Quotes
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality . . . Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, 1967 Christmas Sermon on Peace
We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.
– Confucius
Time is the shadow of motion.
– Japanese proverb
The first step to wisdom is getting things by their right name.
– Chinese proverb
The manner by which we approach is more important than the thing we think we’re approaching. Because the thing we think we’re approaching is a reflection of our inner structures, our belief systems, our socialization, our conditioning. If we see the world through the lens of rationalism, materialism and separation, which is kind of the unholy trinity of capitalist modernity, then everything is a problem to be solved in a mechanistic way.
– Alnoor Ladha
When I take people to the desert, they may see a tin can lying under a cactus and ask, “How can anyone do that to this beautiful desert?” But that can is the desert. It’s what is. How can it be out of place?
The cactus, the snakes, the scorpions, the sand, the can, and us–all of it. That is nature, not a mental image of the desert without the can. Without any stress or judgment, I notice that I just pick up the can. Or I could tell the story that people are polluting the earth and that there is no end to human selfishness and greed and then pick up the can with all the sadness and anger I’d be feeling. Either way, when it’s time for the can to move, I’m there, as nature, picking up the can.
Who would I be without my uninvestigated story? Just happily picking up the can. And if someone notices me picking it up and my action seems right, that person may pick up another can. We’re already acting as a community, beyond anything that we planned. Without a story, without an enemy, action is spontaneous, clear and infinitely kind.
– Byron Katie, The Work
Be selfish and selfless.
Give to yourself, first.
So that you can give more to others.
And when you give, don’t expect to “get” anything in return.
Enjoy the joy of being in a position to give selflessly in the first place.
– Nicolas Cole, 17 rules for a life well lived
An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
– Bertrand Russel
I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.”
― Steve Jobs
Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.
Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that, the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories.
This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated, and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known.
People constantly throw around the term “hero’s journey” without having any idea what it really means. Everyone from CEOs to wellness influencers thinks the hero’s journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real hero’s journey.
In the real hero’s journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house, and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it.
If you are foolish, this is where you will abort the journey and start another, and another, abusing your heart over and over for the brief illusion of winning. But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered, and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognized, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.
So embrace humility in everything. Life isn’t out to get you, nor are your struggles your fault. Every defeat is just an angel, tugging at your sleeve, telling you that you don’t have to keep banging your head against the wall. Leave that striver there, trapped in his lonely ambitions. Just walk away, and life in its vastness will embrace you.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it. Hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love.”
Extremes take the brain into the place where trauma can actually be re-patterned.
– Joshua Schrei, On Trauma and Vegetation Gods
Meditation is a lie, when we try to control the mind or hold on to an experience, we don’t see the innate perfection of the present moment… pure awareness is like space, boundless and open. It’s always here: you don’t have to make it up. All you have to do is rest in it.
More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark—unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson
All this visible universe is not unique in nature and we must believe there are, in other regions of space, other worlds, other beings and other men.
– Lucretius, 99-55 BC
The origin of life may correspond to a physical transition associated with a shift in causal structure where information gains direct and context dependent causal efficacy over the matter it is instantiated in.
Bravery comes along with the gradual accumulation of discipline
– Buzz Aldrin
Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.
– Nisargadatta Maharaj
Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson, you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive, that means you still have lessons to learn.
Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.
– Epictetus
My worry is that we’re going to get to a situation where we’re spending all of our money just trying to stay alive.
– Andrew Dessler, climate scientist
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?
– Rumi
When we pray, don’t pray to get things, pray to be worthy to get things.
Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear.
– Tao Te Ching
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
– Terence McKenna
Dukkha is a function of both (a) prediction errors and (b) internal model complexity. But they aren’t fundamentally bad; they cash out in dissonance. Prediction error is out-of-phase interactions between layers; complexity is risk factor for dissonance.
Math is not in itself elegant. We just use it as a mind mirror in order to find elegant configurations of the mind. These are mindstates that are configured so that they can share energy and information between its various components in efficient, stressless, and generative ways.
– Andreés Gómez Emilsson
The winds of grace are always blowing but you have the raise the sail.
– Ramakrishna
If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.
– Joanna R. Macy
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
– James Baldwin
All flesh is grass.
– Old Testament, Book of Isaiah, Chapter 40, Verses 6-8
Our continuing inability to identify the radical aerospace vehicles violating our airspace is an ongoing intelligence failure, one that arguably requires written notification to the House and Senate intelligence committees pursuant to Section 502 of the National Security Act of 1947…If we fail to thoroughly investigate, in the wake of reliable pilot reporting and the Navy’s admission, it can only be because policymakers are prioritizing political expediency over national security – a state of affairs reminiscent of the declining Roman Empire, when the needs and concerns of troops in the field were given short shrift by maneuvering politicians in Rome. Hopefully, support for our troops is one thing that still unites us.
– A Threat Unmet by Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations
There are only atoms and the void.
You came down here to learn how to live while you’re dying. Anyone who checks out early got the job done.
— Marcus Luttrell
Souls who love God, a Sufi sheikh said a thousand years ago, “know one another by smell, like horses.” Though one be in the East and the other in the West, they still feel joy and comfort in each other’s talk, and one who lives in a later generation than the other is instructed and consoled by the words of his friend.
– Stephen Mitchell, Preface to Bhagavad Gita
Nothing is done because the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed; the fuel has been completely transformed into flame.
– Tao Te Ching
As the soul is immortal, has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things.
– Socrates
I think, although great new ideas are usually articulated by individuals, they’re nearly always generated by communities.
– Brian Eno, Co-founder of the Long Now
A point is that which has no part
– Euclid
These plants and fungi are gifts from Nature, symbiotic partners in our long evolutionary journey from apes to angels.
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light
– Stanley Kubrick
I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.
– Hopo Pono Pono prayer
Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
– George Orwell
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The single most important distinction in life is between an opportunity to seize and a temptation to resist.
– Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Most of the time, we have the option to wait until we arrive in a space of headlessness, and honor the truth of what emerges.
– Jeff Leifer
Marshal Rosenberg articulated the consciousness and developed a process that enables us to enter the consciousness. At first, when we are learning [Nonviolent Communication] we employ the process as a vehicle to the consciousness. Once there, we no longer need the vehicle. All we say and do will serve life. When we step out of the consciousness we can use the process to bring us back.
– Myra Walden, What is Nonviolent Communication
This is our big mistake: to think we look forward to death. Most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death.
– Seneca
Remember that you are not mortal; only your body is mortal. What is alive is not your body but the spirit living in your body. An unseen force guides your body, just as an unseen force guides the world.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us, but if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.
– Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
I tell the children folding paper cranes will not stop atomic war, but folding cranes will make friends and friends will not make war.
– Floyd Schmoe
We may not be rich, but we are free.
– Olivier Said, Founder of Kitchen on Fire
Let not a person revive the past
Or on the future build his hopes;
For the past has been left behind
And the future has not been reached.
Instead with insight let him see
Let him know that and be sure of it,
Invincibly, unshakably.
Today effort must be made;
Tomorrow Death may come, who knows?
No bargain with Mortality
Can keep him and his hordes away,
But one who dwells thus ardently,
Relentlessly, by day and night—
It is he, the Peaceful Sage has said,
Who has had a single excellent night.
– Majjhima Nikaya (MN:131)
There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans.
– John O’Donahue
Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of the ship or the rail accident in the advent of the train, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us.
– Paul Virilio
I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling.
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination of India has evolved the manifestations of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, and by a hundred other names… The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self.
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
What he taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
It’s a mistake to think that those holy men of India lead useless lives. They are a shining light in the darkness. They represent an ideal that is a refreshment to their fellows; the common run may never attain it, but they respect it and it affects their lives for good. When a man becomes pure and perfect the influence of his character spreads so that they who seek truth are naturally drawn to him. It may be that if I lead the life I’ve planned for myself it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third; it’s just possible that a few people will see that my way of life offers happiness and peace, and that they in their turn will teach what they have learnt to others.
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
What gives light must endure burning.
– Viktor E. Frankl
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way… It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
We practice [meditation] not to attain Buddhahood but to express it.
– Shuryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind
Money… is like gas in your car. You need to pay attention so you don’t end up on the side of the road. But your trip is not a tour of gas stations.
– Tim O’Reilly
“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”
— George S. Patton
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
– Whalt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
We can’t have large societies that “feel right”.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
But by all means bear this in mind, that within a very short time both thou and he will be dead; and soon not even your names will be left behind.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
If you found yourself in the void with your brothers before the monstrous body of a dead god, what kind of world would you build from his corpse?
– Jack Donovan, Becoming a Barbarian
Leaves, some the wind scatters on the ground—so is the race of men.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Every new concept gives rise to a new symbolism.
– Mathematics: Its Contents, Methods, and Meaning.
The advantage of the koan method is perhaps, that for general purposes, the other way is too subtle and too easily subject to misinterpretation–especially by monks who might all too readily use it as an excuse for loafing around the monastery while living off the donations of the devout laity. The his almost certainly why the emphasis of the T’ang masters on “not-seeking” gave way to the more energetic use of the koan as a means of exhausting the strength of the egoistic will. Bankei’s Zen without method or means offers no basis for a school or institution, since the monks may just as well go their way and take up farming or fishing. As a result no external sign of Zen is left; there is no longer any finger pointing at the moon or Truth–and this is necessary for the Bodhisattva’s task of delivering all beings, even thought it runs the risk of mistaking the finger for the moon.
– Allan Watts, The Way of Zen
Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses. In time, the sense of relief wears off–but not the awakening, unless one has confused it with the sense of relief and has attempted to exploit it by indulging in ecstasy. Awakening is thus only incidentally pleasant or ecstatic, only at first an experience of intense emotional release. But in itself it is just the ending of an artificial and absurd use of the mind… One method of muscular relaxation is to begin by increasing tension in the muscles so as to have a clear feeling of what not to do. In this sense there is some point in using the initial koan as a means of intensifying the mind’s absurd effort to grasp itself. But to identify satori with the consequent feeling of relief, with the sense of relaxation, is quite misleading, for the satori is the letting go and not the feeling of it. The conscious aspect of the Zen life is not, therefore, satori–not the “original mind”–but everything one is left free to do and to see and feel when the cramp in the mind has been released.
– Allan Watts, The Way of Zen
Raise the Stakes: Make sure that your pilot is one of the most important things you’ve ever done. Jack Black might see it, right? So, don’t faround. Don’t have fun. Keep in mind during every stage of production that your goal is to get into the screening so that everyone can
finally see how awesome you are. s is the first and most important rule, because if you can just realize how make-or-break the Channel 101 experience is, the rest of the
steps toward a shitty pilot will come naturally. This philosophy will not only ensure your submission’s suckiness, it will make almost everything you do sucky. Your relationships, your poems, ydriving, your sense of humor: If you just focus less on what you’re doing (ex: telling a joke) and more on why you’re doing it (ex: to be
funny), the suckiness will take over. The Master of Suck lives outside the moment at all times, therefore everything he does is horrible.
The universe is vast; and our lives our infinite; but we do not know this; and so we suffer.
– Unknown
Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century”, he wrote, “than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible … [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
If thought is something we share, then so is reason—what makes us reasoning beings. If so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared. And if so, we share a common law. And thus, are fellow citizens. And fellow citizens of something. And in that case, our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to?
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV:4, translation by Gregory Hays
The fact that the texture of one’s experience has information processing properties (aka qualia computing) is itself more evident during states of confusion. For example, when you are confused about the meaning of something, this will have implications for the way you experience language and encode gestalts of experience (ex: “This synesthetic sensation here is usually paired up with meaning, but what is the meaning of it now? Without experiencing the meaning I usually ascribe to the sensation, I can’t compare it to other sensations I’ve had before.”)
Only the educated are free.
The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.
Concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.
– Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology
It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
There is no excuse for anyone who is not illiterate if he is less than three thousand years old in mind.
– Why Don’t We Learn from History?
Life’s finest day for wretched; mortals here; Is always first to flee
– Virgil
There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
You can’t wish away Design Process. It has been in existence since the dawn of civilization. And the latest clever development tools, no matter how clever, cannot replace the best practices and real-life collaboration that built cathedrals, railroads, and feature-length films.
– The Case for Slow Programming
Cinema is a very difficult and serious art… you should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.
For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
Ah! vainest of all things
Is the gratitude of kings;
The plaudits of the crowd
Are but the clatter of feet.
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
Tit-for-tat is an efficient catalyst of cooperation in a society where nearly everybody is a defector, but once cooperation is established win-stay, lose-shift is better able to maintain it.
– Mark A. Novak, Five rules for the evolution of coooperation
By describing what consciousness is capable of in rigorous mathematical ways, you can reverse-engineer the reasons why natural selection recruited it as the medium for representing world-simulations.
– Andres Gomez Emilsson, What does comparatively matter in 2015?, Qualia Computin
Willingly give thyself up to Clotho, one of the Fates, allowing her to spin thy thread into whatever things she pleases.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgement now. But if anything in thy own disposition gives thee pain, who hinders thee from correcting thy opinion?
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Metaphors of struggle may just make the phantom dramas of the mind more solid, thus perpetuating the struggle, since even high spiritual warfare is one of the ego’s self-aggrandizing dreams.
– Stephen Mitchell, Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation
I look to see if someone has a marine strategy, for taking the beach; an army strategy, for taking the country; and a police strategy, for governing the country afterward.
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.
The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, long before I dance under those lights.
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology
It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
[Those who] drink to the bottom of the cup must expect to meet some of the dregs.
There have been two big takeaways that changed how I work. The first is to look deeply into the stack of implicit assumptions I’m working with. It’s often the unspoken assumptions that are the most important ones. The second flows from the first and it’s to focus less on building the right thing and more how we’re going to meet our immediate needs.
– CTO to CTO: Werner Vogels and Don Neufeld
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
All things happen in accordance with strife and necessity.
Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not? If I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.
I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans.
There are no rules anywhere. The Goddess Prevails.
– Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia
Every successful system accumulates parasites.
Take the concept of memory. We imagine memory somewhat like a container which can hold mental stuff… such a container does not really exist, but it is a useful way to visualize an aspect of our behavior. In a sense, our entire mental vocabulary is figurative or metaphorical. Even the way in which we imagine time is metaphorical: a spatial extendedness. We place events on a timeline, on which left and right are analogue to before and after. Thus, a coherent story about the ‘self’ can be told, that wonderful fiction. No easy accomplishment! It must have been a long road for humandkind to invent it.
– Erik Weijers, reviewing “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
The problem here is that knowledge exists only in living human minds, and the literacy codes we use for storage are cues that need to go through a complex transformation before they can be brought to life again in another mind. Many educationalists, and even more non-educationalists, confuse the codes with knowledge.
– Kieran Egan, Why education is so difficult and contentious
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
There has always been a lot of talk about what to do when failure is unacceptable and yet failure is inevitable. Heretofore, almost anything that has come to be seen as essential to the public gets some sort of performance standard imposed upon it, electricity and water, say. But let’s talk about software.
– Dan Geer, Cybersecurity as Realpolitik
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
You have to pull back and let the system destroy itself, and then come back. That’s Seneca’s recommendation. He’s the one who says that the sage should let the republic destroy itself.
– Nassim Taleb, Rules for my Life
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 276
I start early, and I stay late, day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success.
Simon emphasized the usefulness of the land tax, reflecting the early influence of Henry George on his economic thought.
Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
I’m trying to build a jigsaw puzzle. I wish I could show you what it will be, but the picture isn’t on the box.
A new breed of philosophers is coming up: I venture to baptize them with a name that is not free of danger. From what I can guess about them, from what they allow to be guessed (since it is typical of them to want to remain riddles in some respect), these philosophers of the future might require in justice, perhaps also in injustice, to be described as ‘Those who attempt’. The name itself is in the end a mere attempt and, if you will, a ‘Temptation’.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Free Spirit
The proper judge of the expert is not another expert, but the user : the warrior and not the blacksmith for the sword.
– Cornelius Castoriadis
The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through…
That rewards can’t get us what we want is a heretical idea, but it emerges ineluctably from a critical analysis of motivation and work. What distinguishes behaviorists… is not a predilection for using rewards so much as a tendency to focus on behavior… The more reasonable view, I would argue, is that our behavior is just the outward manifestation of who we are: our thoughts and feelings, expectations and memories.
– Alfie Kohn, Challenging Behaviorist Dogma: Myths About Money and Motivation
Thus, they conclude that, with state interference eliminated, it will be possible to achieve “socialist ends by market means.”
Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.
Don’t follow in the footsteps of the ancient masters; seek what they sought.
– Matsuo Bashō
Technology and culture have robbed children of something they deeply need, and then, in the form of video games, sold it back to them.
Anything linear in harm is already gone, and what is left are things that are nonlinear.
– Nassim Taleb, Longplayer Letters
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend 6 years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
The most useful general advice is to be specific.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.
— Albert Einstein
We evolve at the rate of the community we are plugged into.
– Gayle Karen Young
Nothing will bring promotion—and better still, usefulness and happiness—than culture giving you general knowledge beyond the depths of those with whom you may have to deal.
– Andrew Carnegie
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
– Bertrand Russell
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
– Albert Einstein
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
– Thomas Huxley
If you find a way to be okay with sucking for a short time, you’ll have a whole lifetime to enjoy not sucking at that thing.
In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.
– Danny Hillis, Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.
I think the hardest part of kicking a habit is wanting to kick it.
– Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy
Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective-doing less-is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
– Tim Ferris
The naïve view of public goods is often at odds with reality… In modern society, better jobs and relationships are often the reward for the production of positive externalities. As it turns out, people like to work and socialize with those who create value for others… Can you name a single person who ended up poor and unhappy because they devoted too many resources to the voluntary production of public goods of actual value to the rest of society? […] Don’t worry about being compensated for it right away. If you succeed in producing things that are of value to others, they will want you around, and you will have plenty of rewarding opportunities you would not have had otherwise.
– Eli Dourado, Why I Should Blog More
The multitude of books serves only to show how many false paths there are, and how widely astray a man may wander if he follows any of them. But he who is guided by his genius, he who thinks for himself, who thinks spontaneously and exactly, possesses the only compass by which he can steer aright.
– Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature
No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.
The ships that brought us here are to be left scuttled and burning at the shore.
– E. O. Wilson
The man who is unable to live in society or has no need because he is sufficient for himself must be either beast or god.
– Aristotle
The only serious question is whether there is anything to take seriously.
– Mitchell Heisman
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
– Frank Herbert