Quotes

Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.

My end is not simple happiness. My need, drive, and desire is to achieve my full and complete self. If I do what I have come to do, if I create the life I was made for, then happiness will follow. The problem in motivation is not the dedication and effort and sacrifice needed to get what we want, it is knowing what it is we could and must want to begin with.

It becomes me against me. My will in a duel with my mind and my body. A contest with that part of myself who wants to stop.

Live if you will a life without risk. Avoid the forge, the fire, the flame. But know that joy and happiness and the good life come only as unexpected interludes in the endless, stressful, tense, and restless journey to become the person you are.

Tengo ganas de no tener ganas.

Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.

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

…Dawn rose up in her golden robe from ocean’s tides, bringing light to immortal gods and mortal men…

Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

When primal Dawn spread on the eastern sky her fingers of pink light…

Don’t try to see what all the colors look like when they’re added up. Instead, try to get into as many (revealing) moods as possible, as many ways of responding to the sacred as you can — and this life of serial resonances with the sacred is ultimately a kind of contentedness, happiness, even joy.

Your bad habits can kill you. I’ve seen that. But your good habits won’t save you.

It almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa… Often the sweeter the first fruit of habit, the more bitter are its later fruits.

Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for change as much as those who are doing badly.

Your “new and improved” can easily become their “what the fuck?” when it is dumped on them as a surprise.

Belief is easier than disbelief; we believe instinctively, but disbelief requires a conscious effort.

I’ve met so many people in my career that “just want to build cool stuff.” That’s what I want too! But I’ve expanded my definition of “cool stuff” so that it encompasses some notion of having an impact.

A cat that dreams of becoming a lion must lose its appetite for rats.

Everyone suddenly became an action figure this week. Same style. Same poses. Same idea. What’s interesting isn’t the trend itself, but what it reveals. Tools like ChatGPT amplify your thinking, but if the thinking’s not there, all you’ll get is noise dressed up as novelty. AI isn’t a threat to creativity. It’s a threat to those without it.

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially the vain or important, cannot learn at all.

I’ve long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn’t that AI can do your job – it’s that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

It’s a confusing experience. It’s like I need to get somewhere and I can either walk, or jump on this spaceship that travels at 900mph, but its controls are half in Hungarian and half in Ancient Greek. With enough trial and error I can probably get the spaceship to take me to my destination, but that’s a lot of work in itself and at the end of the day I’m left wondering if I should have just walked.

There are more song-birds at the edges of forests than in the middle.

Arson was our internet.

Energy must be added to a physical system to preserve order.

The lion, the tiger, and the elephant may be greater in size, strength, and speed, but a wolf will never perform in the circus.

Only when how you do a thing surpasses the thing you are doing can you break through the barriers to these levels of consciousness, your own inner depths.

There is always a risk that the bird’s-eye view is so grand and sweeping as to induce delusions of omnipotence.

Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.

Making public commitments “freezes” attitudes in place. So saying something dumb makes you a bit dumber. It becomes harder to correct yourself. Tweeters beware.

And that will be the story of you.

No one is coming to save you, the life you want is on the other side of the work you are avoiding.

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

The misery (and I am confident it is real) stems from the same source in every case: they traded the ability to be honest, with themselves and with others, for institutional position that turned out not to be stable. That’s a worse deal than most actual crimes.

The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you’re smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there’s no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you’ll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they’ll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.

Confidence is critical for a great competitor, but overconfidence is brittle. We are too smart for ourselves in such moments. We sense our mortality like a cancer beneath the bravado, and when things start to go out of control, there is little real resilience to fall back on.

The extremity of the investment dictates the extremity of the rhetoric.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

When you decide what to consume, you ask: “What do I want?”. When you decide what to produce, you ask: “What do other people want me to do?”. The former is a lot more individuating than the latter.

Software development is a creative field. It has more in common with filmmaking than it does with bridge building.

An awareness of history directly counteracts the ill effects of overexcited pop culture.

A really bad idea, embraced by millions of people, is still a really bad idea.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It’s a terrible fight and it’s between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it — that’s why societies often rub out truly enlightened beings.

“Age verification” means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry’s fondest dream, a world where it’s literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!