Alright Jack Donaghy, follow your heart: Hard Equations and Rational Thinking – Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock
No rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete – Cal Newport
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
If you would like to know how to recognize a prophet, look to him who gives you the knowledge of your own heart. – Persian saying
In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you. — Hindu saying that Steve Jobs was fond of (as read in Appletopia)
Old pond…
A frog leaps in
Water’s sound
-Matsuo Basho
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
—John Donne
I’m like my mother: I stereotype, it’s faster. — George Clooney, Up in the Air
Knowledge is limitless. Therefore, there is a minuscule difference between those who know a lot and those who know very little. — Leo Tolstoy
It is time to leave our comfortable rooms, every corner of which we know, and venture forth into eternity — Rilke
when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. — Why the lucky stiff
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ― Rainer Maria Rilke.
Make the body capable of doing many things. This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God. – Spinoza, paraphrased by Huxley in The Island
As Balzac says, there goes another novel — Woody Allen in Annie Hall
…to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. — Victor Frankl
We have one party with two wings which represents 4% of the population — Gore Vidal
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. — Vladimir Nabokov
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. — George Orwell
Here is an ongoing collection of my favorite quotes.