‘When you die and leave the field of play, the judgement will not be whether you won or lost the match, but simply how you played the game.’

One of the few helpful phrases that has stuck in my mind when looking at the bigger picture of what life throws at you, and the decisions you have to make. Integrity is the quality I try and maintain.

Another that comes to mind I’ve had to dig out of the library (bookshelf) . to quote.

THE ART OF BEING LUCKY.
There are rules of luck and the wise do not leave it all to chance. Luck can be assisted by care. Some content themselves with placing themselves confidently at the gate of fortune, waiting until she opens it. Others do better, and press forward and profit by their clever boldness, reaching the goddess and winning her favour on the wings of their virtue and valour. But a true philosophy has no other umpire than virtue and insight – for there is no good or bad luck except wisdom and foolishness.

SUCCESS

To laugh often and much,
To win the respect of intelligent people and 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.
This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

figure out how much time you want to spend loving someone who isn't loving you back.

-jenn N.

From my dad:

Find work you enjoy doing, so every day you go to "work" you are really going to spend the day doing your hobby.

The corollary to that came from professor Charles Poster at UofAz, when I complained of spending a summer drawing stair sections beacuse I could do them well:

Don't become good at something you don't want to do, cuz you'll just end up doing it.



Also from my dad, regarding choosing a life partner:

The best gift a father can give his children is to love their mother.

AKA choose the great guy, not the bad boy.

"Buy a Peterbilt dump truck, dude. They ain't makin' 'em anymore."

my father always gave great advice, but never pushed when i ignored it. His rule was to tell us what he thought and then let us learn on our own. I guess his message was that you are responsible for your own life and there ain't no gettin round that. An important lesson that is learned through experience rather than words...and much more difficult for it.

what amazes me about that whole approach is how he could stand to watch me and my brother go through with our unwise plans. with two wee kids of me own now I want to teach them in the same way but it is incedibly hard to refrain from stepping in and taking the obstacles from their path. It ain't tough love or anything, but it sure is tough on a parent.

Jump I totally agree!. Its a little tough love and seeing them fall and skin some knees but they learn. Tough part is having a partner who coddles a little more than I think is acceptable.

From a Prof. in second year, who everyone considered to be an old tough bastard, when I was close to a nervous breakdown due to a long distance love affair goin' down the tubes and suffering through a bad period of designer block. ( you all know what I mean, every idea is complete crap and you just can't get inspired )

( Hold your hands far apart over your head ) FUN!

( Hold your hands closer together over your head ) FAMILY!

( Hold your hands close together over your head ) SCHOOL!

Basically get some perspective, don't sweat this crap, and enjoy what your doing. Simple advice but sure got me through school, and a who lot of shitty situations when I was feeling pretty bad about something.

my best friend wrote something and stuck it in a wallet she gave me as a present for the one that got stolen, it said, "Do what makes you happy - no one else can tell you what that is except you!"

Another "If you want to become rich become an engineer - if you want to be happy become an architect"

Also, "I'm an architect - I don't have to apologise for anything!!"

she told me to wear the jimmy hat

"Use the Force"

"If you have to force something then your doing it wrong."
-dad

"Pick apart everything"

this was posted on the front door of the woodshop at the UT school of architecture. it is from our man ralph waldo emerson.

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that nature tyrannizes over our works. They must be conformed to her law, or they will be ground to powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing whimsical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. You cannot build your house or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is a quick bound set to our caprice.

i had a friend who had a caprice, by the way. an '82. had a police car engine. no bounds to its quickness. but i think he traded it in for an acura.

i look at this everyday when i wake up. it's by my bed. it makes me get up and go.

---Never trust anyone-always believe in yourself
---"Some folks trust in reason, others trust in might, I dont trust in nothin, but I know it come out right!" -Bob Weir-

"Before you make any big decision: sleep on it."-Grandad

"learn that life is full of dissapointments" my mom

Awww, lletdownl, that screen name must come from experience.

hey dont tease! its a very good lesson! its actually a reference to my all time favorite radiohead song! thank you for the concern however... i will just assume 'twasnt sarcasm... as one can never tell

"My suggestion is to drink heavily."
-- former co-worker at my first internship with an architecture firm

"experience is something you don't get until just after you need it"

sucess is made up of 2 words. ..............
suc (suck)
and
cess

Dave Mustaine (megadeth)

Wow. That's some really cheesy shit. Nobody has ever really given me any useful advice but they've given me plenty of bad advice. My favorite: "Just be yourself." That's the last thing anyone should ever do. Whenever I am just "being myself", I get dirty looks and closed doors. Some better advice would be: "Humanity is beyond salvation. Lie. Lie. Lie."

My comment to you, lletdownl, was absolutely not sarcastic and was meant in sympathy. I know it's hard to tell!

not necessarily the best..but one i remember after a
particularly bad day...(i'd overheard some kids making
fun of my drawings)

my dad said basically something like this:
always take someone elses opinions in perspective..
everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but temper
their opinion with how much you respect the other
person and their opinions..or that person respects
you...if you respect your own work noone can make
you feel bad about it unless you let them...

basically taught me to be my toughest critic and to
take others opinions as their own and respectfully
choose to ignore or integrate them...never get too
high when people compliment you and never get too
low when people ridicule or insult you.

Very good and inspiring post!
Mine is "Nature law is effortless".
Another one is:"if you don't take charge of your life, others will."
Another one from my own writing:
"People pursue and escape, people imagine and live." I think it sums up all the people's activities.

i don't usually have much patience for the inspirational and pseudo-philosophical. they always sound great at first, but then you realize how generic and hallmark they are later. one piece of advice that's stuck with me for over two decades, however - really only useful to architect-types - comes back into play every time i'm working through the details of a project:

THINK LIKE WATER.

"be earnest"-my boss

"attend the lectures, they're part of your education"-tom buresh

i find inspirational quotes only last on me for about 10 minutes... but i found this absolutely hilarious.

an engineering professor told us this at the beginning of our chem class.... it's too long so i found it on the internet and they used 'philosophy professor' instead.
------------

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks, rocks about 2" in diameter. He then asked the students if the jar was full?

They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was. The students laughed.

The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

"Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognise that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else, the small stuff.

If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you.

Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal. Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

But then...a student then took the jar which the other students and the professor agreed was full, and proceeded to pour in a glass of beer.
Of course the beer filled the remaining spaces within the jar making the jar truly full.

The moral of this tale is:- no matter how full your life is, there is always room for BEER.

best one yet. i love a happy ending.

my question would be...what advice did you get on how to stay in the group that made it through...other than keeping your shit together?

the best advice is hard to think of...but a good one is sometimes it is better to go ahead and do "it", asking for forgiveness later, than to ask for permission and not get to do whatever it was you wanted to do in the first place.

(this may not hold true in a parental relationship!!)

I saw this on a stall in a bar and thought I would share -

Don't sweat the petty things,
Pet the sweaty things!

don't give up on trying before they take you out with the chair - from my father

Pat Green was the speaker at my graduation at Texas Tech, and he told the beer story.

"everything you need is right there." from a truck driver

"don't put ANYTHING up your nose" - mom after an emergency room trip to extract a toy, supose it now applies more to drugs than toys.

"Don't just ram it in there."

From Burt Reynolds, in Boogie Nights.

i gave myself a few i'm working on

be free
unlearn caution and
unlearn hatred

sometimes theres a conflict between them as i sometimes long to be free to hate, of course work in progress

"Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone."

(I learned this from the pessimism of being a catholic and an east coast canadian)

be prepared to get - at best - only four things out of life:
1. humiliation
2. rejection
3. failure
4. defeat
afterall jc was the son of god and look what they did to him.
this wisdom is the key to leading an exalted, noble life.

In design:

never be afraid to destroy what you have created
when you think you've gone far enough, push it over the edge.

In life:

be yourself - although this is trite and cliched, the commitment to this idea is the deepest personal enterprise.

john,

ach, man, you and Sean McCann and Alan Doyle too. they is expressin their angst in a good way though (and have a new all newfoundland album coming out next month, which sounds strange on the face of it, but is quite cool).

the thing that people who say such things always forget to mention is that JC CAME BACK. and if you believe such things, saved the entire human race for what he did. the suffering wasn't pointless or masochistic and one assumes that he lead a quite happy and satisfying life up to the end der, by.

I thought what I said wd be offensive enough as it was without bringing in the resurrection. but the latter is still SECONDARY to the crucifixion and always will be...

not offensive, john.

know many who believe that view of the world. lived with one such for 7 years. very hard for me sometimes cuz was raised a baptist and taught to feel guilty for being such an awful creature, but ultimately more as a prod to get to work and do good things in spite of it. i think that is partly just the way farmers think, mind.

interesting that the crucifixion is the central idea of christianity for you. i always thought the LIFE (x2) of jesus was the message, not the death. I admit that i am not christian, in spite of the careful upbringing of my mother, so feel free to discount me as a nut.

second-best advice is from boethius via "a confederacy of dunces" and steve coogan in "24 hour party people":

"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away."

comes from being an episcopalian and a central texan.

maybe not the best, but a worthy one:



"..no matter how good you are at something there will always be about a million people better than you.."

i know it sounds like a joke, but if you think about it, especially for those in overly competitive professions, it's a good reality check for everyone...

jump: interesting views. I admit I am just trying to make jc palatable to humanists. You don't have to agree with the resurrection (an improbable miracle) or even that he died to save humankind (I never understood that) Just that the message of instense anguish is that in retrospect you will see that that was your finest hour. It sounds masochistic, and maybe it is, but I'm not a masochist. I don't seek anguish. Rest assured it seeks me. And that's the only way that a thick-skulled moron like me EVER learns anything in a way that I can move forward and leave the messy past behind forever.
It's hard to represent the resurrection in a convincing way. the iconography of the crucifixion, on the other hand is at once compelling = here is a person in anguish.

jump: you're not a nut

Have.......a.....good......time.........ALL.....the...time.............That's my philosophy on life Mahty..........

glad to hear it john.

yeah the crucifixion is an amazing icon. we didn't really have icons like that in my church or at home, i guess as a backlash against iconography and all of that stuff from the protestant revolution. my gramma still has pictures of the last supper all over the place, and images of mary magdalene and others watching jesus ascend to heaven, doing miracles and that sort of thing. i guess the terror of the experience was edited for us. Funny, now that i think of it.

amazing how culture forms views of the world, even if it is just sitting there passively.

i might be a nut. :)

keep your feet on the ground,
most of the time anyway

(my dad)

Surprise. As all art, Architecture helps us contemplate. Life wears out our ability for surprise. Surprise is the beginning of a true vision of the world.

eladio dieste