Although they are meaningless and annoying, email signatures are quite common these days. Some types of email signatures include social media markers, environmental statements, corporate disclaimers, email addresses, and worst of all…inspirational quotes. These quotes are often from famous people such as Mark Twain, Mother Teresa, or Victor Hugo. The following are examples of inspirational quotes you may have seen used as email signatures:
- “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain
- “You've got to dance like nobody's watching, dream like you will live forever, live like you're going to die tomorrow, and love like it's never going to hurt.” —Multiple authors
- “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” —Les Brown
- “Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Good friends are like stars: you don't always see them, but you know they are always there.” —Unknown
- “…if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” —Mother Teresa
- “Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.” —Victor Hugo
- “What a grand thing to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!” —Victor Hugo
Now, I have absolutely nothing against inspirational quotes. However, I do have a problem with people who think they are special enough to use these quotes as email signatures. Think about it… how many of your emails actually express any sort of intelligence? Yeah, that's right…NONE OF THEM.
Most of the emails you send on a daily basis contain absolutely no thoughts that could be considered “profound” in any way…unless they're considered “profoundly retarded.” Your emails contain no significant content, and they do not possess any sort of literary quality whatsoever. So, is it really necessary, or even fair, to paste some famous quote at the bottom of them? Does your email deserve to be stamped with a famous quote? Probably not!
Let's review some examples of what I'm talking about. I'm going to take four of the famous quotes above, and attach them to the end of four sample emails. I put the quotes in bold so that they really stand out.
EMAIL #1
Dear Thomas,
Liz and I wanted to thank you for inviting us to your dinner party last night. We really had a great time. However, I do wish to apologize for accidentally spilling that generic, watermelon and cucumber-flavored Jell-O dish all over your wife's dress. I really do hope the stains come out. I also wanted to apologize for tripping and falling down the stairs and accidentally smashing my head into that expensive Ming Dynasty vase that you were so proud of. I really do hope you are able to find a replacement. In addition, I also feel bad for eating too fast and then accidentally vomiting all over the dinner table. It snuck up on me so fast that I didn't know what else to do. I had no idea it would come out so forcefully that it would splatter all over the other guests while they were eating. I hope they are able to forgive me.
Sincerely,
Paul
“Good friends are like stars: you don't always see them, but you know they are always there.”
EMAIL #2
Johnson,
Report to my office at 9:30 this morning. I need you to send a fax for me, but before you do that, I want you to deliver a few boxes to a warehouse down on Broadway Avenue. However, before you deliver those boxes, you need to go up to room 320 on the third floor and speak to Frank. He has a very important message that I need you to deliver to room 315, which is also on the third floor. But before you deliver that message, please make me a cup of coffee. Don't use the cheap coffee from the break room. Instead, go out and purchase a fresh bag of Hazelnut 100% Premium Arabica Coffee with ground beans, not whole beans. Before you purchase the coffee, however, I need you to clean my office. I have an important meeting today. Cleaning supplies can be purchased at the Dollar Store on Main Street. Before you do any of these things, however, I need you to run a complete inventory check of the entire property and type out a full report. The report needs to be on my desk…ASAP.
Bill
“…if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
EMAIL #3
Hi Honey,
I just made it to Denver. I think this business deal will only take a few days, so I should be home sometime early next week. How are the kids? Did the mail come in yesterday? Hey, before I forget… the next time you go shopping, can you buy a different brand of soap? For some reason, Ivory soap has been making my balls itch lately. I also have a severe rash that I need you to look at when I get home.
Love,
Todd
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”
EMAIL #4
Hey Dave,
You fuckin slimy, rotten, shit-eating, douchebag cock-sucker…how the fuck are ya? You still hung over from last night? Man, that sure was some party, huh? I can't believe I drank that much. Hey, you're never going to believe what happened to me last night. Remember that chick I was hitting on? Well, I must have said something intelligent because she took me home with her. Man, she was a real freak! She was giving me some pretty mean head, but then I forgot to tell her I was going to cum, and accidentally blew my load all over her face. Dude, she got so pissed off that she threw me out of her house without even letting me to put my clothes back on! I had to walk all the way back to my apartment naked with a partial erection. And if that wasn't bad enough, I ended up getting sick and throwing up all over my own dick. Man, it was really fucking gross.
Anyway, don't tell my girlfriend about this,
Bob
“You've got to dance like nobody's watching, dream like you will live forever, live like you're going to die tomorrow, and love like it's never going to hurt.”
As you can see, using famous inspirational quotes as email signatures is completely ridiculous. However, if you're one of those people who simply can't resist putting a quote at the bottom of your email, then I have some more appropriate examples for you to use.
So before you insult some famous dead person by placing their words at the bottom of your “less-than-mediocre” email, please consider using these 20 inspirational quotes instead:
1. “‘A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets.' May this Titanic quote never bother you as you lay in bed next to your girlfriend at night wondering which of her previous boyfriends has a bigger dick than you.”
2. “May opportunities for excitement and infidelity find you at perfectly timed intervals throughout your rather short and mundane existence.”
3. “You've got to dance even though everyone is begging you to stop; dream as though you don't have to wake up in the morning and go to your shitty, meaningless job; live as though the loss of elasticity in your blood vessels and the hardened fatty deposits in your arteries will never cause you to die a horribly painful death due to the collapse of your cardiovascular system; and love like it will never hurt when the person of your dreams falls for someone else and shatters your heart…rendering you an emotionally crippled, sick, devastated, pain-filled, drooling, pathetic, hopeless, lifeless, gutless, soulless, broken vessel that simply can't wait to die.”
4. “Show kindness, understanding, compassion, and unconditional love toward the people who come into your life because you never know when they will be gone. Reserve your true nature for friends and family.”
5. “If you don't succeed, try again. If you still don't succeed, try even harder. Keep working, keep practicing, and keep striving. Persevere! If you've given it your absolute best, and you still don't succeed, then you have learned one of life's greatest lessons: It is not wise to spend lots of time trying to do something you're not good at…DUMBASS!!!”
6. “If you are a writer who is currently struggling with writer's block, just think of it as temporary constipation. Something will eventually come out…and it will probably be shit.”
7. “Experts say that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice in order to gain professional expertise or mastery over a particular skill. If that's true, then your average person should be pretty good at being an asshole by the age of 2.”
8. “Trying to figure out women is like doing advanced-level calculus homework: all the formulas you know fail to help you solve any of the problems you're working on; you spend massive amounts of time and energy suffering through numerous headaches and incredible frustration because you don't really know what you're doing; and when you finally turn in your homework, you find out that you did the wrong assignment.”
9. “Trying to figure out men is like taking PE at a poorly-funded high school with little to no sports equipment: the class is easy to pass because the standards are low, and there are no advanced-level courses offered.”
10. “If hindsight is 20/20, then nostalgia is blurred vision.”
11. “Ghosts often wake people up in their sleep or tap people on the shoulder from behind. Aliens, however, seem to have a tendency to ram uncomfortable objects into people's assholes during their attempts to study the human race. May your encounters with the supernatural be of a gentle nature.”
12. “Going through life is like sailing on a poorly-constructed ship full of assholes, steered by a drunkenly insane captain through stormy, shark-infested waters in the middle of the ocean. Go ahead, take a leap of faith.”
13. “May your guardian angel comfort you whenever you experience confusion or depression resulting from an initial acknowledgement of the non-permanence of continuously expanding yet periodically contracting daily occurrences of conflictive reversibility.”
14. “It is wise to protect oneself against the sudden onset of emotionally-charged, truculent spontaneity…which has been known to accompany long periods of severe loneliness caused by the turbulent effects of circumstantial randomness.”
15. “Sometimes all you need is a simple cup of tea in order to ease feelings of disturbance caused by a chronic, perpetual awareness of ludicrous deniability. However, if you feel disturbed due to a premature, neurotic rejection of the realities that underlie the nature of undeniably congruent absurdity…then have two cups of tea.”
16. “If you have not prematurely or neurotically rejected the notion of undeniably congruent absurdity…yet find yourself emotionally vulnerable because you have difficulty accepting the notion of deniably incongruent absurdity…then seek help immediately.”
17. “May only 65% of your life be filled with loneliness, degradation, meaningless toil, and crushing despair…may the other 35% remain free so that you can enjoy random drunkenness, a few fleeting moments of soon-forgotten happiness, and some tomfoolery.”
18. “Bad friends are like turds that won't go down the toilet: the more you flush, the higher they rise to the top.”
19. “It has often been said that in the later years of life, you end up regretting all of the things you didn't do rather than the things that you did do. If that's the case, then it's probably OK to fuck your best friend's sister.”
20. “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars. And if you miss the stars, then the vacuum of outer space will suck all of the oxygen out of your body, and you will float around forever with an extremely stupid look on your face.”