A few words of wisdom
Quote Archive
“Never waste a journey.”
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
“Never waste a journey.”
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”
“Conscious awareness is a post hoc report of what is going on in your head.”
“Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.”
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.”
“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness.”
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
“Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.”
“Trial and error will always be a part of how any organization solves a complex, ever-shifting problem.”
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“Unfortunately, our ability to learn from information hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation.”
“We tend to give too much credit to whichever clever person is standing nearby at the right moment.”
“Intelligence selectively destroys information to create knowledge.”
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
“Our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.”
“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”
“To make anything interesting you simply have to look at it long enough.”
“And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”
“Nothing is 100% ‘unique.’ Language purists be damned: uniqueness is a matter of degree.”
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
“No one is smart enough to invent anything in isolation that anyone else would want to use.”
“Trial and error is a tremendously powerful process for solving problems in a complex world, while expert leadership is not.”
“There’s an extreme kind of conformity to all the non-conformity. You realize that in all this rebellion, everyone’s doing the same thing.”
“Plans are nothing, planning is everything.”
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
“Our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.”
“Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.”
“We are suffering not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing pains of over-rapid changes.”
“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”
“Never waste a journey.”
“Conscious awareness is a post hoc report of what is going on in your head.”
“Insight doesn’t happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.”
“There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”
“When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it. When a story is plausible, we often assume it’s true.”
“The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.”
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The more there is to hear, the less we listen.”
“Something only becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don’t particularly care.”
“The progress of science, with its dazzling success at explaining and manipulating the world, shows that knowledge of the universe is possible, albeit always probabilistic and subject to revision.”
“Real people don’t deal with uncertainty by carefully evaluating all of the relevant information. They stink at statistics and rarely maximize utility. Instead, their choices depend on a long list of mental short cuts and intemperate emotions, which often lead them to pick the wrong options.”
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
“Thinking without doing is of little value or consequence… but a bias toward just “doing” doesn’t necessarily promote precise thinking.”
“The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals. Once triggered by a propitious moment, an emotion triggers the cascade of subgoals and sub-subgoals that we call thinking and acting.”
“Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.”
“We are suffering not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing pains of over-rapid changes.”
“Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs.”
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
“The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.”
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
“If you were an alien encountering humans for the first time, you’d have to assume that the laughing served as the primary communication method, with spoken words as an afterthought.”
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
“More often than not, curiosity is mere vanity. We only want to know something in order to talk about it.”
“If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory.”
“Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.”