this is water

time has posted the "ten best commencement speeches" aggregating some legendary words of wisdom in one place

1) Steve Jobs - really practical, if pretty macabre - "Stay hungry, Stay foolish"

2) Conan O'Brien - i've posted this before, it's a delight - "Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally"

3) Simon Baker - i'd never read this before, so brilliant - three favorites because it's new to me: "Being dumb is not the worst thing in the world, but letting your clothes shout it out loud depresses the neighbors and embarrasses your parents. " / "It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamefully foolishly." / "Sleep in the nude."

4) Winston Churchill - time description nails it, this is a battle cry - "You cannot tell from appearances how things will go."

5) George Marshall - dry stuff indeed. not particularly quotable but - "An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied."

6) JFK - this is like a state of the union speech - "the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete."

7) Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) -brimming with lemon lyman charm, good old "whitty" drops some pleasant knowledge and a billy madison reference - "You've got to want to do whatever you want to do more than you want to be whatever you want to be"

8) Barbara Kingsolver - hadn't read this before either and really loved it - "Wisdom is like frequent-flyer miles and scar tissue; if it does accumulate, that happens by accident while you’re trying to do something else."

9) Stephen Colbert - mostly just one liners, albeit great ones - "There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don't think you are. I don't know if you're tough enough to handle this. You are the most coddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products."

and

10) of course, DFW. i could post the whole address. should. buy it amazon. it works in that suspect one line per page format. if i had any semblance of daily discipline i'd read it every morning. hard to extract but here goes -
"A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self."