If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas
John CleeseRead
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time to be considering alternative strategies.
Interpretation
Taking decisive action is crucial when facing challenges.
This quote by John Cleese emphasizes the importance of commitment and focus when undertaking significant risks or challenges. At the moment of taking action, such as 'leaping a ravine', it's vital to concentrate on the task at hand rather than overthinking or reconsidering one's choices, as this can lead to doubt and failure.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage a team before a big game.
If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you open to my ideas
Because, as we all know, itβs easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And itβs also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that weβre not so sure about.
In Britain, girls seem to be either bright or attractive. In America, that's not the case. They're both.
I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.
When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.
Well, the only way I can get a leading-man role is if I write it.
Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.
I think that nonviolence is one way of saying that there are other ways to solve problems, not only through weapons and war. Nonviolence also means the recognition that the person on one side of the trench and the person on the other side of the trench are both human beings, with the same faculties. At some point they have to begin to understand one another.
If we despond, public confidence is destroyed, the people will no longer yield their support to a hopeless contest, and American liberty is no more. Through the darkness which shrouds our prospects, the ark of safety is visible. Despondency becomes not the dignity of our cause, nor the character of those who are its supporters.
Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
We may never be strong enough to be entirely non-violent in thought, word and deed. But we must keep non-violence as our goal and make steady progress towards it.
We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.
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