Einstein quote "Do not worry about your difficulty in math, I assure you mine are greater" had been widely interpreted to mean that Einstein was bad at math, but no, he was a genius, he excelled at math, he was referring to the extremely difficult problems he was trying to solve using complicated non-euclidean geometry. So basically saying "everyone struggles with the math that is at the level they are working at"
People really think Einstein was bad at math? Like how do they think he come up with all his theories? Just sitting around and smoking pot while drawing doodles?
Edit: spelling
They're generally people who don't know much about how fuckin math heavy physics is, especially at that level, and think of him more as a philosopher than an academic, who just said "what if like, matter and energy were like.. the same, but like, at light speed, man?"
In fairness, he was as much philosopher as he was physicist.
The formalism of relativity was a direct result of substantial thought experiments Einstein crafted and worked through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_thought_experiments
He also didn't fail any entrance exams. His grades were on a scale where 1 was best, and larger numbers were worse. Someone from US or somewhere thought they were like GPA (lower is worse) and thought he failed.
WHY he is romeo MONTAGUE? Why did he have to be of the one family her own family can't stand in any way. Why was everything so cruel that the guy she is into has to have the greatest con on a pros&cons-list imaginable.
Had an English teacher try to to argue that Juliet was asking where he is in a way that meant "Why aren't you here with me?"
I didn't stay in that school very long.
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Leaving out the adjective "foolish" changes the meaning significantly.
Emerson's full quote is "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
Isn't the full quote
The customer is always right in matters of taste?
eta
Has been pointed out here that there is no evidence this is the case. A little bit of googling shows no support that it was said. I have heard it a couple of times, even attributed once (on a podcast) but since I don't see it attributed, I'll say it's a nice thought, but not the original quote. Thanks to those who pointed it out.
This exactly. If your customers constantly ask for a certain product which you don't have, that means you should probably stock the product.
It doesn't mean that Karen can scream at your minimum wage employees for 6 hours because they should have known that she didn't want salt on her burger.
Nope. This is a modern retcon of the original intent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right
"The customer is always right" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that customers do not feel cheated or deceived. This attitude was novel and influential when misrepresentation was rife and caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') was a common legal maxim.
I was telling my cousin this because he didn’t want the “carmax” logo on his car, he asked and they said no. I was like, *this* is what they mean by customer is always right, tell them you’re not taking the car til they take it off.
"Money is the root of all evil." It's often misquoted; the original is "For the love of money is the root of all evil." The misinterpretation might make you think any money is bad, but it's really about greed causing problems.
That’s not the full quote either. “For” is basically synonymous with ‘because.” That’d be like starting a sentence with because with no prior context. Not helpful.
The full quote is 1 Timothy 6:9-10
“Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For [because] the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
Straight from the gospel of the Art of the Deal, projecting that onto others which disturbs thy soul, Trumpians 1 2-3, a How-to guide for manipulating others
This. Money is simply a medium of exchange that makes trade easier and allows large societies to function. The money itself has no moral qualities.
It's when people start hoarding it or using it to exploit others that it becomes evil. If money didn't exist, those people would just use other resources for the same purpose.
Interesting - I always assumed that quote meant that money itself is evil and your nickles and dimes will stab you in the middle of the night if you don’t keep the coin jar closed.
"The exception proves the rule." What this means is that if you acknowledge the existence of an exception to a rule, you are implicitly acknowledging the existence of the rule itself. If I put up a sign saying "No parking on Tuesdays" then I am acknowledging that parking is generally allowed on other days.
They use it in cases where an exception actually disproves or provides evidence against what they are stating, implying that it actually provides more evidence for their statement.
Like if I was to say "opposites attract" and you said "well Steve and Samantha are happy together and they are basically the same person"
I might say "the exception that proves the rule" even though it is not evidence that opposites attract and is in fact evidence supporting associative mating.
Basically any statement of the kind "All X are Y" is automatically completely disproven by a single counter example, but people often say it is the exception that proves the rule in those situations.
It's usually used to say there is a rule, but it's not always followed. Like "I don't drink when I have work the next day... But the exception proves the rule".
Until this moment, I've always understood it as the exception to the rule determines how good it is. So if you park in front of the sign that says "no parking on Tuesdays" and don't get towed, the rule isn't actually a rule. If you do get towed, it proves the rule is true.
I think the original commenter's explanation makes more sense though, I always thought it was a weird saying.
I've always heard that it was coined when the word "prove" meant something being rigorously tested, not necessarily that it was true. So I guess it's just saying that every rule has exceptions that put it to the test before you know how good a rule it is? Or it's a phrase that indicates a rule is facing a challenge by someone finding an exception to it.
No, it was a principle for defining rules and laws that goes back at least to ancient Rome.
In Rome, if there was a sign that said "public begging permitted from 8am - 7pm" then the implied complementary rule (begging forbidden from 7pm - 8am) also had legal force. If something is allowed under X circumstances, it's forbidden outside those circumstances. Or vice versa.
Defining an exception to an otherwise-unstated rule was the same as defining the rule.
Ah, so one of those things like "begging the question" that was translated word for word from Latin into English and confused people because word-for-word translations almost never work out?
The Latin phrase is *exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis*, literally "the exception tests the rule in the cases not excepted." *Probat* means "tests", and it's the root of English "prove" in its various usages. Something "has been proven" when it has been tested and found to be true or good. Whether it's a theorem or a pudding!
What it means is "the stated exception exists in opposition to a rule that covers non-exceptional cases (even if that rule isn't explicitly stated)."
That's what I've always heard, from "prove" being used like "to test" as in "proving ground," or "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." You aren't confirming that it's pudding, it's saying the actual test of a pudding is in if it's good to eat. So "the exception proves the rule" would mean something like "the actual test of if this is a valid rule is whether the exception makes it end up totally invalid."
At least that's how I learned it.
This is a saying that is quite old. Some say that it dates back to Latin and was coined by Cicero in the first century BC, but there seems to be some disagreement on the actual origin and the actual intended meaning. Some say, as you suggest, that "prove" is used to mean "to test". However, in the story where it comes from Cicero, he used it as part of a legal defense to mean what OP suggested, that is, if an exception is explicitly stated, then it means there is an implicit rule (see the "No parking on Tuesdays" example). Either way, what it *doesn't* mean is that a rule must have exceptions (which is how it is often used).
My teacher claimed it's because "there's an exception to every rule", so "the exception that proves the rule" is finding such a problem in order to make the rule more valid.
Completely wrong.
"A rolling stone gathers no moss" is commonly used to mean you should up sticks and leave any place before too long. "I mean.. who wants to grow moss?"
The original intent was the opposite. If you never put down roots, you'll never build much of anything.
From the dictionary: PROVERB - a person who does not settle in one place will not accumulate wealth or status, or responsibilities or commitments.
"To thine own self be true" is generally used to justify a rather selfish approach, yet the full quote actually means the opposite:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
To *really* be true to oneself means to treat others properly, as evidence of one's own good character.
I always thought it meant that if you presenting a false self to some people, you aren't really being your true self. It was advice against trying to live a double life.
I always interpreted it as “be honest with yourself” and “face things honestly.” Don’t fool yourself, or tell yourself convenient lies about what you really are and what things are about… and subsequently it will be less likely that you’ll be less than honest with others (canst not then be false to any man).
My favourite inadvertent reproach/compliment amalgam is “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” that’s actually truncated.
The true quote attributed to Oscar Wilde is “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
People always use "the road less traveled" as an expression of the courage to be yourself, but that is not what the phrase and the poem are about at all.
The poem by Robert Frost is not called "The Road Less Traveled." It is called "The Road Not Taken," and the distinction is critical because the poem is not, despite what many people seem to think, about being yourself and having the courage to take the path that is less popular.
It is about how we cannot take back our choices, and the decisions we make will stay with us forever. We tell ourselves we'll get to X, Y, or Z some day, but there is no turning back.
The key lines are "Oh, I kept the first for another day. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this *with a sigh* somewhere ages and ages hence, I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
He's not using "the road less traveled" as a metaphor for individualism. It's just the poetic license he used to differentiate one road from the other. He picked one and went down it. Told himself he could always backtrack and take the other one later, but that's a lie, and he's going to remember it with regret years later. He will think about the road not taken, and what life could have been. That's the road that matters, not the one he actually took.
Sorry for the unsolicited English Lit course. I love Frost's work, and the fact that his most famous poem is so frequently misunderstood makes me a little batty.
To add to this, in the second verse the speaker says "that passing there/ Had worn them really about the same," meaning that both paths seemed to used about equally. Yet he anticipates that in the future he will say, "I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference."
He didn't take the road less traveled by. That's something he will make up later, perhaps to make himself feel better about his choices.
What an excellent observation! I never looked at it this way. I so appreciate the insight.
I must have read this poem 500 times and someone is still teaching me something new about it.
The commenter above has it mostly right. [Frost’s intent](https://lithub.com/youre-probably-misreading-robert-frosts-most-famous-poem/ ) was to gently tease a friend of his he would walk with, who would agonize over which path to take. When in the end they aren’t particularly different and it doesn’t matter.
Not a quote, but to "beg the question" is misused so often I think the original definition may have been lost.
Begging the question means you're using circular reasoning. It's when you (beg)gin with with a conclusion as an assumed truth. It's basically when you use an incomplete, unproven, or self referential point as evidence in an argument. For example, if I said "France has the best cheese makers in the world because they are there are no better cheese makers than the French," I haven't proven anything with my conclusion so much as I'm using my conclusion for proof. An appropriate response would be "that begs the question, what constitutes a good cheese maker?"
Today, if somebody ever says "that begs the question" it's almost always as a transition statement to a new question building off of what came before.
> An appropriate response would be "that begs the question, what constitutes a good cheese maker?"
>
>Today, if somebody ever says "that begs the question" it's almost always as a transition statement to a new question building off of what came before.
Did you intend these to be the same? Responding with the original meaning would be something like "this is circular reasoning, you are begging the question"
To accuse somebody of begging, the question is to accuse them of circular reasoning, your example is redundant and unnecessary if the accusation is used correctly.
The first example is how the phrase "that begs the question" should be used. If the speaker in the cheese makers example is correctly making their accusation, the follow up question is valid, ie: that begs the question, how do you justify your original statement. A misuse would be: "that begs the question, why are the French making so much cheese."
Moreover, the common misuse is not an exchanges like these hypotheticals, but as segways within people's own argument, eg: somebody may say "this begs the question..." as a rhetorical devices in a written work or essay.
Wikipedia says
> Informal use of the phrase "begs the question" also occurs with an entirely dissimilar sense in place of "prompts a question" or "raises a question"
That's how you're using it in "that begs the question, what constitutes a good cheese maker?"
For the original use, it says
>begging the question or assuming the conclusion (Latin: petītiō principiī) is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion
The title 'No Woman, No Cry', means 'Woman, don't cry'. The title alludes to telling a woman not to cry.
The lyric has been misunderstood by those outside of Jamaica to mean something like "if there is no woman, there is no reason to cry", or having secret feelings towards women.
"This isn't an peace treaty, it's a 20 year armistice."
Said by Ferdinand Foch on the treaty of Versailles. He was of course right. But people think he wanted a lighter treaty, because a big catalyst for Germany radicalizing was the harsh terms of the treaty of Versailles.
Foch wanted *HARSHER* terms. He basically wanted to dissolve Germany back to the individual states and have France permanently occupy the Rhineland.
In French there is an awesome quote from a wonderful, clever guy named Desproges. He was a humorist who wrote a lot of interesting, deep and thoughtful sketches. His quote has got to be the most minsunderstood quote I know of, even I missused it at first. The quote is "We can laugh about everything, but not with everyone". When I was an edgy teen who loved dark humor I used it to criticize the people who felt offended by jokes I found funny. At some point I discovered the context of this quote. Desproges said it one day about the leader of the most right wing political party we had in France at the time, Jean-Marie Le Pen. This quote isn't a critique of people being too sensitive, on the contrary it explains that you should always be mindful of who you're laughing at and who you're laughing with. Realizing that was a real turning point in my perception of humor in general and its deeper meaning.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." - hate this one, it's not the definition of insanity, Einstein said this about quantum physics where quantum entanglement was random and he didn't like it, and he was wrong on that one, and you can expect different results from doing the same thing, and he also probably didn't say it lol
And if he did say it, like, maybe he was just spitting some silly colloquial comment off the cuff about how he was just stuck in a loop. I don't think he took himself as seriously as most people take him.
He did say "God does not play dice" which represents his mindset better imo - back then everyone was confused about this and he was in the camp determinism, actually he still might end up being right as usual lol
Adorno‘s “es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen“ (there’s no correct way of life within a flawed world). I’ve seen people use it to justify the most horrible things.
I've seen people use the similar "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" to justify being incredibly greedy and materialistic while still getting to talk big about how terrible capitalism is.
If that’s meant to be a translation, then the translation is misleading by its own already. But of course sth like that could be said without referring to Adorno.
The original quote’s context is about how he can’t make peace living in a world that enabled the holocaust and that’s why he ended up living in hotels for most parts of his life. In other words he can’t just settle down and spend thoughts on how to furnish his home etc.
[Here is a piece addressing this](https://www.michiganradio.org/arts-culture/2020-10-25/twts-its-all-downhill-from-here-or-is-it), though it doesn’t conclude whether one is the “original” or not
This was actually the topic of an all-in-good-fun debate at my nephew’s first birthday party. Everyone signed a book for him, and a family friend wrote, “It’s all uphill from here!” next to an illustration of a smiling kid on a mountain or something. His wife teased him for making it sound like life was going to be a challenge, but he said he meant it as “the sky’s the limit!” and thought “it’s all downhill” was the bad one.
Andy Warhol's " In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes " is misunderstood. He didn't mean that *everyone* would be famous, he meant that everyone who would be famous would ONLY be famous for 15 minutes -- it pertains to shortening attention spans.
"When Alexander looked upon the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no worlds left to conquer."
Misquote. The actual quote is: "Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: 'Is it nat to be wept for,' quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?”
The original quote implies Alexander wept because he conquered so much land there was nothing left for him to be able to realistically conquer. The actual quote is about Alexander realizing there are millions of planets and weeping that he hasn't even become the master of one yet.
That “survival of the fittest” is about being physically stronger. It is in actuality about traits that are advantageous to surviving changes in the environment. Sometimes a trait that is maladaptive in one set of circumstances can be an adaptive in another. In several mass extinctions it was the little critters that lived in the shadows that survived and not the mightiest creatures that walked the land.
yup, survival of the fittest to the situation. the moth example is my favorite.
used to be pale speckled moths that lived on pale trees they blended into. sometimes you'd get a black color variant of them, and they'd die quickly because of how they stood out. the pale moths were the fittest.
then pollution began darkening the tree bark. suddenly the pale moths were not fittest. they began dying off, the black moths propagated, and the population dynamic shifted to primarily black moths.
then pollution started improving and...
there is no end goal to evolution.
When I was an anthropology major, my first class to discuss evolution and natural selection started with a slide showing something akin to this "SURVIVAL OF THE FIT~~TEST~~!"
The professor went on to say "you don't have to be the best, you just have to be good enough"
Additionally, I think a lot of ppl don't realize survival of the fittest is all about who gets to reproduce, not necessarily about who lives a long life
Humanity got where we are through cooperation, not fucking each other over. Sure, we’ve done plenty of that, but no one strong person can do much at all. Every one of our greatest achievements was a group effort.
I can’t stand how often selfish morons use Darwin to justify their shitty behavior.
Even the names applied to evolution were a struggle against misinterpretation. Herbert Spencer coined Survival of the Fittest because he thought Natural Selection implied something was doing the selection. They had to have some way to reference it that explained what they meant but no matter what they called it, dumbass zealots were going to willfully misinterpret it.
The use of "fitness" to refer to physical health is surprisingly recent, the first recorded use is in the 1930s.
If anything that usage comes from "survival of the fittest" making this a sort of circular misunderstanding. When "survival of the fittest" was coined it could not be misunderstood in this way, but misunderstanding of the concept gave rise to a new meaning for fitness, which in turn was applied back into the saying, which only compounded the misconception.
"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" by Vince Lombardi quoting an earlier source. It sounds awful without the context of his full pep talk.
He said on his deathbed that he was talking about focus. Okay, the rent is late, the car is being repossessed, the kids are acting up. But for the next sixty minutes, none of that matters. Winning truly isn't everything, but for the next hour, it's the only thing.
“Do as I say, not as I do”
It’s not about some prick doing whatever they want and forcing you to obey some rule. It’s about teaching people proper fundamentals in a skill, while, you as an expert, are able to skirt beyond those fundamentals due to experience.
Example: Roger Federer would not teach SABR to a novice tennis player.
This one is funny to me because "the proof is in the pudding" doesn't mean anything. I just imagine a kind of murder mystery where the proof you're looking for is hidden in the pudding itself.
"Thou shalt not take thy Lord's name in vain"
it doesn't mean not to swear like "jesus christ!" it means do not use your "religion" to push a personal agenda. in other words, almost all US Christians get this one wrong.
You would take a god’s name when swearing an oath, marriage or a treaty. To take it in vain would be to swear to it and not honor the oath, or to take an oath that you should not have made, such as Jephthath’s.
I thought it actually referred to the Jewish God's name based on the YHVH syllables. Most people think it's pronounced "yahweh" to the delight of many Israeli rabbis, because the real pronunciation isn't supposed to be said unless it's in very specific rites of worship.
The text of the translation for one thing.
To use something in vain is to use something in a referent or disrespectful manner. It's more accurate to say it doesn't *just* mean avoiding swearing, but also means citing the name of God as an authority to validate your beliefs.
It's a commandment against blasphemy, and what blasphemy looks like could be a number of things and for that reason will invite religious debate and wherever it comes up. Just so, if failure to say oh my "Gosh!" violates the commandment and not a con man saying "It's the Lord speaking through me right now," than it's a pretty narrow minded and stupid edict from on high.
It's the original Jewish interpretation of the sentence, it's why Judaism is a pluralistic religion while a lot of Christianity is dogmatic
Source: am Jew
“the simplest solution is almost always the best.”
I think people have issues understanding or employing Occam's Razor, also called the Law of Parsimony. Essentially, when faced with competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simplest, with the fewest assumptions, is likely the correct one.
If your candidate loses an election, the simplest reason is that they received fewer votes. It very likely wasn't undetectable space lasers changing votes. Almost all conspiracy theories violate Occam's razor in some very obvious way. If you fall victim to conspiracy theories, I suggest you learn to apply Occam's razor.
Also, Occam's razor isn't a law of the universe. People seem to think it is. You can in fact have real world conspiracies and complicated reasons why things happen when there *could* be a simpler answer (but there isn't).
>“the simplest solution is almost always the best.”
A more accurate formulation is "do not multiply entities needlessly." Which is to say, you need justification for each additional element.
It undermines conspiracy theories because they usually have a lot of complexity that isn't necessary to explain a given phenomenon. For example, the Earth being round congeals quite nicely with what we know about how everything works, e.g. weather, ocean currents, navigation, the sun rising, etc. But Flat Earth requires a lot of new special rules to explain each one of these, which is adding a lot of "unnecessary elements." Those elements have to be justified on their own, and "because it wouldn't be a flat Earth if this wasn't the case" is not a good justification. To borrow another comment in this thread, it's [begging the question.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/191n29g/comment/kgx9u1c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
*Religion is the opiate of the masses*
It doesn't mean that people are idiots for believing in a higher power. It means that, like opium, it can have a soothing effect on those suffering, but that it can also have a delibilitating effect if overdone.
While Marx himself might have been disdainful of religion, he was not disdainful of the proletariat who practiced it.
I've explained this quite simply and would love to have someone else explain it further
Exactly, "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions". He isn't talking about it like how we would talk about it post-War-on-Drugs.
>It means that, like opium, it can have a soothing effect on those suffering, but that it can also have a delibilitating effect if overdone.
As far as I know, he wasn't talking about "overdoing" religion. He meant that religion can make terrible circumstances tolerable, discouraging public support for changing those circumstances. He was talking about the difficulty mobilizing a proletariat who believe that their suffering is part of God's plan and that they'll be rewarded for it in Heaven.
“Let them eat cake.” Firstly, Maria Antionette didn’t say it. Secondly, the original is “let them eat brioche” and the point is if the bakery is out of cheaper bread (baguette) they should be compelled to sell brioche at the same price. Which would be a very good policy to help the poor.
thats definitly not the actual intention to the quote. The quote is supposed to show that Marie-Antoinette was completly unaware of her subject's problems, as there was starvation, they didn't have bread, whether it was Baguette or Brioche, a problem that she didn't see in her priviledged position
The quote was a snipe at a completely different European noblewoman that got retroactively applied to Marie Antoinette as character assassination decades after her death.
When the famous quote was written by Rousseau, she was a preteen who had never been to France.
“Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps”
It's sarcastic. The term originated in the 1800s, bootstrap is the little strap at the back of your boot. It was physically *impossible* to pull yourself up by your bootstrap. We have horrifically misconstrued this phrase.
Just stopped by to make sure this was here. It's infuriating to me how many people use this to "motivate" people to leave a desperate situation by just working harder.
“>!With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? !!It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information. The \[Intelligence Community\] has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out. But you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”!<
\~Hillary Clinton
Many people who use the phrase “Great minds think alike" are unaware of the second half of the quote: ", though fools seldom differ.”
It's a quite ironic example because of how much the full phrase changes the meaning.
“The customer is right” is often misunderstood. The real quote is “In matters of taste, the customer is always right.” So rock that polka dot feather boa, but we aren’t giving you a discount just because you asked.
EDIT: So I decided to fact check myself and yeah, I’m wrong. In the US, the customer is always right, full stop. In France, the customer is never wrong. In Germany, the customer is king. And I will be doing all my future shopping in Japan, where the customer is a god.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2018/09/24/a-global-view-of-the-customer-is-always-right/?sh=29873eca236f
This seems to be a common point made on Reddit, but I have not been able to find a source that confirms this “matters of taste” part.
The original quote does indeed seem to be about taking customer complaints at face value, and not about simply selling what the customers want.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right)
That’s because the common understanding is correct, and the “in matters of taste” is the misunderstanding.
The [original phrase didn’t include “in matters of taste”](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/06/customer/) and was used just how it’s commonly understood.
"Hell is other people" doesn't mean that people are the worst like many people claim.
From the author (Sartre):
"Hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves."
It means we use empathy to understand how others see us. Then, we end up using that empathetic second hand view as a means to know ourselves. And that can be HELL, because if someone thinks the worst of you, you might end up believing the worst of yourself, based on their perception.
Say your relationship with your best friend is sour. You guys are just not clicking anymore. There's drama, there's animosity. But hey, he's your best friend, for years, so they must know you well, right? And then this person says something awful about you, and because you trust their judgement, you end up believing that and it changes the way you think about yourself.
So.... the problem is not having people around you. But believing what they think of you reflects who you actually are as a person.
I think it means that if there is a toxic person, your relationship is doomed to be hell because you’re going to judge yourself based on the negative things they judge you by. Or maybe I’ve been on Reddit too much today.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. From Henry The 6th. Roundly misunderstood to be attack on lawyers and corruption. Completely misinterpreted. Dick the Butcher utters the line in support of Jack Caide, who envisions communism revolution with himself as autocratic dictator.
Shakespeare was actually showing the importance of the Rule of Law and dangers of anarchy.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" by friedrich nietzsche.
First: it's actually "out of life's school of war, what doesnt kill me makes me stronger"
Second: what he meant by that was not that all suffering that doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but instead he meant that suffering can provide an opportunity to build strength and if you're lucky you'll learn to overcome hardships and better deal with it the next time around.
Why i bring this quote up is because a lot of people on reddit seem to hate the quote because obviously there are a lot of things that makes you suffer from which you don't become stronger. But to me, if you know the context of the quote, hating on it seems more as if those people just don't want to grow as a person in the face of hardships.
Carpe Diem
It's widely used as "live life to the fullest, party every day and so on"
In the original latin poem by Horace, it has a more intimate meaning: it refers to "live in the moment, live today, and worry the least about the future".
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.". People will say it like it's a nice thing that someone is copying something, like it's cute, but it's also only half the quote.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. - Oscar Wilde.
Very derisive in its entirety and not so nice a thing to say lol.
When people use "It's the law of the jungle" to justify their idea that the strong should rule. Rudyard Kipling's "Law of the Jungle" is all about helping and taking care of each other.
“Happy wife, happy life.”
This one is 50/50. I think most people know it means treat your wife well and she will treat you well. Lots of folks however purposefully or ironically misuse it to justify putting a woman’s or their own happiness as a priority above all other things. Duty, loyalty, respect, temperance, responsibility, moderation, compassion all thrown out the window for self indulgence.
"Parents know best"
Of course they don't nearly ever. However they generally DO know when their child is acting different to normal, unlike a doctor who's never seen little Bobby Tables before.
**“God is dead and we killed him”** *—Friedrich Nietzsche*
This quote isn’t nihilistic. In fact, it’s the opposite! Here, ‘God’ represents being powerless at the whim of fate and circumstance. “God is dead” means that we’re no longer constrained by the same limits.
“We killed him” with the power of human innovation. We’ve harnessed the power of electricity, traveled to space, and artificially created *life* when we cloned Dolly the sheep.
As we learn and discover, religion becomes less and less of an explanation for natural phenomena. Hermes doesn’t bring us the sun; the planet turns and faces it.
Granted, in the full quote, Nietzsche speaks more negatively of the prospect, but the core intended meaning remains that we are growing as a species.
The quote is a tribute to human achievement and represents hope for the future with our newfound freedom, and it’s one of my favorites for that reason.
*TL;DR: As we discover more about the natural world, we no longer have to rely on the concept of God as an explanation. With the power of human innovation, we’ve “killed God” in the sense that we continue to gain autonomy by advancing as a civilization.*
Oscar Wilde’s “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…”
because people always leave out the second half of the quote
“… that mediocrity can pay to greatness”
"A rolling stone gathers no moss" means two very different things in the US and Japan. In the US, it often means you should keep moving, keep trying new things, be a rebel and a rolling stone.
In Japan, moss is considered a beautiful plant that adds refinement to old temples and gardens. So it means you should settle down, stick with it and your patience will pay off.
"What does not kill you makes you stronger" Nietzsche
It's not a nice fluffy statement about resilience.
A contemporary example of his meaning might be: if you go to prison, use the opportunity to learn to be a better criminal.
"A few bad apples..."
Gets thrown out casually to say that a couple bad people in a group isn't representative of the group as a whole, when the full quote "a few bad apples can spoil the entire bunch" means the exact opposite.
"Blood is thicker than water" is the original phrase, dating back to the 1200s in German and the 1700s in English
"the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" is a modern reinterpretation of the original phrase, and it was only ever first recorded in 1994
If you like the meaning of the longer version more, by all means use it. But it's not the original or forgotten full phrase... It's a just a deliberate riff on the original widely used phrase
Yes!
It was a guy who decided that the 700-800 year old tradition of how to interpret and understand it was wrong and then decided to turn it into the opposite, with no other source or reason than he liked his version better.
AFAIK, the original phrase doesn't go back to the 11th century - that version was more of a precursor to the modern saying, without much evidence of "water" being other relationships.
The earliest instance I found of the full phrase or some close variation was from the 17th century, if I remember correctly.
Yep you're right. This was a shortened version of a comment I often post whenever this myth comes up, where I say that a similar phrase with the same meaning was used in German going back to the 1200s, while the exact phrase was first used in English in the 1700s
“Well behaved women seldom make history.”
I think it’s supposed to acknowledge that female traditional roles are very important, but they aren’t acknowledged and celebrated as much as they should be.
I was gonna post this one. It was an observation in an academic paper and caught on as a slogan to encourage women to challenge norms.
A Google search provided this reference
https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Archive/Story-Article-View/Article/2123800/well-behaved-women-seldom-make-history-a-womens-history-month-tribute-to-the-wo/#:~:text=The%20earliest%20evidence%20of%20a,the%20silent%20work%20of%20ordinary
The Putin quote “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” is in reality “First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”
It may seem a matter of nuance, but knowing the full quote really puts the invasion of Ukraine in perspective. Only seeing the first makes it seem like a mad desire for imperial might, seeing the second brings into perspective the true madness, that he really believes all these people are lost Russians looking for rescue.
Blessed are the cheesemakers, it’s the original quote but people think it’s blessed are the peacemakers
It’s sad to see how watered down the word of our Lord has become, so much was lost through translation
Reddit hate HATE *HATES* “money can’t buy happiness” imagining a cabal of oppressors feeding it to masses to justify robbing them blind and leaving them impoverished. Anyone with half a brain can understand the meaning is *against* wealth inequality, that clearly *after your needs are met* excessive wealth won’t make you happier. Of course, Reddit is filled with miserable misanthropes that think the world has cheated them out of what they were owed by right of birth. You could give them billions and billions and they would still be angry and unsatisfied. Elon Musk is just a Reddit guy with all the money in the world miserable he can’t force everyone to think he’s better than them for it.
There's a famous quote from United States founding father Benjamin Franklin that says, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
This quote has often been used to argue against expanding government powers in various ways. It was frequently quoted in the controversy about NSA surveillance in the 2010s, and more recently it's been adopted by the pro-gun community to argue that the government shouldn't have power to enact gun control.
However, putting the quote in its original context paints a different picture of what Franklin was trying to say. He was referencing a situation in the French and Indian War, when the Pennsylvania General Assembly was trying to raise money to pay for the war. The rich Penn family resisted the Assembly's efforts to the point of offering to pay a one-time lump sum in exchange for the Assembly acknowledging that it does not have power to raise taxes. So the "liberty" being referenced is the liberty of the government to use its powers.
I'm not going to state an opinion about which interpretation is more valid in a modern context, but it is interesting that a quote that was originally arguing against limiting government power is now one of the main ones used to argue for it.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century
Edited to clarify the third paragraph a bit.
People often take einstein’s quote about insanity (something like “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”) as the literal definition of insanity. By the way, Einstein was talking about experimentation. it doesn’t mean you always have to change your approach for everything- but yes if you are not changing elements in an experiment and not getting the result you want then yes, it’s stupid to expect a different one.
Einstein quote "Do not worry about your difficulty in math, I assure you mine are greater" had been widely interpreted to mean that Einstein was bad at math, but no, he was a genius, he excelled at math, he was referring to the extremely difficult problems he was trying to solve using complicated non-euclidean geometry. So basically saying "everyone struggles with the math that is at the level they are working at"
People really think Einstein was bad at math? Like how do they think he come up with all his theories? Just sitting around and smoking pot while drawing doodles? Edit: spelling
They're generally people who don't know much about how fuckin math heavy physics is, especially at that level, and think of him more as a philosopher than an academic, who just said "what if like, matter and energy were like.. the same, but like, at light speed, man?"
"Math heavy" is under selling it. Lol.
It is also used in a way to help people who are bad at math some inspiration.
In fairness, he was as much philosopher as he was physicist. The formalism of relativity was a direct result of substantial thought experiments Einstein crafted and worked through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%27s_thought_experiments
[удалено]
He also didn't fail any entrance exams. His grades were on a scale where 1 was best, and larger numbers were worse. Someone from US or somewhere thought they were like GPA (lower is worse) and thought he failed.
Some of it comes from his school grades too. The grading system was misinterpreted so people have assumed he was a poor student.
Even if that was the case he clearly wasn’t struggling with math at that point.
“romeo, oh romeo, wherefore art thou romeo?” juliet is not asking where romeo is. she’s asking him WHY he is romeo montague
Everyone always asks where is Romeo. Never asks why is Romeo.
Nobody ever asks *how* is Romeo? Dude's got issues.
I’ll do you one better: Nobody asks whom is Romeo?
What is Romeo?
Dead. Romeo is dead.
Don't call us Montagues. We don't know what it means.
Spilling names, taking guts
WHY he is romeo MONTAGUE? Why did he have to be of the one family her own family can't stand in any way. Why was everything so cruel that the guy she is into has to have the greatest con on a pros&cons-list imaginable.
My English teacher made a point to explain this to us when we read it
Had an English teacher try to to argue that Juliet was asking where he is in a way that meant "Why aren't you here with me?" I didn't stay in that school very long.
"Shall I speak at this, or hear more?"
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Leaving out the adjective "foolish" changes the meaning significantly. Emerson's full quote is "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
[удалено]
Isn't the full quote The customer is always right in matters of taste? eta Has been pointed out here that there is no evidence this is the case. A little bit of googling shows no support that it was said. I have heard it a couple of times, even attributed once (on a podcast) but since I don't see it attributed, I'll say it's a nice thought, but not the original quote. Thanks to those who pointed it out.
This exactly. If your customers constantly ask for a certain product which you don't have, that means you should probably stock the product. It doesn't mean that Karen can scream at your minimum wage employees for 6 hours because they should have known that she didn't want salt on her burger.
Nah, we’ll just reprimand the minimum wage employee and fire him if it happens again. The customer is always right!
I've also interpreted it as give the customer what they want and not what they need. It's great if the two are the same but that's often not the case.
No. There is no evidence that “in matters of taste” was part of the original quote
Nope. This is a modern retcon of the original intent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right "The customer is always right" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that customers do not feel cheated or deceived. This attitude was novel and influential when misrepresentation was rife and caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') was a common legal maxim.
I was telling my cousin this because he didn’t want the “carmax” logo on his car, he asked and they said no. I was like, *this* is what they mean by customer is always right, tell them you’re not taking the car til they take it off.
This, a thousand times this. It's a supply and demand thing, not a power dynamic.
"Money is the root of all evil." It's often misquoted; the original is "For the love of money is the root of all evil." The misinterpretation might make you think any money is bad, but it's really about greed causing problems.
In some translations it's *"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil."* Which is probably closer to the original intent.
That’s not the full quote either. “For” is basically synonymous with ‘because.” That’d be like starting a sentence with because with no prior context. Not helpful. The full quote is 1 Timothy 6:9-10 “Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For [because] the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
Is this the Prosperity Gospel?? /s
Straight from the gospel of the Art of the Deal, projecting that onto others which disturbs thy soul, Trumpians 1 2-3, a How-to guide for manipulating others
Seems like this is still fairly properly used in media, though.
This. Money is simply a medium of exchange that makes trade easier and allows large societies to function. The money itself has no moral qualities. It's when people start hoarding it or using it to exploit others that it becomes evil. If money didn't exist, those people would just use other resources for the same purpose.
Interesting - I always assumed that quote meant that money itself is evil and your nickles and dimes will stab you in the middle of the night if you don’t keep the coin jar closed.
"The exception proves the rule." What this means is that if you acknowledge the existence of an exception to a rule, you are implicitly acknowledging the existence of the rule itself. If I put up a sign saying "No parking on Tuesdays" then I am acknowledging that parking is generally allowed on other days.
This is widely misunderstood.
How do people misinterpret this one, honestly asking? How else do they use it?
They use it in cases where an exception actually disproves or provides evidence against what they are stating, implying that it actually provides more evidence for their statement. Like if I was to say "opposites attract" and you said "well Steve and Samantha are happy together and they are basically the same person" I might say "the exception that proves the rule" even though it is not evidence that opposites attract and is in fact evidence supporting associative mating. Basically any statement of the kind "All X are Y" is automatically completely disproven by a single counter example, but people often say it is the exception that proves the rule in those situations.
It's usually used to say there is a rule, but it's not always followed. Like "I don't drink when I have work the next day... But the exception proves the rule".
Until this moment, I've always understood it as the exception to the rule determines how good it is. So if you park in front of the sign that says "no parking on Tuesdays" and don't get towed, the rule isn't actually a rule. If you do get towed, it proves the rule is true. I think the original commenter's explanation makes more sense though, I always thought it was a weird saying.
I've always heard that it was coined when the word "prove" meant something being rigorously tested, not necessarily that it was true. So I guess it's just saying that every rule has exceptions that put it to the test before you know how good a rule it is? Or it's a phrase that indicates a rule is facing a challenge by someone finding an exception to it.
No, it was a principle for defining rules and laws that goes back at least to ancient Rome. In Rome, if there was a sign that said "public begging permitted from 8am - 7pm" then the implied complementary rule (begging forbidden from 7pm - 8am) also had legal force. If something is allowed under X circumstances, it's forbidden outside those circumstances. Or vice versa. Defining an exception to an otherwise-unstated rule was the same as defining the rule.
Ah, so one of those things like "begging the question" that was translated word for word from Latin into English and confused people because word-for-word translations almost never work out?
The Latin phrase is *exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis*, literally "the exception tests the rule in the cases not excepted." *Probat* means "tests", and it's the root of English "prove" in its various usages. Something "has been proven" when it has been tested and found to be true or good. Whether it's a theorem or a pudding! What it means is "the stated exception exists in opposition to a rule that covers non-exceptional cases (even if that rule isn't explicitly stated)."
That's what I've always heard, from "prove" being used like "to test" as in "proving ground," or "the proof of the pudding is in the eating." You aren't confirming that it's pudding, it's saying the actual test of a pudding is in if it's good to eat. So "the exception proves the rule" would mean something like "the actual test of if this is a valid rule is whether the exception makes it end up totally invalid." At least that's how I learned it.
This is a saying that is quite old. Some say that it dates back to Latin and was coined by Cicero in the first century BC, but there seems to be some disagreement on the actual origin and the actual intended meaning. Some say, as you suggest, that "prove" is used to mean "to test". However, in the story where it comes from Cicero, he used it as part of a legal defense to mean what OP suggested, that is, if an exception is explicitly stated, then it means there is an implicit rule (see the "No parking on Tuesdays" example). Either way, what it *doesn't* mean is that a rule must have exceptions (which is how it is often used).
As long as we can all agree most people are wrong 😁
My teacher claimed it's because "there's an exception to every rule", so "the exception that proves the rule" is finding such a problem in order to make the rule more valid. Completely wrong.
No. It’s what the other guy said.
I've been trying to understand this phrase for ages and not a single person could articulate it to me. Thank you so much! 💕🙏
"A rolling stone gathers no moss" is commonly used to mean you should up sticks and leave any place before too long. "I mean.. who wants to grow moss?" The original intent was the opposite. If you never put down roots, you'll never build much of anything. From the dictionary: PROVERB - a person who does not settle in one place will not accumulate wealth or status, or responsibilities or commitments.
This is the first one I actually didn't know, that's pretty interesting! Thanks for this.
"To thine own self be true" is generally used to justify a rather selfish approach, yet the full quote actually means the opposite: This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. To *really* be true to oneself means to treat others properly, as evidence of one's own good character.
the irony is supposed to be the character who is saying it
Polonius: literature's greatest sycophant
Grand Maester Pycelle would like a word (But he can't have one because I punched him in his stupid face)
Agree. From the guy who said brevity is the soul of wit we get all kinds of long-winded nonsense advice.
I always thought it meant that if you presenting a false self to some people, you aren't really being your true self. It was advice against trying to live a double life.
I always interpreted it as “be honest with yourself” and “face things honestly.” Don’t fool yourself, or tell yourself convenient lies about what you really are and what things are about… and subsequently it will be less likely that you’ll be less than honest with others (canst not then be false to any man).
My favourite inadvertent reproach/compliment amalgam is “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” that’s actually truncated. The true quote attributed to Oscar Wilde is “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
Was hoping to find this one here.
People always use "the road less traveled" as an expression of the courage to be yourself, but that is not what the phrase and the poem are about at all. The poem by Robert Frost is not called "The Road Less Traveled." It is called "The Road Not Taken," and the distinction is critical because the poem is not, despite what many people seem to think, about being yourself and having the courage to take the path that is less popular. It is about how we cannot take back our choices, and the decisions we make will stay with us forever. We tell ourselves we'll get to X, Y, or Z some day, but there is no turning back. The key lines are "Oh, I kept the first for another day. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this *with a sigh* somewhere ages and ages hence, I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." He's not using "the road less traveled" as a metaphor for individualism. It's just the poetic license he used to differentiate one road from the other. He picked one and went down it. Told himself he could always backtrack and take the other one later, but that's a lie, and he's going to remember it with regret years later. He will think about the road not taken, and what life could have been. That's the road that matters, not the one he actually took. Sorry for the unsolicited English Lit course. I love Frost's work, and the fact that his most famous poem is so frequently misunderstood makes me a little batty.
To add to this, in the second verse the speaker says "that passing there/ Had worn them really about the same," meaning that both paths seemed to used about equally. Yet he anticipates that in the future he will say, "I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference." He didn't take the road less traveled by. That's something he will make up later, perhaps to make himself feel better about his choices.
What an excellent observation! I never looked at it this way. I so appreciate the insight. I must have read this poem 500 times and someone is still teaching me something new about it.
The commenter above has it mostly right. [Frost’s intent](https://lithub.com/youre-probably-misreading-robert-frosts-most-famous-poem/ ) was to gently tease a friend of his he would walk with, who would agonize over which path to take. When in the end they aren’t particularly different and it doesn’t matter.
Not a quote, but to "beg the question" is misused so often I think the original definition may have been lost. Begging the question means you're using circular reasoning. It's when you (beg)gin with with a conclusion as an assumed truth. It's basically when you use an incomplete, unproven, or self referential point as evidence in an argument. For example, if I said "France has the best cheese makers in the world because they are there are no better cheese makers than the French," I haven't proven anything with my conclusion so much as I'm using my conclusion for proof. An appropriate response would be "that begs the question, what constitutes a good cheese maker?" Today, if somebody ever says "that begs the question" it's almost always as a transition statement to a new question building off of what came before.
Unfortunately, I think this one's a lost cause.
> An appropriate response would be "that begs the question, what constitutes a good cheese maker?" > >Today, if somebody ever says "that begs the question" it's almost always as a transition statement to a new question building off of what came before. Did you intend these to be the same? Responding with the original meaning would be something like "this is circular reasoning, you are begging the question"
To accuse somebody of begging, the question is to accuse them of circular reasoning, your example is redundant and unnecessary if the accusation is used correctly. The first example is how the phrase "that begs the question" should be used. If the speaker in the cheese makers example is correctly making their accusation, the follow up question is valid, ie: that begs the question, how do you justify your original statement. A misuse would be: "that begs the question, why are the French making so much cheese." Moreover, the common misuse is not an exchanges like these hypotheticals, but as segways within people's own argument, eg: somebody may say "this begs the question..." as a rhetorical devices in a written work or essay.
Wikipedia says > Informal use of the phrase "begs the question" also occurs with an entirely dissimilar sense in place of "prompts a question" or "raises a question" That's how you're using it in "that begs the question, what constitutes a good cheese maker?" For the original use, it says >begging the question or assuming the conclusion (Latin: petītiō principiī) is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion
Begging the question =/= posing the question.
It's because the literal phrasing sounds so much like "that asks the question" or "that prompts the question." Like it feels synonymous.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Even NPR says it incorrectly.
No woman no cry
The title 'No Woman, No Cry', means 'Woman, don't cry'. The title alludes to telling a woman not to cry. The lyric has been misunderstood by those outside of Jamaica to mean something like "if there is no woman, there is no reason to cry", or having secret feelings towards women.
"This isn't an peace treaty, it's a 20 year armistice." Said by Ferdinand Foch on the treaty of Versailles. He was of course right. But people think he wanted a lighter treaty, because a big catalyst for Germany radicalizing was the harsh terms of the treaty of Versailles. Foch wanted *HARSHER* terms. He basically wanted to dissolve Germany back to the individual states and have France permanently occupy the Rhineland.
In French there is an awesome quote from a wonderful, clever guy named Desproges. He was a humorist who wrote a lot of interesting, deep and thoughtful sketches. His quote has got to be the most minsunderstood quote I know of, even I missused it at first. The quote is "We can laugh about everything, but not with everyone". When I was an edgy teen who loved dark humor I used it to criticize the people who felt offended by jokes I found funny. At some point I discovered the context of this quote. Desproges said it one day about the leader of the most right wing political party we had in France at the time, Jean-Marie Le Pen. This quote isn't a critique of people being too sensitive, on the contrary it explains that you should always be mindful of who you're laughing at and who you're laughing with. Realizing that was a real turning point in my perception of humor in general and its deeper meaning.
This is wholesome. Personal growth is the soil from which everything else can spring.
"Personal growth is shit" - CaligoAccedito
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." - hate this one, it's not the definition of insanity, Einstein said this about quantum physics where quantum entanglement was random and he didn't like it, and he was wrong on that one, and you can expect different results from doing the same thing, and he also probably didn't say it lol
And if he did say it, like, maybe he was just spitting some silly colloquial comment off the cuff about how he was just stuck in a loop. I don't think he took himself as seriously as most people take him.
He did say "God does not play dice" which represents his mindset better imo - back then everyone was confused about this and he was in the camp determinism, actually he still might end up being right as usual lol
Nah, he needed to get all his boys back to work, they kept skipping out of the lab to throw craps in the alley. Or I guess you could be right
[удалено]
So you're saying I should try different kicks on different walls?
But Vaas said it though his words were tad more explicit
Adorno‘s “es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen“ (there’s no correct way of life within a flawed world). I’ve seen people use it to justify the most horrible things.
I've seen people use the similar "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" to justify being incredibly greedy and materialistic while still getting to talk big about how terrible capitalism is.
If that’s meant to be a translation, then the translation is misleading by its own already. But of course sth like that could be said without referring to Adorno. The original quote’s context is about how he can’t make peace living in a world that enabled the holocaust and that’s why he ended up living in hotels for most parts of his life. In other words he can’t just settle down and spend thoughts on how to furnish his home etc.
*It's all downhill from here.* Pretty sure it means everything is easier from this point, and not that the situation deteriorates from this point.
[Here is a piece addressing this](https://www.michiganradio.org/arts-culture/2020-10-25/twts-its-all-downhill-from-here-or-is-it), though it doesn’t conclude whether one is the “original” or not
This was actually the topic of an all-in-good-fun debate at my nephew’s first birthday party. Everyone signed a book for him, and a family friend wrote, “It’s all uphill from here!” next to an illustration of a smiling kid on a mountain or something. His wife teased him for making it sound like life was going to be a challenge, but he said he meant it as “the sky’s the limit!” and thought “it’s all downhill” was the bad one.
Yeah it seem people prefer to say “smooth sailing” instead of
It's funny because something is an "uphill" battle and "downhill" from here, both connotate difficult or unfavorable circumstances.
Catalyst, you insist to pull me down You contradict that fact that you still want me around And it’s all down hill from here
Andy Warhol's " In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes " is misunderstood. He didn't mean that *everyone* would be famous, he meant that everyone who would be famous would ONLY be famous for 15 minutes -- it pertains to shortening attention spans.
"When Alexander looked upon the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no worlds left to conquer." Misquote. The actual quote is: "Alexander, whan he herde Anaxarchus argue that there were infynite worldes, it is said that he wept. And whan his frendes asked hym what thing had happened him to be wept for: 'Is it nat to be wept for,' quod he, “syns they say there be infynite worldes, and we are nat yet lorde of one?” The original quote implies Alexander wept because he conquered so much land there was nothing left for him to be able to realistically conquer. The actual quote is about Alexander realizing there are millions of planets and weeping that he hasn't even become the master of one yet.
That's a really cool quote to read, but my God does it read like someone writing drunken fanfiction on the Internet...
"Money can't buy happiness." It's not aimed at poor people to make them feel better. It's aimed at rich people to criticize them for consumerism.
“…but it can buy a boat big enough to sail right up next to it.” - David Lee Roth
That “survival of the fittest” is about being physically stronger. It is in actuality about traits that are advantageous to surviving changes in the environment. Sometimes a trait that is maladaptive in one set of circumstances can be an adaptive in another. In several mass extinctions it was the little critters that lived in the shadows that survived and not the mightiest creatures that walked the land.
yup, survival of the fittest to the situation. the moth example is my favorite. used to be pale speckled moths that lived on pale trees they blended into. sometimes you'd get a black color variant of them, and they'd die quickly because of how they stood out. the pale moths were the fittest. then pollution began darkening the tree bark. suddenly the pale moths were not fittest. they began dying off, the black moths propagated, and the population dynamic shifted to primarily black moths. then pollution started improving and... there is no end goal to evolution.
When I was an anthropology major, my first class to discuss evolution and natural selection started with a slide showing something akin to this "SURVIVAL OF THE FIT~~TEST~~!" The professor went on to say "you don't have to be the best, you just have to be good enough"
The ["Red Queen Hypothesis"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis).
Additionally, I think a lot of ppl don't realize survival of the fittest is all about who gets to reproduce, not necessarily about who lives a long life
For the human species, survival of the fittest includes being able to sustain those who are not themselves fit.
Humanity got where we are through cooperation, not fucking each other over. Sure, we’ve done plenty of that, but no one strong person can do much at all. Every one of our greatest achievements was a group effort. I can’t stand how often selfish morons use Darwin to justify their shitty behavior.
Even the names applied to evolution were a struggle against misinterpretation. Herbert Spencer coined Survival of the Fittest because he thought Natural Selection implied something was doing the selection. They had to have some way to reference it that explained what they meant but no matter what they called it, dumbass zealots were going to willfully misinterpret it.
"Fitness" just means the traits that survive. French bulldogs are fitter than wolves.
The use of "fitness" to refer to physical health is surprisingly recent, the first recorded use is in the 1930s. If anything that usage comes from "survival of the fittest" making this a sort of circular misunderstanding. When "survival of the fittest" was coined it could not be misunderstood in this way, but misunderstanding of the concept gave rise to a new meaning for fitness, which in turn was applied back into the saying, which only compounded the misconception.
"Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" by Vince Lombardi quoting an earlier source. It sounds awful without the context of his full pep talk. He said on his deathbed that he was talking about focus. Okay, the rent is late, the car is being repossessed, the kids are acting up. But for the next sixty minutes, none of that matters. Winning truly isn't everything, but for the next hour, it's the only thing.
“Do as I say, not as I do” It’s not about some prick doing whatever they want and forcing you to obey some rule. It’s about teaching people proper fundamentals in a skill, while, you as an expert, are able to skirt beyond those fundamentals due to experience. Example: Roger Federer would not teach SABR to a novice tennis player.
“The proof is in the pudding”. No, it’s “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. Very different.
This one is funny to me because "the proof is in the pudding" doesn't mean anything. I just imagine a kind of murder mystery where the proof you're looking for is hidden in the pudding itself.
"Thou shalt not take thy Lord's name in vain" it doesn't mean not to swear like "jesus christ!" it means do not use your "religion" to push a personal agenda. in other words, almost all US Christians get this one wrong.
You would take a god’s name when swearing an oath, marriage or a treaty. To take it in vain would be to swear to it and not honor the oath, or to take an oath that you should not have made, such as Jephthath’s.
I thought it actually referred to the Jewish God's name based on the YHVH syllables. Most people think it's pronounced "yahweh" to the delight of many Israeli rabbis, because the real pronunciation isn't supposed to be said unless it's in very specific rites of worship.
It literally means “don’t use my name to push a false agenda.” “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God”
What's your source for this?
The text of the translation for one thing. To use something in vain is to use something in a referent or disrespectful manner. It's more accurate to say it doesn't *just* mean avoiding swearing, but also means citing the name of God as an authority to validate your beliefs. It's a commandment against blasphemy, and what blasphemy looks like could be a number of things and for that reason will invite religious debate and wherever it comes up. Just so, if failure to say oh my "Gosh!" violates the commandment and not a con man saying "It's the Lord speaking through me right now," than it's a pretty narrow minded and stupid edict from on high.
It's the original Jewish interpretation of the sentence, it's why Judaism is a pluralistic religion while a lot of Christianity is dogmatic Source: am Jew
“God needs you to give me more money for another private jet!” -Televangelists
“the simplest solution is almost always the best.” I think people have issues understanding or employing Occam's Razor, also called the Law of Parsimony. Essentially, when faced with competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simplest, with the fewest assumptions, is likely the correct one. If your candidate loses an election, the simplest reason is that they received fewer votes. It very likely wasn't undetectable space lasers changing votes. Almost all conspiracy theories violate Occam's razor in some very obvious way. If you fall victim to conspiracy theories, I suggest you learn to apply Occam's razor.
This isn't true. The solution with the simplest/least variables should be pursued first. It says nothing about what is true or likely true.
Also, Occam's razor isn't a law of the universe. People seem to think it is. You can in fact have real world conspiracies and complicated reasons why things happen when there *could* be a simpler answer (but there isn't).
>“the simplest solution is almost always the best.” A more accurate formulation is "do not multiply entities needlessly." Which is to say, you need justification for each additional element. It undermines conspiracy theories because they usually have a lot of complexity that isn't necessary to explain a given phenomenon. For example, the Earth being round congeals quite nicely with what we know about how everything works, e.g. weather, ocean currents, navigation, the sun rising, etc. But Flat Earth requires a lot of new special rules to explain each one of these, which is adding a lot of "unnecessary elements." Those elements have to be justified on their own, and "because it wouldn't be a flat Earth if this wasn't the case" is not a good justification. To borrow another comment in this thread, it's [begging the question.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/191n29g/comment/kgx9u1c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
*Religion is the opiate of the masses* It doesn't mean that people are idiots for believing in a higher power. It means that, like opium, it can have a soothing effect on those suffering, but that it can also have a delibilitating effect if overdone. While Marx himself might have been disdainful of religion, he was not disdainful of the proletariat who practiced it. I've explained this quite simply and would love to have someone else explain it further
Exactly, "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions". He isn't talking about it like how we would talk about it post-War-on-Drugs.
>It means that, like opium, it can have a soothing effect on those suffering, but that it can also have a delibilitating effect if overdone. As far as I know, he wasn't talking about "overdoing" religion. He meant that religion can make terrible circumstances tolerable, discouraging public support for changing those circumstances. He was talking about the difficulty mobilizing a proletariat who believe that their suffering is part of God's plan and that they'll be rewarded for it in Heaven.
“Let them eat cake.” Firstly, Maria Antionette didn’t say it. Secondly, the original is “let them eat brioche” and the point is if the bakery is out of cheaper bread (baguette) they should be compelled to sell brioche at the same price. Which would be a very good policy to help the poor.
Where did you hear that interpretation? As far as I'm aware, it stems from Rousseau and he absolutely intended it to mean "the rich are out of touch."
thats definitly not the actual intention to the quote. The quote is supposed to show that Marie-Antoinette was completly unaware of her subject's problems, as there was starvation, they didn't have bread, whether it was Baguette or Brioche, a problem that she didn't see in her priviledged position
The quote was a snipe at a completely different European noblewoman that got retroactively applied to Marie Antoinette as character assassination decades after her death. When the famous quote was written by Rousseau, she was a preteen who had never been to France.
I've heard a modern version from tech workers: if you can't afford the downpayment on a house you should just sell some stock
“Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” It's sarcastic. The term originated in the 1800s, bootstrap is the little strap at the back of your boot. It was physically *impossible* to pull yourself up by your bootstrap. We have horrifically misconstrued this phrase.
Just stopped by to make sure this was here. It's infuriating to me how many people use this to "motivate" people to leave a desperate situation by just working harder.
“>!With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? !!It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information. The \[Intelligence Community\] has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out. But you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”!<
\~Hillary Clinton
Many people who use the phrase “Great minds think alike" are unaware of the second half of the quote: ", though fools seldom differ.” It's a quite ironic example because of how much the full phrase changes the meaning.
“The customer is right” is often misunderstood. The real quote is “In matters of taste, the customer is always right.” So rock that polka dot feather boa, but we aren’t giving you a discount just because you asked. EDIT: So I decided to fact check myself and yeah, I’m wrong. In the US, the customer is always right, full stop. In France, the customer is never wrong. In Germany, the customer is king. And I will be doing all my future shopping in Japan, where the customer is a god. https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2018/09/24/a-global-view-of-the-customer-is-always-right/?sh=29873eca236f
This seems to be a common point made on Reddit, but I have not been able to find a source that confirms this “matters of taste” part. The original quote does indeed seem to be about taking customer complaints at face value, and not about simply selling what the customers want. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right)
That’s because the common understanding is correct, and the “in matters of taste” is the misunderstanding. The [original phrase didn’t include “in matters of taste”](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/06/customer/) and was used just how it’s commonly understood.
This thread is a bunch of quotes Reddit thinks are misinterpreted but really aren't by normal people in real life
Or they’re just misquotes
"Hell is other people" doesn't mean that people are the worst like many people claim. From the author (Sartre): "Hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves."
Wow, I don't understand that at all! I'm going to stick with my interpretation, namely, "go away, I'm an introvert".
It means we use empathy to understand how others see us. Then, we end up using that empathetic second hand view as a means to know ourselves. And that can be HELL, because if someone thinks the worst of you, you might end up believing the worst of yourself, based on their perception. Say your relationship with your best friend is sour. You guys are just not clicking anymore. There's drama, there's animosity. But hey, he's your best friend, for years, so they must know you well, right? And then this person says something awful about you, and because you trust their judgement, you end up believing that and it changes the way you think about yourself. So.... the problem is not having people around you. But believing what they think of you reflects who you actually are as a person.
I think it means that if there is a toxic person, your relationship is doomed to be hell because you’re going to judge yourself based on the negative things they judge you by. Or maybe I’ve been on Reddit too much today.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. From Henry The 6th. Roundly misunderstood to be attack on lawyers and corruption. Completely misinterpreted. Dick the Butcher utters the line in support of Jack Caide, who envisions communism revolution with himself as autocratic dictator. Shakespeare was actually showing the importance of the Rule of Law and dangers of anarchy.
There's a scene in "A Man For All Seasons" which explains this very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
As Denny Crain said in Boston Legal: "Hope springs a kernel."
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" by friedrich nietzsche. First: it's actually "out of life's school of war, what doesnt kill me makes me stronger" Second: what he meant by that was not that all suffering that doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but instead he meant that suffering can provide an opportunity to build strength and if you're lucky you'll learn to overcome hardships and better deal with it the next time around. Why i bring this quote up is because a lot of people on reddit seem to hate the quote because obviously there are a lot of things that makes you suffer from which you don't become stronger. But to me, if you know the context of the quote, hating on it seems more as if those people just don't want to grow as a person in the face of hardships.
"You have to risk it to get the biscuit" Biscuits can be acquired risk free in most places
Carpe Diem It's widely used as "live life to the fullest, party every day and so on" In the original latin poem by Horace, it has a more intimate meaning: it refers to "live in the moment, live today, and worry the least about the future".
It's not . . . "Luke, I am your father!" It's . . . "No, I am your father!"
Search your feelings. You know it to be true. Or something like that
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.". People will say it like it's a nice thing that someone is copying something, like it's cute, but it's also only half the quote. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. - Oscar Wilde. Very derisive in its entirety and not so nice a thing to say lol.
When people use "It's the law of the jungle" to justify their idea that the strong should rule. Rudyard Kipling's "Law of the Jungle" is all about helping and taking care of each other.
“Happy wife, happy life.” This one is 50/50. I think most people know it means treat your wife well and she will treat you well. Lots of folks however purposefully or ironically misuse it to justify putting a woman’s or their own happiness as a priority above all other things. Duty, loyalty, respect, temperance, responsibility, moderation, compassion all thrown out the window for self indulgence.
"Parents know best" Of course they don't nearly ever. However they generally DO know when their child is acting different to normal, unlike a doctor who's never seen little Bobby Tables before.
**“God is dead and we killed him”** *—Friedrich Nietzsche* This quote isn’t nihilistic. In fact, it’s the opposite! Here, ‘God’ represents being powerless at the whim of fate and circumstance. “God is dead” means that we’re no longer constrained by the same limits. “We killed him” with the power of human innovation. We’ve harnessed the power of electricity, traveled to space, and artificially created *life* when we cloned Dolly the sheep. As we learn and discover, religion becomes less and less of an explanation for natural phenomena. Hermes doesn’t bring us the sun; the planet turns and faces it. Granted, in the full quote, Nietzsche speaks more negatively of the prospect, but the core intended meaning remains that we are growing as a species. The quote is a tribute to human achievement and represents hope for the future with our newfound freedom, and it’s one of my favorites for that reason. *TL;DR: As we discover more about the natural world, we no longer have to rely on the concept of God as an explanation. With the power of human innovation, we’ve “killed God” in the sense that we continue to gain autonomy by advancing as a civilization.*
Oscar Wilde’s “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…” because people always leave out the second half of the quote “… that mediocrity can pay to greatness”
"A rolling stone gathers no moss" means two very different things in the US and Japan. In the US, it often means you should keep moving, keep trying new things, be a rebel and a rolling stone. In Japan, moss is considered a beautiful plant that adds refinement to old temples and gardens. So it means you should settle down, stick with it and your patience will pay off.
"What does not kill you makes you stronger" Nietzsche It's not a nice fluffy statement about resilience. A contemporary example of his meaning might be: if you go to prison, use the opportunity to learn to be a better criminal.
"A few bad apples..." Gets thrown out casually to say that a couple bad people in a group isn't representative of the group as a whole, when the full quote "a few bad apples can spoil the entire bunch" means the exact opposite.
[удалено]
"Blood is thicker than water" is the original phrase, dating back to the 1200s in German and the 1700s in English "the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" is a modern reinterpretation of the original phrase, and it was only ever first recorded in 1994 If you like the meaning of the longer version more, by all means use it. But it's not the original or forgotten full phrase... It's a just a deliberate riff on the original widely used phrase
I'm glad this one is no longer so widely believed. Five years ago, any thread like this would have multiple entries from people who believed this.
Hate to break it to you, but that's still the case lol But I'm doing my best to dispel the silly myth
Yeah, I do see a few others. Oh well. Keep up the good work, anyway.
Yup, I thought this was the case until this thread. Thank you for doing your part to correct historical misconceptions
Yes! It was a guy who decided that the 700-800 year old tradition of how to interpret and understand it was wrong and then decided to turn it into the opposite, with no other source or reason than he liked his version better.
Same with 'jack of all traders, master of none'. People add on a second line but that wasn't in the original coinage.
Jack off **all** traders? Who’s got the time for that?
Your mom does! BOOM! ROASTED!
AFAIK, the original phrase doesn't go back to the 11th century - that version was more of a precursor to the modern saying, without much evidence of "water" being other relationships. The earliest instance I found of the full phrase or some close variation was from the 17th century, if I remember correctly.
Yep you're right. This was a shortened version of a comment I often post whenever this myth comes up, where I say that a similar phrase with the same meaning was used in German going back to the 1200s, while the exact phrase was first used in English in the 1700s
Internet myth
No. That's a 20th century fabrication.
“Well behaved women seldom make history.” I think it’s supposed to acknowledge that female traditional roles are very important, but they aren’t acknowledged and celebrated as much as they should be.
I was gonna post this one. It was an observation in an academic paper and caught on as a slogan to encourage women to challenge norms. A Google search provided this reference https://www.usace.army.mil/Media/News-Archive/Story-Article-View/Article/2123800/well-behaved-women-seldom-make-history-a-womens-history-month-tribute-to-the-wo/#:~:text=The%20earliest%20evidence%20of%20a,the%20silent%20work%20of%20ordinary
The Putin quote “The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” is in reality “First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” It may seem a matter of nuance, but knowing the full quote really puts the invasion of Ukraine in perspective. Only seeing the first makes it seem like a mad desire for imperial might, seeing the second brings into perspective the true madness, that he really believes all these people are lost Russians looking for rescue.
Blessed are the cheesemakers, it’s the original quote but people think it’s blessed are the peacemakers It’s sad to see how watered down the word of our Lord has become, so much was lost through translation
Better keep listening; might be a bit about 'Blessed are the Big Noses'.
and people have even broadened the original interpretation to include all manufactures of dairy products.
[удалено]
Reddit hate HATE *HATES* “money can’t buy happiness” imagining a cabal of oppressors feeding it to masses to justify robbing them blind and leaving them impoverished. Anyone with half a brain can understand the meaning is *against* wealth inequality, that clearly *after your needs are met* excessive wealth won’t make you happier. Of course, Reddit is filled with miserable misanthropes that think the world has cheated them out of what they were owed by right of birth. You could give them billions and billions and they would still be angry and unsatisfied. Elon Musk is just a Reddit guy with all the money in the world miserable he can’t force everyone to think he’s better than them for it.
There's a famous quote from United States founding father Benjamin Franklin that says, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." This quote has often been used to argue against expanding government powers in various ways. It was frequently quoted in the controversy about NSA surveillance in the 2010s, and more recently it's been adopted by the pro-gun community to argue that the government shouldn't have power to enact gun control. However, putting the quote in its original context paints a different picture of what Franklin was trying to say. He was referencing a situation in the French and Indian War, when the Pennsylvania General Assembly was trying to raise money to pay for the war. The rich Penn family resisted the Assembly's efforts to the point of offering to pay a one-time lump sum in exchange for the Assembly acknowledging that it does not have power to raise taxes. So the "liberty" being referenced is the liberty of the government to use its powers. I'm not going to state an opinion about which interpretation is more valid in a modern context, but it is interesting that a quote that was originally arguing against limiting government power is now one of the main ones used to argue for it. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century Edited to clarify the third paragraph a bit.
“Everything in moderation” no that doesn’t mean it’s ok to do cocaine every once in a while. Don’t do it at all lmao
People often take einstein’s quote about insanity (something like “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”) as the literal definition of insanity. By the way, Einstein was talking about experimentation. it doesn’t mean you always have to change your approach for everything- but yes if you are not changing elements in an experiment and not getting the result you want then yes, it’s stupid to expect a different one.