Category Archives: Quotes

Today's quote of the day is from this well-written review of a memoir about the author's mother dying:

The literature on dying is rife with measured words, gallantry, sage advice. This is good. But we all harbor an inner 2-year-old: naturally stubborn and easily frightened, with no recourse in the face of unfathomable hurt but to stamp our feet and wail.

Or just cry. The 2-year-old is within us all.

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I've stayed prolific on Twitter. Below are some other quotes I've posted there, and below are the fold are the rest of my recent tweets (140 character max) from the past couple months.

• "Sarah Palin has been tagged and released back into the wild." – Jon Stewart
• "Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them." – Paul Graham
• "Mutual understanding and the human touch are in inverse relationship to frequency of encounter and kinship." Yi Tuan: http://cli.gs/DEEygq
• "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." – George Washington Carver   
• "Many people seem to find it relatively easy to find a state of mind where they can 'honestly' say whatever is in their interest to say." – Robin Hanson
• "Why is it admirable for scientists to love science and businessmen to love biz, but political candidates must [say they] hate politics?" MK
• "Because we are also what we've lost" — Amores Perros
• "Libertarians never die — they just walk off alone…" – David Zetland, from his good reflections of being a postdoc: http://cli.gs/qZYdqL
• "Even a happy life cannot be w/o a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness." – Carl Jung
• "The religious people who live the longest are ones who attend services most frequently rather than feel their beliefs most deeply."
• "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday." 
• "Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we would move the stars to pity."- Flaubert on writing 
• "Sincerity with a motive." – essayist Lewis Hyde on the phenom when the emperor declares *himself* to have no clothes.
• "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." – Mike Tyson, on risk management
• "Have u heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles r lost in the same spirit in which they r won."
• "It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust." – ever-wise Samuel Johnson, on trust
• "Progress is measured by [making] ourselves better than we were in the past rather than by increased proximity to a goal." – Kuhn
• "Man never really grows up, he just learns how to act in public." – Krishna, commenting on my blog post on true colors emerge in tough times
• "If you were in a position of authority on September 11, then every day since has been September 12." – Sec State Condi Rice
• "People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences." – Malcolm Gladwell
• "My goals in life: To love, be loved, and never stop learning." – Tim Ferriss. That's pretty damn good. Those are mine, tho I would add happiness.
• "We will learn an enormous amount in a very short time, quite a bit in the medium term, and absolutely nothing in the long term." On $ crisis
• "The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable." – Martin Buber
•  “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
• "A weakness is any activity that leaves you feeling weaker after you do it." – Marcus Buckingham, one of the few gurus I respect / read
• "When everyone sees Opportunity; they are only seeing the reflection. True Opportunity appears at the market bottom, not at the top." Peter Rip

Continue reading “Quote of the Day & Recent Tweets”

"If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.

There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.

Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t."

— Christopher Alexander (via Gretchen)

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."

— Father Dennis Edward O’Brien, USMC

(hat tip to Eliezer Yudkowsky who interestingly included this under "Quotes on Rationality.")