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

Rumi

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

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

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

Mark Twain

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

Winston Churchill

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

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

Hegel

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Replace pure by applied mathematics, logic by computer programming, architecture by engineering, history by sociology. The result will be a new generation of well-informed philistines, whose charmlessness will undo every advantage which their learning might otherwise have conferred.

Roger Scruton

Great minds discuss ideas; mediocre minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Premium mediocre minds discuss bitcoin

Venkatesh Rao

A zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they've forgotten their aim.

Andy Hunt (agile manifesto)

Be the hero of your life, not the victim; no longer choose a life that looks good over a life that feels good. Give up on some goals so you can care about others. Be honest even if that means you aren't universally liked.

Paraphrased from an article on Thought Catalog by Brianna Wiest, November 16th 2017

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

Margaret Atwood - The Globe and Mail, January 13, 2018

Life is our reaction to the basic insecurity which constitutes its substance. Hence it is an extremely serious matter for a man to find himself too much surrounded by apparent securities. A consciousness of securities kills life.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

Ernest Hemingway