in—complete with the promoters of “Life sucks and then you die,” “The doomsday clock is nearer to apocalypse than ever,” “I see no hope for the future”—is, in fact, the world of our own making, and that it won’t be changed, let alone made better, by the same thoughts that create it.

In the beginning is the thought? Thinking it is our thinking that got us here would be forgetting what got us here in the first place. We cannot change what is.

In the beginning is the word, a fact that can be denied only by confirming it. But you can tip the balance in your favor.

Think good words.

“Words become works.”– Seneca


PS. My collection of Think Quotes Worth Reading Twice

True Quotes Worth Reading Twice Flipbook

Think Quotes Flip Book

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 8
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

Follow

Spread the love

Contact / Privacy Policy (and GDPR) / Disclaimer / Terms Of Use / Affiliate Disclaimer

The Story Of Words, Last Train To Simple and other books by the same author are Schindlersword-productions by Beat Schindler in Biel-Bienne, Switzerland. © 2004-2021

Copyright © 2023 · Beat Schindler