From one of Bruce Lee's friends:

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-tow minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile.

So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.”

I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.”

He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.”

I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.”

So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out.

I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” — and we’re still running — “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles.

Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?”

He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

Discipline, courage, willpower... It's not something you're born with. It's something you think. Start thinking you have them.

The Plan that Cannot Fail

I spent probably the last eight or nine years of my life believing that people who said to just keep smiling no matter what were only hiding their problems.

Now I see that if I had spent those eight or nine years just smiling all of the time, I would have had far less problems to begin with.

Shit my philosophy professor says

Halfway through the first class meeting of my Introduction to Philosophy, I realized that taking good notes in that class wasn't going to happen. There's just too little structure to the lessons. But when the professor started saying things left and right that I knew I would want to write down and think about later, I came up with a new note-taking method.

Just write down funny and/or good to remember life lessons from a man who gets up, eats breakfast, rides a motorcycle everywhere, and shits philosophy.

"If I allow anything that comes into my life to affect my happiness... That's insanity!"

"People say these days 'I don't have time for myself.' What kind of idiotic life is that?! Who the hell are you living for?!

"The idea, right... Is once you know yourself... Anything goes!"

"The world is a curious place. Some animals can just regrow lost appendages. Just imagine if you could regrow limbs. Everyone would ride motorcycles!"

"The problems with human beings is that we have this tendency to get a little bit of knowledge and think we know a lot more than we do."

"We are great about remembering the answers, but often we forget the questions."

"How many in here want to die in their sleep? ... What the hell are you thinking?! Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to answer the question of what happens to you when you die. You get one chance to figure it out and you want to sleep through it?!"

"The appeal to the metanarrative is no appeal at all. It's just justification for somebody else's whim."

"The point at which society tries to replace ethics with law is deeply problematic."

"If all you're doing is following the rules, you're a scary character."

"That's it. That's what ties everything together. Water. ... I just gave you the answer to the cosmos... and you don't seem very impressed."

"Everybody is always talking about finding some state of rest. But there is no such thing in the cosmos. Everything is in flux."

"Happiness is a function of the self. It can't possibly be found outside the self."

"This is what happens to most people... They identify themselves with their wants."

"As long as you think you know, you will never be able to learn."

"Once you can get through all your bullshit... And say 'Shit. I don't know.' Then you're in a great place."

"You are all going to die someday. And it's something you all need to be aware of."

"If there's not a God, don't worry about it. If there is a God, don't worry about it. You can't do anything about it anyway."

"The brain is like a sonar operator in a submarine. It just gets these blips that it must interpret. But the sonar operator has an advantage... He's been outside the submarine."

"You gotta have proof. Cause that's how you know shit."

"Descartes was trying to tell the church that God could be proved through natural science. But the church took offense. Because they heard 'You can't have some burning bush tell you there's God. Here's a better explanation.'"

"For God to be giving you all of your sensations, you would have to be a brain in a vat somewhere with God just giving you these sensations and all this information from some Godly wi-fi of a thousand million gigabytes per second."

Inevitably, there will be more to come.

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

-Ellie Wiesel

"My request to all. Whenever you run across a story such as this, don't assume it'll take a life of its own, on its own. It won't. It can't. There are too many other stories that drown out the one before it.

You need to spend time to get that story and its word out to many. If you care, you'll do it.

Keep the faith, pay forward and always lend a hand; even if you're the one who needs it."

-ritchey