Nine and a half thoughts

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Think about it. We are all born with a blank mind. We, then, keep absorbing thoughts picked up from our parents, teachers, books, friends and colleagues. Our ability to absorb them obviously depends on factors like intelligence and sensibility.

Based on various inputs we keep developing a personality. And then at some point we close the gates of our mind for new thoughts. That is when we start having convictions and belief systems which place us at conflict with anyone who opposes us. Personally, I have no belief systems and no conflict with anything or anyone. That’s why I don’t close the gate of my mind to thoughts from anywhere.
So, let me tell you nine and a half thoughts which you may agree or disagree with:

There always will be a confused soul in an existing system who will think that he can change the system. The only way to convince him otherwise is to kill him.
— Ned Beatty’s character in the film The Shooter.

You close your eyes and go to sleep and the world ceases to exist.
— Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea.

A lion wakes up every day and starts running after a deer to survive. A deer wakes up every day and starts running from a lion to survive. So the point is that it does not matter whether you are a lion or a deer. You just have to keep running.
— SMS from an unknown number.

The best things in life are for free and are pleasurable. It is only the dinners, the gifts and the conversations which one has to go through in order to lead to the best things which are painful and expensive.
— Ram Gopal Varma.

The first thing to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
— Line in a greeting card.

When Napoleon, who was supposedly short, was trying to reach for a book on a highshelf, one of his generals offered, “Let me get that for you, my Lord. I am higher than you,” to which apparently Napoleon replied, “You are not higher. You are longer.”

An agitated executive at a board of director’s meeting of the Liril soap company was overheard saying, “It’s
fantastic that we made the model so popular! But what about the f**%ing soap?”

Silence is not always golden. Many times it is just plain yellow.
— Mad magazine.

I was standing at the edge of the cliff road with a body at my feet. You didn’t need to study medicine to know how the man died. He died of cardiac arrest. The arrest was caused due to a thin blade of steel passing through his heart.
I wasn’t too anxious to call
a doctor. At the time the blade pricked out his life,
its handle happened to be in my hands
— sheer narrative genius on the opening page of a Desmond Bagley book.

The point of life is that there is no point to it. So the best point we can aim at is to live it point by point and point to point.
— RGV.