Default Setting Quotes & Sayings

Anger is extraordinarily easy. It's our default setting. Love is very difficult. Love is a miracle. — Brant Hansen

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. — David Foster Wallace

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home. — David Foster Wallace

I feel like I missed my era, because I remember the time when black people uplifted each other and looked for the positives. I feel sorry for the people who live their lives in the negative default setting because they filter out what's good, and that's no way to live. — Michael Jai White

This is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. — David Foster Wallace

Everybody should be normal. Everybody should be nice. I think they go hand in hand, and that to me is the default setting. — Steve Carell

The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting. — Rebecca Solnit

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. — David Foster Wallace

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write. — Stephen Graham Jones

Honor our sense of right and wrong
our sense of what others need from us and how we ought to act towards them ... Because we go against this sense
because we fail to act as we feel we should
that we grow resentful and feel alienated. We convince ourselves that others are making our lives intolerable. On the other hand, when we treat them as we feel we should, we have no occasion to feel this way. We can care openly for them because caring, not selfishness, is our "natural" condition (in computer jargon, our "default setting"). We alienate ourselves from theirs when we compromise our integrity, and we care for them when we don't. — C. Terry Warner

Isn't that the story for many of us in America? Christianity is our default setting. — Jefferson Bethke

It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, "maturity," suffering. — Christian Wiman

Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought. As — Jon Kabat-Zinn

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, — Katha Pollitt

Sadness is a very interesting idea, this idea of sadness being some kind of default setting that artists will go into. And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness, and the idea that sadness is very loud, and happiness is quiet. — Glen Hansard

Pessimism is my default setting. — Miranda Hart

Our guns go from safe to single shot to full auto, which is nice and linear and logical, but they (Russians) knew that would mean ninety-nine times in a hundred their guys would panic and ram the selector all the way home, and thereby fire off a whole magazine on the first hasty and unaimed shot. Which would leave them with an empty weapon right at the start of a firefight. Which is not helpful. So the AK selector goes safe, then full auto, then single shot. Not linear, not logical, but certainly practical. Single shot is a kind of default setting, and full auto is a deliberate choice. — Lee Child

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write. — Khaled Hosseini

Goal setting is good stewardship. Instead of letting things happen, goals help us make things happen. Instead of living by default, goals help us live by design. Instead of living out of memory, goals help us live out of imagination. — Mark Batterson

The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting — Ta-Nehisi Coates

...my awkward silence default setting kicked in. — Sarra Manning

I thought this was a cookout. You know, dogs and burgers, Tater Tots, ambrosia salad" Dexter picked up a box of Twinkies, tossing them into the cart. "And Twinkies."
"It is," ... "Except that it's a cookout thrown by my mother."
"And?"
"And my mother doesn't cook."
He looked at me waiting.
"At all. My mother doesn't cook at all."
"She must cook sometimes."
"Nope."
"Everyone can make scrambled eggs, Remy. It's programmed into you at birth, the default setting. Like being able to swim and knowing not to mix pickles with oatmeal. You just KNOW. — Sarah Dessen

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. — David Foster Wallace

I, for one, am profoundly grateful to feel the hand of God at work in my life. But at the beginning and end of the day, when my default setting is to show kindness and love to others, I never regret it. And to me, that is what faith is all about. — Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door. — Katha Pollitt

And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Admittedly, guilt can be my default setting. After a social gathering, I'm often left with a vague sense of wrongdoing that I try to pinpoint the source of. Had I laughed insensitively or slighted someone unintentionally? And I always feel accused in Nordstrom. The saleswomen look at my jeans and inexpensive haircut and I'm sure they're thinking I'm about to slip a pair of earrings into my purse. I feel guilty when I eat white bread and when I don't recycle. — Deb Caletti

Our "default setting" is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances - including outdated notions of "management" - often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Type X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Organizations that have found inventive, sometimes radical, ways to boost autonomy are outperforming their competitors. — Daniel H. Pink

There's a part of me that still hates everything, and my natural view default setting is still very cynical and dark — Alexei Sayle

Unfortunately, telling me not to worry is like telling someone not to breathe. It's impossible, and is my default setting. — T.C. Edge

Whatever happens to a baby contributes to the emotional and perceptual map of the world that its developing brain creates. As my colleague Bruce Perry explains it, the brain is formed in a "use-dependent manner."5 This is another way of describing neuroplasticity, the relatively recent discovery that neurons that "fire together, wire together." When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting - the response most likely to occur. If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment. As infants and — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't. — Meghan Daum

I didn't used to be like this. I didn't believe in love and romance and swooning. My default setting was bitch — Elizabeth Norris

If another woman had been around, this would never have happened."

"Whatever you're trying to say, just spit it out."

"Come on, Heath. I'm not blond, leggy, or stacked. I was the default setting. Even my fiance never said I was sexy."

"Your ex-fiance wears lipstick, so I wouldn't take that to heart. I promise, Annabelle, you're very sexy. That hair..."

"Do not start in on my hair. I was born with it, okay. It's like making fun of someone with a birth defect. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Trouble was her default setting. — C.J. Daugherty

There's a time and a place for being normal. For most people, normal is their default setting. But for some, like you and me, normal is something we have to bring out, like putting on a suit for a posh dinner. — Alice Oseman

You know, men would much rather run away than talk about stuff, and my default setting has always been, 'If you have an argument, walk out the door.' — Stephen Moyer

Giving someone shit, Rodney knew was a sign of love in Catholic families. And the same held true for Rodney and his friends. But he wished it weren't Keith's default setting, his auto-reply to everything. — Steve Rushin