Quotes

A collection of quotes I find interesting.

• “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

  — Bob Dylan, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

• “When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal!”

  — Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

• “If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.”

  — Miles Davis

• “You have to be in a state of play to design. If you’re not in a state of play, you can’t make anything.”

  — Paula Scher

• “Never be looking so hard for something that you fail to see what is there.”

• “Paths are made by walking.”

  — Franz Kafka

• “A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse.”

• “There are no solutions; only tradeoffs.”

  — Thomas Sowell

• “Anyone could learn LISP in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.”

  — Marvin Minsky

• “The art of doing mathematics is finding that special case that contains all the germs of generality.”

  — David Hilbert

• “Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.”

  — Alan Perlis

• “Boredom is the root of all evil―the despairing refusal to be oneself.”

  — Soren Kierkegaard

• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

  — Carl Jung

• “Keep killing your ideas until they cannot be killed. If you never kill your ideas, you’ll kill your career.”

  — Garin Nugroho

• “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”

• “By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems.”

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• “Startups are interdisciplinary research projects.”

  — Conor White-Sullivan

• “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise…”

  — Bertrand Russell

• “Simplicity is complexity which has been crushed into a diamond.”

  — Iian Neill

• “As in the evolution of living species, each intervening step must be a viable organism.”

  — Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything - How New Ideas Emerge

• “Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.”

  — Isaac Newton

• “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”

  — Samuel Johnson

• “If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures”

  — Musonius Rufus

• “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

• “The mind must be given relaxation—it will rise improved and sharper after a good break”

  — Seneca

• “In a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together.”

  — David Bohm

• “Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wild flowers…the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

  — George Orwell, 1938

• “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”

  — C.S. Lewis

• “Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

  — Gilles Deleuze

• “Love and work... work and love, that's all there is.”

  — Sigmund Freud

• “New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.”

  — George Lakoff

• “Where your attention goes, your time goes.”

  — Idowu Koyenikan

• “Man is a Tool-using Animal. Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half-square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs, lest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.”

  — Thomas Carlyle

• “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.”

  — Seneca

• “Follow your arrow wherever it points.”

  — Kacey Musgraves

• “Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy.”

  — Elisabeth Elliot

• “There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

• “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is.”

  — Yogi Berra

• “Curiosity, rigor, slightly obsessional perfectionism, being able to identify important questions. To be a good scientist you have to indulge in a degree of lateral or creative thinking, in terms of constructing new questions. I normally say that a mark of a good scientist is the quality of questions they ask. So that would be the hallmark of a good scientist for me: asking questions that no-one has asked before.”

  — Karl Friston

• “Be wary of those who use charm as a substitute for competence.”

  — Hugh O'Neill

• “It is structure that we look for whenever we try to understand anything. All science is built upon this search...”

  — Linus Pauling

• “I especially don't trust people who don't write things down. With those who do, I'm very interested in what they write things in. If it's one of those chic little Fifth Avenue notebooks with those expensive gold pencils, I'm more suspicious than ever.”

  — Stanley Kubrick

• “To ask the right question is harder than answering it.”

  — Georg Cantor

• “Physics is the law. Everything else is a recommendation.”

  — Elon Musk

• “Let our theories die in our stead.”

  — Karl Popper

• “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual”

  — Galileo Galilei

• “Everything around me was someone's lifework.”

  — Gordon Brander

• “Those who play for safety cease to be truly human, for human beings are made in the image of God.”

  — William Barclay

• “Teach principles not formulas.”

  — Richard Feynman

• “All models are wrong but some are useful”

  — George Box

• “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

  — Henry Ford

• “The art of doing mathematics is finding that special case that contains all the germs of generality.”

  — David Hilbert

• “So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “Talk is often a substitute for action.”

• “To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small.”

  — Jordan Peterson

• “He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.”

  — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

• “Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool.”

  — Seneca

• “He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

  — Seneca

• “To things which you bear with impatience you should accustom yourself, and, by habit you will bear them well.”

  — Seneca

• “It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it.”

  — Seneca

• “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”

  — Seneca

• “Just keep in mind: the more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

  — Epictetus

• “Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.”

  — Seneca

• “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

  — Epicurus

• “The Fates guide the person who accepts them and hinder the person who resists them.”

  — Cleanthes

• “Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.”

  — Seneca

• “Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.”

  — Marcus Aurelius

• “Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share.”

  — Ginni Rometty

• “The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strengths.”

  — Epictetus

• “Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.”

  — Marcus Aurelius

• “We should always be asking ourselves - is this something that is, or is not, in my control?”

  — Epictetus, Enchiridion

• “Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of: that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”

  — Ryan Holiday

• “It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”

  — Seneca

• “Passions stem from frustrated desires.”

  — Marcus Aurelius

• “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”

  — John Milton

• “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

  — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

• “With every accident, ask yourself what abilities you have for making a proper use of it. If you see an attractive person, you will find that self-restraint is the ability you have against your desire. If you are in pain, you will find fortitude. If you hear unpleasant language, you will find patience. And thus habituated, the appearances of things will not hurry you away along with them.”

  — Epictetus

• “Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.”

  — Epictetus

• “You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Nero’s shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, ’Appear by all means.’ And when Florus inquired, ’But why do not you appear?’ he answered, ’Because I do not even consider the question.’ For the man who has once stooped to consider such questions, and to reckon up the value of external things, is not far from forgetting what manner of man he is.”

  — Epictetus

• “A problem well-stated is a problem half solved.”

  — Charles Kettering

• “Knowledge isn't free. You have to pay attention.”

  — Richard Feynman

• “Shortcuts make long delays.”

• “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

  — Theodore Roosevelt

• “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

  — Richard Feynman

• “I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? 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.”

  — Annie Dillard

• “There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”

  — C.S. Lewis

• “Understanding a question is half an answer.”

  — Socrates

• “Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”

  — Nikola Tesla

• “Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.”

  — Errett Bishop

• “Goals are not the end. Goals are the means to the end of character.”

  — Primeagen

• “When an archer is shooting for fun He has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle He is already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold He goes blind Or sees two targets – He is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, But the prize divides him. He cares He thinks more of winning Than of shooting – And the need to win Drains him of power.”

• “Necessity is the mother of invention and constraints are the father of creativity.”

  — David Shapiro, I think

• “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”

  — Winston Churchill

• “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

  — Theodore Roosevelt

• “Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself.”

  — George Bernard Shaw

• “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

  — Andre Gide

• “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

  — James Baldwin

• “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

  — William James

• “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

  — Henry David Thoreau

• “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”

  — Thomas Jefferson / John Philpot Curran

• “I can't base what I'm gonna be off of what everybody isn't.”

  — Shawn Carter / Jay-Z

• “Being competent is just more fun.”

  — DHH

• “To chop wood fast, you have to first chop wood slowly.”

• “Shall I tell you, my friend, how you will come to understand it? Go and write a book upon it.”

  — Henry Home, Lord Kames

• “The road to hell often feels like heaven and the road to heaven often feels like hell.”

• “Make decisions that make you proud of yourself today and proud of yourself tomorrow.”

• “Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships. Happiness, maturity, and even enlightenment require rejecting the untruth of emotional reasoning and learning instead to question our feelings. The feelings themselves are real, and sometimes they alert us to truths that our conscious mind has not noticed, but sometimes they lead us astray.”

  — Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

• “Copywriting is design”

  — Jason Fried

• “There is no bad weather, only bad clothes”

  — German saying

• “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”

  — William Gibson

• “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

  — Alan Kay

• “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”

  — Mark Twain

• “The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations. They think ahead and create their mental picture and then go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this bit and that bit, but steadily building, steadily building.”

  — Robert Collier

• “Young folks don't know that if you move too fast you'll finish too early and leave behind a big mess.”

  — Some random on a Primeagen stream

• “A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.”

  — Edward DeBono

• “Fortunately, I didn’t know any experts and so I did it anyway, so this sort of thing happens. I think, maybe, just don’t listen to the experts too much and do what makes sense. Solve your problem.”

  — Dwayne Richard Hipp, The Untold Story of SQLite

• “Technology is any knowledge that has been embodied to reliably cause a new physical transformation.”

  — Nivi

• “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

  — Frank Herbert, Dune

• “It doesn't matter how you start building. It matters that you're building and solving real problems.”

  — Theo Browne

• “Your margin is my opportunity.”

  — Jeff Bezos

• “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

  — John Adams

• “You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

  — Carl Jung

• “I think hope is the virtue that sits between the vices of optimism and pessimism. And it's the view that things could be better if we are willing to make them so. And I think we can.”

  — Yuval Levin

• “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

  — Theodore Roosevelt

• “The properties commonly ascribed to any object are, in last analysis, names for its behavior.”

  — Judson Herrick

• “There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.”

  — Jordan Peterson

• “Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.”

• “A 'system' is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it.”

  — W. Ross Ashby

• “What Homo knows at any moment, of the actual future is absolutely nothing.”

  — W. Ross Ashby

• “To think is to act — inside the brain.”

  — W. Ross Ashby

• “The brain has no brain inside to guide it.”

  — W. Ross Ashby

• “Whether a computer can be 'really' intelligent is not a question for the philosophers: they know nothing about either computers or intelligence.”

  — W. Ross Ashby

• “Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do and, even if their genius is unrecognized in their lifetime, the essential earthly reward is always theirs, the certainty that their work is good and will stand the test of time. One suspects that the geniuses will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven—if, indeed, they ever make it; they have had their reward.”

  — W. H. Auden

• “[Comtemplative prayer is] to find the place in you where you are here and now being created by God.”

  — Thomas Merton

• “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general Favor; a long Habit of not thinking a Thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of Custom. But the Tumult soon subsides. Time makes more Converts than Reason.”

  — Thomas Paine, Common Sense

• “He Whom God shall make manifest is indeed the Primal Veil of God. Above this Veil ye can find nothing other than God, while beneath it ye can discern all things emanating from God. He is the Unseen, the Inaccessible, the Most Exalted, the Best Beloved.”

  — The Báb

• “Say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.”

  — Thomas Jefferson

• “All the worst ideas are French.”

  — David Starkey

• “Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

  — Donald Knuth, Foreword to A=B

• “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.”

  — Emerson Pugh

• “... it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, ... to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently...”

  — Noam Chomsky

• “The more we reduce ourselves to machines in the lower things, the more force we shall set free to use in the higher.”

  — Anna Brackett, The Technique of Rest

• “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

  — Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “It is not difficult to conjecture that the only 'real' law which drives physics is the 'law' that the universe must be explicable.”

  — Alexei Nesteruk, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.2277

• “The universe is a self-excited circuit... giving rise to the observer who gives meaning to the universe.”

  — John Archibald Wheeler

• “It from bit.”

  — John Archibald Wheeler

• “Information is a difference that makes a difference.”

  — Gregory Bateson

• “To put it saucily: information theory is something like the logarithm of probability theory. In early modern times the logarithm simplified multiplication into addition which was more accessible to calculation. Today, information theory transforms many quantities of probability theory into quantities which allow simpler bookkeeping. More seriously, information theory is one of the most universal concepts with applications in computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry and other fields. It allows a lucid and transparent analysis of many systems and provides a framework to study and compare seemingly different systems using the same language and notions.”

  — Daniel Polani

• “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

  — Herbert Simon

• “Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn”

  — Herbert Simon

• “My father’s advice — 'if you want an interesting life, bloody well go out and get one' — was good.”

  — Frederick Forsyth

• “If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be called research.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

  — Frank Herbert

• “What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

  — Andy Warhol

• “Your life is what you pay attention to.”

  — Catherine Price

• “An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.”

  — Sun Tzu

• “People don't have ideas. Ideas have people”

  — maybe Carl Jung

• “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”

  — Albert Einstein, in response to One Hundred Authors Against Einstein

• “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

  — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

• “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

  — Donald Knuth

• “When it's between you sweating and the silicon sweating, let the silicon sweat.”

  — Isaac Rubinstein

• “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

  — Albert Einstein

• “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

  — Cory Doctorow

• “An organization is the vector sum of the people within it.”

  — paraphrasing Elon Musk

• “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

  — Charlie Munger

• “A few lines of reasoning can change how we see the world.”

  — Steven Landsburg

• “Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.”

  — Lionel Robbins

• “Politeness and familiarity breed access.”

  — Jim DiOreo (sp?)

• “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

  — Mary Oliver

• “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

  — Mary Oliver

• “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

  — Lewis Carroll