November 05 2024
Tags: quotes

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad.

17th Century -- imagined ref. from antiquity


March 30 2024

Yesterday I was so clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Rumi


March 20 2024

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.

Kurt Vonnegut


March 12 2024

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do.

Anton Chekhov


February 26 2024

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

Mark Twain


December 28 2023

There is a precipice on either side of you: a precipice of caution and a precipice of overdaring.

Winston Churchill


December 28 2023

How did you go bankrupt? Gradually, and then suddenly.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises


December 28 2023

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.

George Best


December 12 2023
Tags: quotes

We live in a packaging culture that despises content.

Jodie foster


November 18 2023
Tags: books

"A book is not just a collection of pages; it's a passport to other worlds, a time machine, and a lifelong companion."

books


November 16 2023

The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse.

David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.


October 23 2023

Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable.

Attributed to 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke


July 14 2023

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read? and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you dont know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan


May 18 2023
Tags: quotes

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order -- willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life


May 07 2023
Tags:
The ethos behind Quotebacks is one of the reasons why I love the product. Yes, its a great addition to my thinking toolkit, allowing me to store quotes without polluting my note-taking and thinking system. But its also a tool which aims at making the Internet a more generous place. If you regularly write online, give it a try!

April 07 2023

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Essays in Aesthetics (1966)


December 14 2022

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.

Einstein


December 03 2022

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read

Mark Twain


November 17 2021

Communities form around shared beliefs, and communities can provide benefits to their members even when those beliefs are wrong.

Communities can feel threatened when those beliefs are questioned. I am a heretic. I value the pursuit of truth over the benefits of community. That is offensive to some people.

Douglas Crockford - How Javascript Works


November 16 2021

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Hegel


September 25 2021

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, the wise as false, and the rulers as useful.

Seneca


September 18 2021
Tags:

The donkey told the tiger, "The grass is blue."

The tiger replied, "No, the grass is green ." The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the issue to arbitration, so they approached the lion.....

lion and ass


August 22 2021
Tags: UK

Indeed. The UK now resembles nothing so much as a retired soldier in imbecile dotage, boring all comers with increasingly-embellished tales of former glories, while handing power of attorney to conmen who want only to steal the paintings off the walls before the house falls down.

Comment in theguardian.com to Global Britain exposed as impotent and friendless by Afghanistan


March 28 2021
Tags:

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr

to wit: a Great Truth is one whose negation is also a Great Truth.


March 20 2021
Tags:

Your retirement fund won't save your sanity, and LARP*ing Aurelian stoicism (a popular genre of Adulting) won't make life worth living.

Venkatesh Rao

*Live Action Role-play