A particularly fertile month, quotes-wise. I was in a Rilke reading binge…what a writer.
When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. – Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
After innumerable times hearing some friend or writer praise this book, I finally began to read it. They were right.
Every good anime just has to have a sword that defies the laws of mass – Ben on YT, re: Rurouni Kenshin
Great anime. Attack on Titan is another great one, and a wildly creative concept.
I have three treasures I cherish and hold dear: the first is love, the second is moderation, the third is humility. With love one is fearless. With moderation one is abundant. With humility one can fill the highest position. – 道德经
Reading the Tao Te Ching fills me with peace.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. – Henry David Thoreau
Philosophy should be a set of tools and paths to understanding how to live. We have moved far away from that, just as we have moved far away from seeing food as a way to nourish the body.
The Internet allows any two individuals to transfer data without permission from any central authority. Bitcoin does the same for value – Naval Ravikant
Chris Dixon said: you should pay attention to where “smart energy” is moving. Naval is that, personified.
It doesn’t get any easier, you just get faster – Greg Lemond
Hat tip to Patrick Collison.
Moore’s Law is really about people’s belief system, it’s not a law of physics, it’s about human belief, and when people believe in something, they’ll put energy behind it to make it come to pass. – Kevin Kelly
From What Technology Wants…a book that is re-organizing how I think about technology, its evolution and its role in society. I’d like to have a long chat with Kevin someday.
There might be tens of thousands of people who conceive the possibility of the same invention at the same time.
But less than one in ten of them imagines how it might be done.
Of these who see how to do it, only one in ten will actually think through the practical details and specific solutions.
Of these only one in ten will actually get the design to work for very long.
And finally, usually only one of all those many thousands with the idea will get the invention to stick in the culture.
-Danny Hillis via What Technology Wants
The book is filled with gems as the above.
In physical talents he was a pauper when he started; by grace of his intellect he is incomparably the richest of all the animals now. But he is still a pauper in morals — incomparably the poorest of the creatures in that respect. The gods value morals alone; they have paid no compliments to intellect, nor offered it a single reward. If intellect is welcome anywhere in the other world, it is in hell, not heaven. – Mark Twain
The power of great writers: what they say may not be true, but how they say it is so beautiful that you are compelled to believe.
And the rest is Rilke, sans commentary:
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you. – Rainer Maria Rilke
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. – Rainer Maria Rilke
what do the contours of your body mean,
laid out like the lines on a hand,
so that I no longer see them except as fate?
-Rainer Maria Rilke in Requiem for a Friend