Quotes

A frog's brain is set up to recognize food as moving objects that are oblong in shape. So if we take a frog's normal food -- flies -- paralyze them with a little chloroform and put them in front of the frog, it will not notice them or try to eat them. It will starve in front of its food! But if we throw little rectangular pieces of cardboard at the frog it will eat them until it is stuffed! The frog only sees a little of the world we see, but it still thinks it perceives the whole world. Now, of course, we are not like frogs! Or are we? - Alan Kay

All progress depends on the unreasonable man. - Elon

Champions behave like champions before they're champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners. - Bill Walsh

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. - C.S. Lewis

One should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. If discrimination is long, it will spoil. When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. - Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Progress has been made not by adding new theories but by deleting old assumptions. - Terence Tao

It will always be the case that our explanation for how the brain works will be by analogy to the most sophisticated technology we have… levers and pulleys, humors and fluid dynamics, computers. - Jeff Beck

Say it’s close and your opponent starts kirtwainging you. Balls are in and he is calling them out. You can’t believe the flagrancy of it. This is early rounds, honor systems. All of a sudden he is kirtwainging on you. Whether he is kirtwainging you or heading fucking you do you start kirtwainging back tit for tat? Do we assume there is a crowd? Early round no witnesses, you’re on your own out there. You do not kerteain back. You play the calls, not a word. Keep smiling. If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person. If you lose you do something private and unpleasant to his water jug right before the next round. - Infinite Jest

This is how we grow: by being defeated by greater and greater things. - Rainer Maria Rilke

History does not ask whether we feel ready, it simply arrives. - USNA Superintendent

χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά. (Beauty is hard.) - Plato

How many of you have ever sawed wood? Let’s see your hands.’ Most of them had. Then he inquired: ‘How many of you have ever sawed sawdust?’ No hands went up. ‘Of course, you can’t saw sawdust! It’s already sawed! And it’s the same with the past. When you start worrying about things that are over and done with, you’re merely trying to saw sawdust.’ - Fred Shedd

The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost. - G.K. Chesterton

The harder I practice the luckier I get - Arnold Palmer

While an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event”; instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. “When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” - War and Peace

The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years, is a strangely under-appreciated skill. - Joshua Rothman

To make something interesting, just look at it a long time. - Gustave Flaubert

Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate a melody in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it. But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fair-mindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned. - Nietzsche

The most important part of the simulation is to keep things interesting enough to pay the cosmos AWS bill. Only the most interesting simulations survive so the most interesting outcome is the most likely outcome. - Elon

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. - Picasso

A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility. - Susan Sontag

It’s just kinda like you couldn’t stop from saying it. If you don’t have to say anything then you’ll end up saying the right thing.

I don’t trust you right now man that’s a fucking problem (when Matt Damon was blanking Ben Affleck and it is really pissing him off).

There is this paradox where the stuff I am most proud of it has felt very easy and the shit where your banging yourself against the wall ends up feeling empty. But my greatest insecurity is should this feel hard.

Actors try to cry, people try not to cry. Until they pull up the sheet up over their head. Great actors are good enough for both of us. - Matt Damon

We’re not going to take ourselves too seriously, but we will take our jobs really seriously. - Ben Affleck

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. - G.K. Chesterton

Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world John Sculley? - Steve Jobs

The highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. - Charlie Munger

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. -Yevgeny Zamyatin

I would rather be accused of breaking precedents than breaking promises. - JFK

How often do you miss a laser shot out of the 150,000 per second? We don’t miss them. - ASML

The world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish. - Tim Ferriss

Marriage as a long conversation. When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation. - Nietzsche

Does anyone have a better suggestion than the ten commandments to get a young person’s mind aiming in the right direction? - Matthew McConaughey

America is not a lie, it’s a disappointment. But it can only be a disappointment because it’s a hope. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I ask my friends how things are going and they’re doing well, they get shy. Most people can tolerate only a moderate dose of happiness before they begin to self-regulate. They grow suspicious of their own good fortune like they’ve stumbled upon a vault left open by mistake. They act like joy is a smuggled gem. - Sherry Ning

People don’t come to my shows to learn something new. They come to my shows to be reminded about what they already know is true. - Bruce Springsteen

If convictions don’t cost anything, then they probably aren’t convictions, they are just fashion. - Obama

I could be in a negotiation meeting for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and I see a notification pop up on my phone and I say to myself ‘I wonder what he just played on words with friends.’ - Obama

In the beginning, we don’t trust them because we think they are crazy. In the end, we trust them because we know they are crazy. - Justine Musk

Once your mind expands it never returns to its original size. - Einstein (he gets way too many quotes attributed to him)

The aerodynamic body of the bumblebee is not fit to fly. But it’s good the bee doesn’t know about it. - NASA

When extra credit is included credit doesn’t get its due. When amnesty is offered, going into the crime we are more bound to commit it because there is no fine (no tips). - MM

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to make the important choices in life. All pride, fear, embarrassment, or fear of failure all just fall away. You are already naked. - Steve Jobs

Love life more than its meaning. - Alyosha

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. - Steve Jobs

No one cares until I put on the mask - Bane (the form factor matters!)

Let me just say that you need a license to drive a car, but you don’t need a license to be the CEO of a company. And maybe you should need one.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear. As you live your arc across the sky, you want to have as few regrets as possible. Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and wish you could do over again. Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did. - Steve Jobs

If you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more.

Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. - Steve Jobs

This was California. You can get LSD fresh-made from Stanford University. California has a sense of experimentation about it, and a sense of openness about it—openness and new possibility—that I really didn’t appreciate till I went to other places. - Steve Jobs

Life is like driving at night with the headlights on—you can only see a few feet in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way. - E.L. Doctorow

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. - Annie Duke

What is your core technical insight that makes it all work? - Eric Schmidt (if no easy answer, don’t fund the product)

I don’t want to moon the giant - Eric Schmidt on starting the chrome browser when Google was too young

I’m not obsessed about time. I'm obsessed about energy management. If you have time, but you have no energy, you're not going to accomplish anything anyway. —Daniel Ek

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. -Michelangelo (artists as transmitters rather than creators so it’s not self-expression)

Education tends to ruin talent, not enhance it. Students are dulled by repetitive, moribund lessons that leave them frightful of failure and devoid of creativity. It is for this reason that Johnstone began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.

I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have. [...] I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over. Then: I’m not ready for it to be over. - Andre Agassi

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. - James Baldwin

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters. - PG

When you look at the lives of people who've done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket collector's obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries. - Paul Graham

As a general principle, be dynamic, take initiatives, don’t be a stick in the mud, and so forth, for sure, but there are times when it’s all important to first think for a moment, lest later you reflect that it would have only taken a moment —. - Edward Packard

In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving. - The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie

It’s not so difficult to be a buddha. Simply being fully present, understanding, compassionate, and loving is enough. - Thich Nhat Hanh

What you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others. - Huckleberry Finn

What would the 14-year-old version of me want to see? Then I make that. - James Cameron

Don’t walk in like you want to buy the place, walk in like you want to own it. Matthew McConaughey

As a gardener you have to stay on top of an awful lot of things. -David Lynch

Every problem cries in its own language. Go like a blood hound where the truth has trampled. - Tomas Tranströmer

How come your blood is blood but our blood is water (America supporting israel killing 106 people at a UN safe hold in lebanon, the two holy sites) - Osama Bin Laden

The sport is on the table and the business is underneath it

Stubborn determination to capture the trust of those who work with me. - Enzo Ferrari

He who chases two hares catches neither. - Desiderius Erasmus

I either buy my first choice or I buy nothing. - Jiro Ono

A novice is easily spotted because they do too much. A master uses the fewest resources required to fulfill their intention” - Jiro (ultimate simplicity leads to purity)

Each encounter I’ve had with Lao Tzu has pointed to something new. Almost as if the book changes with every reading. I first picked up Stephen Mitchell’s translation 40 years ago at the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles and my life has never been quite the same. - Rick Rubin

Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk. - Sam Altman

If you can’t handle the pains that most people can, you’re soft. If you can handle the pains that most people can’t, you’re resilient -Aristotle

If he gives me credit for being a plodder he will describe me justly. Anything beyond that will be too much. I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything. - William Carey

We ride at dawn - Taylor Swift about her fans

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. - James Joyce

Healthy disregard for the impossible. - Google

Locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory is not a matter of reduction at all, but perversely, of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled metastatic growth - Infinite Jest

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around. - Henry David Thoreau

It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the lot people who are together on that ship.

Talent hit’s a target no one else can hit, genius hit’s a target no one else can see. - Schopenhauer

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. - Hemingway

If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, Hemingway’s purpose is to make his readers beholders. - Harry Levin

Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once. - Marcus Aurelius

Creativity tools warn us when our energies are being hijacked, serving others but not ourselves. As we become increasingly clearheaded, others are attracted to our clarity. - Julia Cameron

Slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears: you don’t like it but you don’t dare let it go. - Thomas Jefferson

One day, I watched the sun set forty-four times. You know, one loves the sunset when one is sad. - The Little Prince

It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days... Lightly, lightly - it's the best advice ever given me... to throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. - Aldous Huxley

Your masterpiece won't emerge from your mind fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head. It will emerge from your willingness to start badly and improve steadily. It will emerge from your commitment to showing up consistently rather than brilliantly. It will emerge from your ability to see failure as information rather than indictment. The work that will matter most to you, the work that will surprise you with its significance, is probably much smaller than you imagine and much closer than you think. - Dr. Warner

You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear. - Steve Jobs

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. - The Screwtape Letters

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out. - The Screwtape Letters (evil doesn’t arrive through fire and fury. It creeps in through ease, comfort, and optimization. Screwtape wants to nudge people into passivity as a way of capturing their souls)

I know it when I see it. - Supreme Court judge Justice Potter Stewart on defining porn (agency is one of those things too)

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. Steve Jobs ( you might not know shit, but nobody knows shit)

I knew I wasn’t so much bound to a biological race as to a group of people. And these people were bound because they suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the dream.” Between the World and Me

Bad times, hard times—this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: such as we are, such are the times. - St Augustine

His friends must stand with him, and they muat all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight in our feet, fists raised to the sky. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together and that part was in our control. The struggle in and of itself had meaning. - Ta-Nahesi Coates

The true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip… he wants to dominate, not be dominated - High MacLeod

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. - David Foster Wallace

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. - Andre Gide

All I know is violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. - Between the world and Me

American’s deify democracy is a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have from time to time stood in defiance of their God… America’s problem is not its betrayal of ‘government of the people’ but the means by which ‘people’ acquired their names. The process of naming the people have never been a matter of genealogy or physiognomy as much as one of hierarchy. - Ta-nehisi Coates

I don’t know anything about music. My job is to listen—to feel whether it’s alive. - Rick Rubin

The greatest wealth is to live content with little. - Plato

Well, are musicians able to make men unmusical by music? Impossible. It is apparent to us that it is never just to harm anyone.

Look at it this way. Isn’t the man who is cleverest at landing a blow in boxing or any other kind of fight also the one cleverest as guarding against it? - Socrates

“Could you really persuade,” said Glaucon, “if we don’t listen?” - The Republic

Reason is corrosive to the mysteries of human connectedness. - Allan Bloom

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her. - Orthodoxy

A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either. -Mortimer Adler

The amazing thing about moments of awe is they are so point we don’t need that many of them.

It’s important to view knowledge as a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to. - Elon Musk

My experience at west point was much like a colonoscopy - Gen Stanley Mccrystal

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” — G.K. Chesterton

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. — G.K. Chesterton

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering. - Martin Heidegger (tech flattens the world into models, a machine)

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily. - Cormac McCarthy

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. - Hannah Arendt (turning the crank on the machine, unthinking and unfeeling)

Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” — Ecclesiastes 4:4

About getting ambitious plans: you have to be immune to rejection. People are going to dismiss you at first. If that's enough to stop you, you're doomed. - Jessica Livingston

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down. - Jane Wagner

If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up. - Steve Albini letter to Nirvana

The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not weigh stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you. - Mihir Desai

The cliche goes like this; live each day as if it were your last. The best way to take this advice is to do exactly the opposite: live each day as if you would live forever. — Peter Thiel

To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing. - José Raúl Capablanca

The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you. The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say. For that reason, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. That’s why I wouldn’t let a conversation end. - Lyndon Johnson

But how likely are you to find someone who has the intensity and ambition of a Napoleon or Alexander, and who is willing to aim those talents towards writing a great biography? It’s like finding out that Darth Vader is using the death star to carve wooden figurines. -Robert Caro

Imagine looking back over your life and watching ten years worth of footage: you at various ages holding a smartphone, scrolling, rapt, pacified, oblivious to your surroundings to all the things you are choosing not to do, to all the sides of yourself you don’t know because you’ve surrendered to your phone the time it would take to discover them. Is this how you want to spend your life? - August Lamm

The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly. - C.S. Lewis

I have no concept of knowing how to be a musician at all, whatsoever. I mean, I don’t know the names of the chords to play I don’t know how to do major and minor chords. - Kurt Cobain

A philosopher-king lives 729 times more pleasantly than a tyrant. - Plato, Book IX (justice is worthwhile even in the absence of the rewards it might confer)

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. - Franz Kafka

We plant things—sow ideas and dreams and expectations. Sometimes, they work out exactly as we wish. But more often, life laughs in our faces and hands us something else. - Caroline Cala (seven of pentacles tarot card)

Often we feel there is so much we yearn to do and so little time to do it in. We could take a cue from music here: ‘Rest’ is a musical term for a pause between flurries of notes. Without that tiny pause, the torrent of notes can be overwhelming. Without a rest in our lives, the torrent of our lives can be the same. Even God rested. Even waves rest. Even business titans close their office doors and play with the secret toys on their desks. Our language of creativity knows this. We talk about ‘the play of ideas,’ but we still overwork and underplay and wonder why we feel so drained. - Julia Cameron

When the storm comes — when night falls — what's worse: the danger or the fear of danger? Give me reality, the danger itself. - Vincent Van Gogh

Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle. - G.K. Chesterton

For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula. - Bill Bernbach (Volkswagen marketing)

I would rather be on the soil, a serf to another man, to a portion less man, and to undergo anything whatsoever rather than to opine the truth of the world and live that way - Plato

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeming new landscapes, but in having new eyes - Marcel Proust

You fall in love the way you go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. - Hemingway

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context - Devon Price

The One Thing you need to know about happy marriage: Find the most generous explanation for each other’s behavior and believe it. - Marcus Buckingham

Everybody’s got dreams. It’s your job to become a nightmare - John Gruden

There’s nothing that gets me going like a slab of mozzarella - Konrad

It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other — Aldous Huxley

She was cilantro, but he has the soap gene - Emma Chamberlain

There is only one thing worse than being imitated and that is not being imitated. - Coco Chanel

Copy from one, it’s plagiarism. Copy from two, it’s research. - Wilson Milner

An ounce of originality is worth a pound of imitation - Orson Welles

Where did you and neal get that connection? Riding in the car together and making him breakfast. - Cooper Flagg

I’m not a candy maker, I’m empire minded - Forrest Mars

Golf is a good walk spoiled. - Oscar Wilde

• I would rather go do shit: play piano, climb a mountain, ride a motorcycle, than complain about my driver after the fourth hole. It takes so damn long. You guys need to go home and either get divorced or work on your marriage. It should be 7 holes.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. - Hermann Hesse

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you're job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. - Steve Jobs

We have only the particular thought for the words that are present in our minds. - Nietzsche

Justin is a bible name and I’m kind of on the fence right now - Bon Iver

We divide human drives into three groups: those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort, those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort, those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes” - Unabomber Manifesto

If there’s anything I wish we could talk more about it’s the in-between stages of letting someone go. Because nobody lets go in an instant. You let go once. And then you let go again. And then again and again and again. You let someone go at the grocery store when their favorite type of soup is on sale and you don’t buy it. You let them go again when you’re cleaning your bathroom and have to throw out the bottle of the body wash that smells like them. Sometimes you’re going to have to let the same person go a thousand times in a thousand different ways. The truth is, none of us want to think of ourselves as works in progress. We want everything to happen instantaneously: Falling in love, falling out of it, letting go of what we know we ought to leave in the past and moving on to whatever comes next. We hate the in-between spaces – the times when we’re okay but not quite there yet. The periods where we suspect that growth is happening but have nothing to show for it.

You’re going to a one year old’s birthday party, no there isn’t going to be a lot of alcohol…

The education of guardians will involve physical training for the body, and music and poetry for the soul. - Plato

It’s not about affection, it’s just about time. It’s not the lemon zest, it’s the time. - Butter

Nothing ever happens if you don’t impose on people. - Butter

A charming person is not one that glimmers but holds a mirror to your glow — a conversation with them makes you fall for them by making you fall for yourself. Charm is not navel-gazed, but generated through your radical, loud embrace of both honesty and openness rooted in liking people enough to generously hand a piece of yourself to them.

When I don’t have inspiration or I have a block, I do nothing. I live. - John Batiste

One often meets one’s destiny on the road one takes to avoid it - Kung Fu Panda

The art of riding big waves is finding the wave’s personality and then matching the best of you with that. -Kai Lenny

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. - Carl Sagan

Never lose an opportunity of reasoning against the principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former but not every work has the latter, and he who discovers them tells you something that you could not with certainty have anticipated - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I had theee months yo play bob dylan, and never again for the rest of my life. So I didn’t turn my phone on for three months

Power is only vouchsafed for those who dare to stoop and pick it up. - Raskolnikov

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. - Nikola Tesla

I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that's how you grow — when there's that moment of, 'Wow, I'm really not sure I can do this,' and you push through. - Marissa Meyer

The great become so in part because it would never occur to them not to be totally present. Their blindness and dumbness, in other words, are not the price of the gift, but its essence. What combination of blankness and concentration is required to sink a putt or a free throw for thousands of dollars in front of millions of unblinking eyes? - David Foster Wallace, String Theory

People with new ideas, with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are few in number.

All great men capable of saying some new word must be in their very nature criminals, or else they would have never removed themselves from the common rut. -Raskolnikov

I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various animals across the planet. The condor used the least amount of energy to move one kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. So that didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. That’s what a computer is to me. A computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. - Steve Jobs

To go wrong in your own way is better than to go right in someone else’s way. - Razumikin

It looks as if the equivalent of six thousand rubles ensures great literature. - Joseph Brodsky

His final decisions were what he came to trust least. - Crime and Punishment

Would not one tiny crime be wiped out by a thousand good deeds? - Crime and Punishment

Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself." - Glennon Doyle

Metaphorical imagination in a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists in large measure of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experience. - George Lakoff

Ordinary words convey only what know already; it is from metaphor that can best get hold of something fresh - Aristotle

Myths provide ways of comprehending experience: they give order to our lives. Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on. -George Lakoff

Truth is always relative to a conceptual system, any any human conceptual system in metaphorical in nature. Therefore, there is no fully objective, unconditional, or absolute truth. To many people raised in the culture of science where absolute truth is taken for granted, this will be seen as a surrender to subjectivity and arbitrariness—to the Humpty Dumpty notion that something means just what I choose it to mean… there is a third choice to the myths of objectivism and subjectivism. - Metaphors We Live By

We understand a statement as being true in a given situation when our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation close enough for our purposes. - George Lakoff

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. - Anton Chekhov

The pianist whose fingers seem supernaturally nimble, the presenter whose message seems viscerally compelling, and the artist whose paintings seem impossibly realistic all wield the same magic; they’ve invested more time than you’d expect. It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal. That’s why, generally, the approach is to start small, then increment. Do something, so you can change it. Get your reps in. Evolve your complex simple from a simple one that works. Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success. - Allen Pike

In film, a door slamming shut is something of a cliche indicating anger, exasperation, or the definitive end of a relationship. Much less has been made of the door that’s slammed open.

The personality of a man always poses the biggest obstacle to his own education. Many of life’s lessons come through trial or tribulation, and the cost of these lessons shouldn’t be taken lightly. But at least half of what a man hasn’t learned in his lifetime he could have learned with ease. - Amor Towles

Men charged with catching criminals must know each milieu as well as the criminals know them. Just as the captains who hunted pirates on the Spanish Main had to know the prevailing currents and the location of every coral reef and shoal. - Table for Two

If the mayor of Los Angeles had any sense, he’d immediately establish a new ordinance requiring that every purveyor within the city limits sell no more than one item and that he sell it from a ship in the shape of his merchandise. - Table for Two

On a jury one could expect to find a sample of the human condition: a patchwork of intellects and experiences, personalities and prejudices. To convince these twelve disparate souls of an argument’s merit, an attorney could not rely on logic, or science , or even justice. After all, Socrates couldn’t convince the elders of Athens of his innocence any more than Galileo could convince the pope or Jesus the people of Jerusalem. To convince the members of a jury, one must instead draw them into a story. - Table For Two

Once in possession of a few essential attributes of your person, the Astrologicon will consult the laws of chemistry and the arrangement of the stars in order to provide you with an unassailable, incontrovertible, and indismissible instruction. For one dollar. -Table for Two

He stopped as had Kutuzov on the fields of Borodino; as had Washington on the western banks of the Hudson having slipped through the grasp of Howe. - Table for Two

History has shown that the beat alliances are often forged by the most unlikely of allies. - Amor Towles

The music began to climb. But the word climb isn’t quite right. For it wasn’t a matter of reaching one hang over the other and pulling oneself up with the occasional anxious glance at the ground. Rather than climbing, it was…it was…it was the opposite of cascading—a fluid and effortless tumbling upward: an ascension. - Amor Towles

The road along which a young man discovers what he is capable of is no midwestern interstate. It has no uninterrupted views to the horizon, no painted white lines, no brightly lit signs indicating the distance to one’s destination. Rather, it is a narrow and winding byway crowded with undergrowth and overhung with branches. - Table for Two

Does the thoroughbred that has cleared the first hurdle suddenly slow down to consider the second? Of course not. - Table for Two

But if Irina was quiet, she was quiet in the way a heated skillet is quiet—in the moments before you drop in the fat. - Amor Towles

So satisfactory was their life, had Pushkin uncovered an old bronze lantern while tilling the fields and unleashed from it an ancient genie with three wishes to grant, Pushkin wouldn’t have known what to wish for. - Table for Two

The soul is a form (a pattern) imposed on physics - Aristotle

Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, saying that “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other”. Nazis and German Jews. Northern Irish Protestants and Northern Irish Catholics. Hutus and Tutsis. South African whites and South African blacks. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. Anyone in the former Yugoslavia and anyone else in the former Yugoslavia.

We’re in the mood for an offensive conversation in a quiet room - Grace

If you want to be happy for a lifetime, make a garden. -Martha Stewart

It’s like a middle school girlfriend: you know it’s not going anywhere but you like it anyway - Charlie

Change. But start slowly, because direction is more important than speed. - Paul Coelho

If you want to have a stable, healthy relationship, exercise kindness early and often. Be generous is seeing your partners intentions. - Emily Smith

Everything is just an accumulation of detail.

The physics of time is ultimately the expression of our ignorance of the world - Rovelli

Be humble after but not during the action. - Hemingway

Never sacrifice momentum. I might know a better path, but if we've got a lot of momentum, if everyone's united and they're marching together and the path is okay, just go with the flow. - Ben Chestnut

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. - George Orwell

I have two family sized bags in my room - Fran (but anyone at pilot training)

In the West, we’re living in the legacy of the Enlightenment, which is when we tried to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of absolute faith; when we threw out all ideas of myth, magic, mysticism and metaphor, and “de-animated” the world — or, as the philosopher Descartes would say, we began to see the world as consisting of material objects governed by mechanical laws rather than a world of spirits. Following the Enlightenment, all that existed was mind and matter. That can, to a great extent, explain the way that we’ve interacted with the natural world for most of modern European history. And the important point to make is this way of thinking is actually highly anomalous, and most cultures around the world base their relationship with the natural world on reciprocity, not extraction.

The sacred has nothing to do with death. It’s all about the luminous presence of the divine, or of life, or whatever we call it, that unfolds around us all the time. It’s always elusive. It’s intangible. We can’t even know it’s there but the possibility that it is there gives us some kind of comfort. - David Suzuki

I recognize the lion by his claw - Bernoulli to Newton about the problem of fastest descent

The common narrative is that kids learn faster than adults, but if you watch any toddler they spend a large portion of the day attempting things that are on the edge of their ability. How much time have you spent on the edge of your ability today? - James Clear

More of what happens cognitively doesn’t happen in our brains, but out there stored in the world- in books, in folklore, in symphonies and so forth - Dave Krakauer

Before you seek revenge, remember to dig two graves - Confucius

If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by - Sun Tzu

The remedy to the anxieties of a new project, a growing to do list, an uncertain future, is falling in love with the present moment - Michael Gervais

National park project sub alpine lavender changed my life - Grace

I’d rather my cheeks come out than my nike pros - Grace

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. To yield to resistance deforms our spirit and stunts us. - Steven Pressfield

We have a job to do, a calling to enact. Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some idea we imagine ought to be, but to find out who we are already and become it.

We should have a wife, children, goods, and above all health; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back room (une arrière-boutique) all our own, entirely free, in which to establish real liberty and our principle retreat - Montaigne

To know the world, one must begin with knowing the self, as ancient philosophy instructs. In order to know the self, one ought to study other selves too, preferably their ideas as recorded texts. And since interior spaces shape the inward soul, the studiolo became a sanctuary and a microcosm. The study thus mediates the world, the word, and the self

Name one genius that isn’t crazy - Kanye West

Some of the finest solo yachtsman don’t know how to swim - Cooper from Interstellar

The devil cannot make hell look beautiful, so he makes beautiful roads that take us there

The things we do to impress others rarely impress them for longer than five minutes. But the things we do to provide value for others can last a lifetime. In the long run, one of the most impressive things you can do is provide exceptional value. - James Clear

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot - Werner Herzog

Artists have an interest in inspirations, as if the idea of a work of art or fundamental thought shines down like a merciful light from heaven. In truth, the good artists or thinkers imagination is continually producing good, mediocre, bad, but his power of judgment, highly sharpened and practiced, rejects, selects, joins together. Thus we now see from Beethoven’s notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and selected them out of disparate beginnings. The artist who separates less rigorously can in some circumstances become a great improviser, but improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging - Friedrich Nietzsche

Before you worry about how to win the game, figure out whether the game is worth winning - James Clear

It’s exhilarating to be shot at without results - Churchill

Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, "What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now. - Vincent Van Gogh

If you are going to try and make big progress, you are by definition unqualified to be doing what you are doing - Eric Weinstein

People pay to see others believe in themselves. - Kim Gordon

Impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations result in a perceived feeling of failure.

Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. - Chris Sommer

If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox. - Chris Sommer, USA Gymnastics Coach

I don’t want a fire pit I want an Uber XL - Kel P

History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes - Mark Twain

The most consequential fact of history so far could be that we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at tiny scale onto computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating artificial intelligence - Sam Altman

Don’t eat with people you wouldn’t starve with - Conor McGregor

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road but when many people walk on it, it comes into existence. - Lu Xun

You can’t change your past but you can reframe it. You can’t choose your history, but you can choose the story you tell about it. - James Clear

The best life is the one in which creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest - Bertrand Russell

The orator’s body is like a lyre - Cicero

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one's health and it were constantly one station ahead—I would still say: Walk! - Soren Kierkegaard

Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you've never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride. - Anthony Bourdain

And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. - Milan Kundera

Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” - Milan Kundera

Alice laughed: ‘There’s no use trying, one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice,’ said the queen. ‘When I was younger I always did it for half an hour a day. Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!’ - Lewis Carroll

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. - Mark Twain

If you raise the price of the fucking hot dog, I will kill you. - Jim Sinegal

People only saw the decisions I made, not the choices I had - Itachi Uchiha

Eating yogurt fast makes me gag because I start thinking it is sunscreen - Kyle Bundesmann

Attention is a moral act because what you find there is what you become - Jordan Peterson

Ungrounded religious philosophy predictably leads to negative political and moral outcomes - Sam Harris

Art celebrated with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reinforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is. - ?

Maybe my amygdala is just tired - Alex Honnold

Nuit, nuit - Steph Curry

The sheer amount of compute spent on attempting procreation is astounding - Elon Musk

I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one - Jamie Dimon

Life is easy. What I meant was life is easy with you here, and when you leave it will be hard again - Miranda July

If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most to get to - Miranda July

In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed - Charles Darwin

The great enemy of creativity is too much time and money - Ryan Reynolds

You heard me speak of these goals at each of our quarterly board meetings; always the same since June of 2013. Variety is overrated. - Sam Hinkie

Finding your way through a labyrinth of ignorance requires you to first open a door into a room of understanding, one that by its very existence has new doors to new rooms with deeper insights lurking behind them - Steven Johnson

Cross- pollinating ideas from other contexts is far, far better than attempting to solve our problems in basketball as if no one has ever faced anything similar - Sam Hinkie

To anyone I’ve offended, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars, did you also think I’m going to be a normal dude? - Elon Musk

We cannot give what we have not received - St. Francis

No one loved can escape from loving in return - Dante

Not having known birth, it knows not death - Tibetan Scripture

Don’t think, just throw - Bull Durham

If your child needed brain surgery, would you go to Dr Dre? -Eric Weinstein

Always let your conscience be your guide - Jiminy Cricket

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run—and often in the short one—the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. - Arthur C. Clarke

If your men get coffee in the morning, you can hold your position - Civil War Union Army General Benjamin Butler

Playing defense because you are afraid to fail is a disease - Howard Schultz

If it be an important object, it will never be found exactly in the center - Henry Peach Robinson

The art of doing mathematics is finding that special case that contains all the terms of generality - David Hilbert

Romanticism is forever becoming and never perfected - Julian Bell

To make virtue attractive, vice odious, and ridicule effective, such is the project that every upstanding man who takes up the pen, brush, or chisel should make his own - Denis Diderot

The republicans are basically like the christian’s, they’ll take anybody - Joe Rogan

So Patrick, would you call this a dynasty? It’s the start of one. - Super Bowl LVIII

What’s there to be happy about? Job’s not finished. - Kobe

If the fish are saying I can’t see a goddamn thing, you won’t either - Jerry Seinfeld

A ten-dollar dress, if you have good taste, may be just as pretty as one for which you have spent ten times as much. - Eleanor Roosevelt

A new idea, plus a sense of humor, makes a party – and the bores break it. - Elsa Maxwell

A good party should occur in one room only, and that room should always be too small for the number of guests invited.

Then there is the deliberately casual hostess, who prides herself in letting her guests do what they want. This is a great mistake. No guests want to do what they want – everything must be done for them at a successful party. - Elsa Maxwell

Carefully studied effects must appear just to happen, and the joy of the hostess in her own party must be the first element encountered by a guest. - Elsa Maxwell

Intuition oddly enough ISN’T the subject of countless books. High-level intuition is even more accurate and perceptive than rationality because it accesses deeper parts of reality - Robert Greene

The mentor-protege relationship is the most efficient form of learning - Mastery (absorb their style but also their way of thinking)

As a child, we have some of this intuitive power and spontaneity, but it is generally drummed out of us by all of the information that overloads our minds over time - Robert Greene

Better to hurry into the unknown than dawdle in certainty.

As long as you are asleep, the logic in the dream holds. It is only upon waking that you realize there is no logic to the dream at all. The waking world is no different. Yes, we are familiar with presentations of light and sound and time, but what is the logic beneath these presentations? Nothing.

Be kind and when you can’t be kind, be fair. And when you can’t be fair, be clever. And when you can’t be clever, be kind again - Geometry for Ocelots

If you must seek the advice of anyone, make it the drunk - JG

There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving their bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. They might continue but they will hate you for bringing consciousness into their debauchery - Exurb1a

Wisdom isn’t the only phenomenon missing a mathematical signifier. Compassion is a universal constant too. - Geometry for Ocelots

Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not. -?

If I asked you in the midst of a tragedy, ‘shall I end your suffering and make you well again?’ you would answer ‘please do, I beg it.’ If instead I asked you after the tragedy ‘are you glad you lived through it?’ you would answer ‘yes! Thank you for not stopping the thing prematurely.’ Humans are not to be trusted -Exurb1a

The must be some sturdy ledge of salvation between the pits of piety and the false floorboards of scientist - Geometry for Ocelots

The only noble desire is for the end of desire - Exurb1a

Be kind to the creation - Jackson

Genes are fiercely inventive, squeezing complexity out of simplicity. Four letter write a 1.5 million page book. - The Gene

The exact determination of heredity will impact human outlook more than anything else - The Gene

For Hamlet, greatness means a willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter, true heroes fight for things that don’t matter on their honor. This logic is part of human nature, but disastrous for relationships and business - Peter Thiel

The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places - Peter Thiel

Make our basics our best. A good basic is hard to find. - JG

How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines our lives. Meditation isn’t about conceptual understanding, it’s about experiencing things, knowledge by acquaintance and it’s a new form of intelligence. - Sam Harris

Children hold on to hope longer than hope should survive - Elizabeth Zott

The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among the worst and most damaging, words like evil and soul be will irrelevant as considering a car with faulty brakes - Robert Sapolsky

Instead of causes, biology is about propensities, potentials, vulnerabilities, and predispositions - Behave

Gossip is the weapon of norm enforcement - Robert Sapolsky

I win a grammy in the shower every time I sing a song - JG

There’s a myth that learning is meant to be serious business: when you see someone learning it’s usually a person bent over a book. Rarely do you see someone in the throes of a fully belly laugh, eyes watering from laughing, but our brains love humor. Humor is a learning juggernaut - Your Brain on Art

I’m not interested in dogma, I’m interested in what works - Benjamin Franklin

We are innately suspicious of the adaptive unconscious rapid cognition because we think the quality of a decision is based on the amount of time and effort spent deliberating on it - Blink

The profound nobility that is indifference - The Myth of Sisyphus

It is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religion or prophets, even without gods…he is asked to leap. - Albert Camus

The ABSURD: born of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. - The Myth of Sisyphus

The balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity - Albert Camus

When it feels like something, but it’s not something. When it feels like I’ve heard it before, but it’s actually new, that’s when I know it’s good - Jon Batiste

Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousand of a click of a second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the feeding on one species. And that is when the tree of life becomes something else again - The Overstory

We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted goods. It’s easy to see by yourself in a cabin, and almost impossible to see once you join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

The greatest flaw of the species is our overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser. If you would learn the secrets of nature, you must practice more humanity - The Overstory

We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement- The Overstory

Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered. After a few fights, you’re afraid of a lot less - Fight Club

The nature of the All moved to make the universe - Marcus Aurelius

Always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are - Meditations

As physicians have always their instruments and knives ready for cases which require their skill, so do you have principles ready for the understanding of things - Marcus Aurelius

Poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers..if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often - Leonard Cohen

There is more than one kind of freedom: freedom to, and freedom from - Margaret Atwood

Relationships are reflections of our keenest yet most inarticulable desires, our hopes and insecurities taking shape physically in the form of another person - A Little Life

Friendship is witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, long bouts of boredom and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored but the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments - A Little Life

The only trick of friendship is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter or cooler, but kinder and more generous and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself—no matter how bad or good it may be—and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well - Wilhelm

No matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully - Hanya Yanagihara

Skill in redirecting and repositioning almost as if their conversation were something liquid, and he was guiding it through a series of thoughts and chutes, eliminating any options for its escape until it reached its inevitable end - Jude, A Little Life

It is never a tell-all because all is something we can never access… so it is a tell-some, a tell-mine. The spaces I know aren’t empty, but I also can’t see what is inside them. How can I learn to read those silences? - The Glass Castle

If you run out of the vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life principle you die. - JG

Too much self sufficiency is sort of mean to the people who love you. You rob them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value - Malibu Rising

Happiness—a butterfly, which when pursued, seems always just beyond our grasp, but if you sit down quietly, may alight upon us - ??

Engineered green lights have reason and mystical green lights have rhyme - Matthew McConaughey

Don’t just be in the world to translate, be in the world to interpret - JG

Incomplete tasks have the ability to dominate our attention - Deep Work

Waiting for inspiration to strike is a terrible plan - Cal Newport

To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction - Cal Newport

If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you. - ??

When people let their monsters out for a little onstage interview, it turns out that we’ve all done or thought the same things. We don’t end up with a brand on our forehead, instead we compare notes - Anne Lamont

All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right - Bird by Bird

When I don’t know what to do, get quiet and try to hear that small still voice inside. It will tell me what to do. The problem is that many of us have lost access. When we listened to our intuition and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were so often corrected or ridiculed. It is essential I get it back. - Anne Lamont

Perfectionism is based off the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, you’ll hit each stepping stone just right. The truth is a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to a whole lot better than me and have more fun doing it. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp - Anne Lamont

All I have to do is write down as much as I can through a one inch picture frame - Anne Lamont

Inside myself I find a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of hatreds - C.S. Lewis

Sometimes a thing is its truest self when the colors are stripped away - Winter Garden

Acceptance is a powerful drug. And I should know because I’ve done them all - Daisy Jones and the Six

History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing - Taylor Jenkins Reid

Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. Everybody wants someone to hold up the right mirror.

Daisy was a woman that felt like sand through your fingers - Daisy Jones & The Six

We became a democracy instead of an autocracy. And democracy sounds like a good idea, but bands aren’t countries - Fleetwood Mac

I don’t take shots I know I’ll miss - JG

You have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith right? - Daisy Jones & the Six

If you can’t change the culture, you’re not going to change it at gunpoint - Sam Harris

Hesitation communicates a lack of trust in yourself - The Body Keeps the Score

The roots of resilience are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned and self-possessed other - The Body Keeps the Score

Money can buy happiness, if we spend it on other people - JG

Rejoice in moments before they slip through the vanishing hourglass of experience - Dalai Lama

The spring bloom begins first in the low places - Dalai Lama

If there is a way to overcome the situation, then of instead of feeling too much sadness, too much fear, or too much anger, make an effort to change the situation. If there is nothing you can do to overcome the situation, then there is no need for fear or sadness or anger - The Book of Joy

When we see how little we need—love and connection—then all the getting and grasping that we thought was so essential to our well-being takes its rightful place and no longer becomes the focus of our lives - Dalai Lama

The greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous - Desmond Tutu

A compassionate concern for other’s well being is the source of happiness - The Book of Joy

• I was thinking of this man and his suffering, and I completely forgot about my own pain.

Wherever you receive love, that is your home - Dalai Lama

One step short of crazy what do you get? Obsessed. No, passionate. - National Treasure

Audacity is its own form of protection, like recklessness somehow neutralizes danger - The Great Circle

Beginnings are not fixed but ambient, they are happening all the time without us noticing. Endings are easier to detect.

You don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. - The Great Circle

Sometimes you feel as though you don’t exist at all. That’s terrible… or liberating - The Great Circle

Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came from - The Great Circle

It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it - Aristotle

Forgive me comrade, your mother is just as anxious as mine, how could you be my enemy when you could be my brother - Paul, All Quiet on the Western Front

It is chance in war that makes them indifferent, but it is also impossible not to believe in chance, because they trust their life to it - All Quiet on the Western Front

Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish - Siddhartha

Cherish the sorrow and suffering of love more than the joy and happiness without - Siddhartha

Too much knowledge had hindered him, too many sacred verses, too many rules, too much castigation, too much acting and striving - Siddhartha

If you toss a stone in the water, it takes the swiftest way to the bottom. Siddhartha is like that when he has a goal, makes a resolve.

I can think. I can wait. I can fast.

Beautiful is the world if you contemplate it with no seeking, so simple, so childlike - Siddhartha

Venerable teaching does not contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself has experienced - Siddhartha

To whomever Fate comes from the outside, it kills him as the arrow kills the deer. To whomever Fate comes from within, it empowers him and makes him into a god - Siddhartha

We should have reasons WHY we don’t want to give up. It shouldn’t just be THAT we don’t want to give up - Evelyn Hugo

About the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love is give them enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad - Taylor Jenkins Reid

I broke Celia’s heart because I spent half my time loving her and the other half hiding how much I loved her - Evelyn Hugo

Never let anyone make you feel ordinary - Celia St. James

If you don’t realize there is a formula to be working with, how the hell are you supposed to find the answer? - Evelyn Hugo

It’s not so great being loved for something you didn’t do - Taylor Jenkins Reid

People think intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is, ‘you’re safe with me’—that’s intimacy - Evelyn Hugo

I blame pheromones, ultimately - JG

I think I’m too intrigued to be worried - Evelyn Hugo

The decent into Hell is the recognition of sin, ascent is the purification of sin and the ascent is much more arduous - Dante

Anxiety is the turmoil of mind that hungers after god awaiting a sign - Dante

The double grief of a lost bliss is to recall its happy hour in pain - Inferno

A certain preoccupation with form is essential to beauty - Dante

I’m in Home Depot all the time because it’s full of possibilities - JG

Do you feel sufficient to tsake on this role Caspian? No. Good.

A thorough confidence in yourself and your instrument in necessary or else you will not succeed - Kanye West

Silence is a potent carrier of presence - Ekhert Tolle

I slept with the park ranger to get this camp site - JG

Sometimes knowing how it works doesn’t make it work - Rick Rubin

All in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously… nevertheless… - Plato

In questions of the highest philosophical kind, all people with personal considerations of a family are suspect - Nietzsche

Everything habitual draws an ever tighter net of spiderwebs around us, then we notice the fibers have become traps and we are sitting in the middle. That is why the free spirit hates all rules - Aphorisms on Love and Hate

When entering a marriage, ask ‘will I be able to have good conversations with this person right into old age?’ - Nietzsche

Put a few grains of injustice on our own side of the scale - Nietzsche

Free-spirited people, living for knowledge alone, will soon find they have achieved their external goals - Nietzsche

One does habitual things more easily, skillfully, gladly, and one feels a pleasure at them, knowing from experience that the habit has stood the test and is useful - Aphorisms on Love and Hate

If someone wants to SEEM to be something, stubbornly for a long time, he eventually finds it hard to be anything else - Nietzsche

A certain blind faith in human nature may really be more desirable for a man’s overall happiness that the trait of psychological sharpsightedness - Friedrich Nietzsche

The longing for what you lack is the very thing that gives you what you’re longing for. The longing is the cure - Susan Cain

You always get exaggerated notions of things you don’t know anything about - Albert Camus

Lincoln was so honest with himself that he touched on something universal - Team of Rivals

The chief enemy to open conversation is dogmatism - Sam Harris

The existence of moral truth does not require that w define morality in terms of unvarying moral precepts — in chess, principles like ‘don’t lose your queen’ is almost always worth following. Almost. - Sam Harris

Self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life - Adam Smith

Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty - Einestein

Selfish desire and anger, these are the appetites which threaten a person in this life - Bhagavad Gita

Getting pummeled by Michael Jordan would turn out to be one of the best things to ever happen to Steve Kerr - Steve Kerr

No one jumps out of windows, but if the house is on fire, then the foremost gentlemen might up and jump out of the window - The Idiot

Why, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impression, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdities of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited, but what it is that has been told to you, all that you can neither comprehend nor recall, delicacy and diginity are taught by one’s own heart, not by some dancing master - Dostoevsky

How do you know what seed has been sown forever in his soul? How do you know what meaning this communication of one person to another will have on the destiny of that person? - Dostoevsky

There always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave my skull and will stay with me forever - Ippolit

The point is in life — in discovering it, eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself - The Prince

This was one of those that precisely cannot be thought over, but simple resolved upon - The Price

Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all mankind - The Idiot

A man could even lose his faith from that painting!

He who fears wolves should stay out of the forest - Nastasy Fillippovna

Have you ever felt that when you were freshened or in very terrible moments, when you keep your reason but it has no power anymore? - Dostoevsky

I looked at his face and understood everything - The Idiot

being led to the scaffold… What if life were given back to me - what infinity! Then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d reckon up every minute, let nothing be wasted. - The Idiot

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once per day - Charles Darwin

Never mistake a clear line of sight with distance - Thomas Tull

I’ve fallen in love or imagine I have. Went to a part and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all - Tolstoy diary entry

There’s more beauty in the truth, even if it is dreadful beauty - John Steinbeck

It’s easy to guide a man’s strength when it’s impossible to resist it (momentum) - East of Eden

People told Vincent Van Gogh, ‘you can’t be a great painter, you only have one ear.’ You know what he said? ‘I can’t hear you.’

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful - William Morris

If the Indians can, we can - Meriweather Lewis

Wouldn’t it be nice is everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else - Amor Towles

What is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired? For kindness begins when necessity ends - The Lincoln Highway

It’s one of those things that people revere even when they’ve never had firsthand experience with it, like justice or jesus - Amor Towles

If all you see is funhouse mirrors you are going to get off course - JG

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex - Walden

The fault-finder will find fault even in paradise - Thoreau

Direct your right eye inward, and you’ll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be expert in home-cosmography -?

What danger is there if you don’t think of any? - Thoreau

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature - Thoreau

What are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of nations and generations. A man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a dollar but here are the golden words which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered - Walden

An abode without birds is like meat without seasoning - Walden

Man discovered new satellite moons to Neptune, but does not detect to what vagabond he is a satellite himself - Thoreau

The worker is endeavoring to solve the problem of livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself - Walden

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour - Henry David Thoreau

What a man thinks of himself dictates his fate - Walden

You never gain something but that you lose something -Thoreau

There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, nothing new happened, and best was a matter of dogma. But now the stream of our consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose. Some channel deepening seems to be called for -Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Respect was invented to cover the empty space where love should be - Nietzche

Learn to be a sponge if you want to capture love from an overflowing heart - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

There are no conditions of life in which man cannot become used to - Anna Karenina

The endeavors that most modern men saw as urgsent (appointment and catching of trains) probably could have waited, while those deemed frivolous (cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention - Gentlemen in Moscow

It is a fact of human life that one must eventually choose a philosophy…his had always been meteorological. He believed in the inevitable influence of clement and inclement weather; of early frosts and lingering summers, of fog and sunshine and snowfall. And he believed in the reshaping of destinies by the slightest change in the thermometer - Amor Towles

If patience wasn’t so easily tested, it would hardly be a virtue - Anna Karenina

Coins, crowns, and swords—that unholy trinity to which the common man was enslaved for the next one thousand years -Gentleman in Moscow

I want to get the texts but I don’t want to text back -JG

The arms of others either fall from your back or they weigh you down - The Prince (be authentically my style)

Injuries ought to be done all at one time so that being tasted less, they offend less. Benefits ought to be given little by little so that the flavor may last longer - Machiavelli

A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme - The Prince

Wisdom requires the knowing the details of life, and we become acquainted with those through experience -Aristotle

Wisdom is not a form of scientific knowledge or technical expertise. Wisdom is a truth-hitting, rational, action guiding disposition concerned with what’s good and bad - Aristotle

Character is a disposition to reliably make certain choices, and a choice is a desire shaped through deliberation -Aristotle

Truth, cher ami, is a collasial bore - Anna Karenina

Christ would never have said those words if he knew how they would be abused - Anna Karenina

Competition brings out the best in people…if you forget about the competition -Phil Knight

You will never live if you’re looking for the meaning of life - Albert Camus

When you sacrifice you life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry - Book of Five Rings

I think I actually like a speckled-ax best - Franklin after toiling for hours

Conservative early, liberal late - Gsreenlights

Catching greenlights is about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed and discipline. We can catch more green lights simply by identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then changing course. We can also engineer green lights - Matthew McConaughey

Every person is born into a pre-existing imagines order, and his desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths - Kanye

An important reason for having friends is that you can more easily contemplate virtues in action in people other than yourself - Aristotle

Yet see how elastic out stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them - Ishmael from Moby Dick

The measure of a man is how great the distance is between his understand and his action - Soren Kierkegaard

When you have a problem, make a list of everything that matters - Jamie Dimon

Once we are thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost; but it’s only here that the new and the good begins - War & Peace

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous - Pierre

The totality of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of a man. And the human mind takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause - War & Peace

A soldier on leave is un untucked shirt - JG

In yielding to the power of the circumstances and the people who were guiding him, he was not only doing nothing bad, but was doing something very, very important - War & Peace

A good commander not only does not need genius or any specific qualities, but on the contrary, needs the absence of the best and highest human qualities—love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that was he is doing is very important or else God forbid he should be a human being and come to love or pity someone - War & Peace

It would have been possible to find a better location, but he was once of those people who deliberately set themselves up in the most gloomy conditions of life, so as to have the right to be gloomy. For the same reason, they are always in a hurry and stubbornly busy. ‘How can I think about the happy side of human life, when, as you see, I’m sitting in a dirt shed and working.’ - War & Peace

Preaching alone was, of course, sufficient: the newness of truth endowed it with such special strength - War & Peace

If Prince Vassily had thought out his plans beforehand, he would not have had such naturalness in his dealings and such simplicity - War & Peace

Remember who you are - Mufasa

A man may be a pleasant companion when he always has dry clothes and meals at regular intervals, but the same cheery individual may seem a very different man on half rations eaten cold, having been drenched for three days - Kermit Roosevelt

The most tremendous trick of nature of all is the white silence… man trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot’s life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of god, of the universe comes over him - Call of the Wild

When a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane, he has put himself in danger - Rules of Civility

I can ride on now, I’ve got a pumpkin on each end of my bag! - Lincoln

Ambition can sometimes cheat a man out of his happiness - Bates

Just do the next right thing - Anna from Frozen 2

PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener - Mattis

I did not rely on the chain of command to bring all important issues to my attention…every Friday afternoon I would be at the club for happy hour - General Mattis

Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it - Aristotle

The attitude with which we approach the situation can determine our success or failure - Peyton Manning

Audacity with sound planning prevails - Mattis

Our minds and feelings are trained by the company we keep - Blaise Pascal

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it should be settled for us without our permission… we would like it less if the author came before the curtain every hour and forces us on the trouble of inventing the next act. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of limitations and things we do not like or expect - Heretics

Truth is stranger than fiction. Truth of course must of necessity be stranger than fiction, we we have made fiction to suit ourselves - Heretics

The rapidity with which one can completely change one’s ideas and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful - Endurance

Go get your mom, we won’t see a fire as cool as this one! - Thomas Edison as his lab went up in green and blue flames

To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively taped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing…what a tragedy if the moment finds them unprepared for what could have been their finest hour - Churchill

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality because they are in sprit fierce and free and therefore want things repeatedly and unchanged…while grown ups are not strong enough to exalt in monotony - Chesterton

If the standard changes, how can there be improvement? Therefore, there must be a standard - Orthodoxy

How can we conceive at once to be astonished by the world and yet at home in it? - G.K. Chesterton

Don’t let anyone tell me the courageous man is a man of principle. The courageous man is actually the man to put principle aside - Nassim Taleb

The mind will always take on order conforming to the order of whatever it concentrates on - Richard Foster

It is not fatigue simple as such that produces anger, weariness, and despair, but unexpected demands on a man already tired…let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it for a reasonable period—and let that reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last - Screwtape

No, I just jump and decide in the air - MJ

The art of a great teacher is to put things in ways in which you will remember even if you don’t understand them - Dallas Willard

Can it at any time be unjust for a person to live with all hear heart? - Augustine

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. - Marcus Aurelius

Your eyes show the strength of your soul - The Alchemist

A free curiosity has more force in our learning that a frightful enforcement - Augustine

I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us (what we truly mean, not words) why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? - C.S. Lewis

Humor, above 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 - Victor Frankel

If you open a window and make love to the world so to speak, your story will get pneumonia - Kurt Vonnegut

Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is dearly bought by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time - Elder Zosima

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol - Bible

The stupider, the more to the point. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest - Ivan Brothers Karamazov

Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed with everyone watching. Active love is a labor and perseverance - Brothers Karamazov

I would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days - Dimitris in Brothers Karamazov

There are some things you just can’t do casually - JG

A prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men and imitate those who have been most excellent - Machiavelli

The musical notes are only eight in number, but their melodies are so numerous one cannot hear them all. The primary colors are only five in number but their combinations are so infinite that one cannot visualize them all - Sun Tzu

The people have a mind to work - Nehemiah 4:6

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands at a moment of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge - MLK Jr

Follow the example of an ox that marches through the deep mire carrying a heavy load. He’s tired, but his steady gaze, looking forward, will never relax until he comes out of the mire - ?

A man is always looking down on things and people, and as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you - C.S. Lewis

Sow a thought and reap an act, sow and act and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a character, sow a character and reap a destiny - Upanishads

There comes a time when we even ask of Shakespeare or Taylor Swift “is this all?” - JG

The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the enlargement of understanding - Kant

It’s an act of faith to declare that the world is good because the evidence is ambivalent - Lex Fridman

Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving - Dostoevsky

Happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not the fleeting satisfaction awaiting at the next peak - ?

He whose life has a why can hear almost any how - Nietzsche

Place one foot in what you have mastered and understand, and the other in what you are currently exploring (chaos/order, yin/yang) - Jordan Peterson

The world is changed by your example, not your opinion - Paulo Coelho

Set aside a certain number of days during which you shall be content with the scantiest fare - Seneca

Life favors the specific ask and not the vague wish - ?

Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious - Tom Edison

Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts, worries, and pre-occupations on the page, we face our day we clearer eyes - Tim Ferriss

Learn things once and use them forever - Tim Ferriss

I can think, I can wait, I can fast - Siddhartha

In humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interest but each of you to the interests of others - Philippians 2:1-4

It’s not how much you cover, it’s how much you uncover - Dimitris

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashed across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every word of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power it brings. Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer - Robert Greene

Negative Capability, this is when a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - John Keats

There is nothing that becomes repetitive and boring more quickly than free expression that is not rooted in discipline - Martha Graham

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of ART to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what really exists lies unknown within us - Proust

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift - Einstein

Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so while extraordinarily marvelous, wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are religiously inclined, a gift from on high. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us does he not aggrieve us. But… genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build - Friedrich Nietzsche

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the ax - Abe Lincoln