“Beware of wisdom that you did not earn.” -Carl Jung
| “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.” |
| “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” |
| Lockean madman: Someone reasoning correctly from erroneous premises -Originated by Nassim Taleb |
| “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” |
| “The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” -Hunter S. Thompson |
| “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” – George Orwell |
| “A desire not to butt into other people’s business is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.” -Robert Heinlein |
| “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” -Juvenal, 1st century A.D. |
| “Aesthetics is an archetype of quality and, ultimately, of soul.” |
| “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” -Hunter S. Thompson |
| “But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” -Robert Heinlein, The Moon is A Harsh Mistress |
| “Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” — Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces |
| “And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.” -Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
| “The principle: If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.” -Nassim Taleb, Skin in The Game |
| “Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.” – Nassim Taleb, Antifragile |
| “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft |
| “Realize that sleeping on a futon when you’re 30 is not the worst thing. You know what’s worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you’re not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and a job you hate. You’ll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There’s no risk when you go after a dream. There’s a tremendous amount of risk to playing it safe.” -Bill Burr |
| “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” -Thomas Paine, The American Crisis |
| “This experiment has often been tried and has seldom failed. As a general rule, where circumstances do most for men, there man will do least for himself; and where man does least, he himself is least. His doing or not doing makes or unmakes him.” -Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men |
| “No matter how good a person you are, you are evil in someone’s story.” |
| “Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.” -Mark Manson |
| “In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.” Jean-Paul Sartre |
| “If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.” |
| “God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” -Voltaire |
| “The lesson taught at this point by human experience is simply this, that the man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down. Personal independence is a virtue and it is the soul out of which comes the sturdiest manhood. But there can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.” -Frederick Douglass |
| “Opportunity lays where responsibility has been abdicated.” |
| “I don’t need to tell you that I still advocate freedom of thought, etc. Nor do I see any sacredness in ritual. The matter is deeper than that…Everyone agrees that there are truly sacred principles in the Bible of the sort that need to be inculcated; but these principles, it so happens, are moral ones that can be espoused by any atheist too, so why inculcate them under the banner of religion? Precisely here, in my opinion, lies the crux of the matter. One can of course seek to formulate the noblest moral system without bringing the divine into it; this is what I’ve done all my life. Now, though, I’m convinced that it’s more correct to treat ethical fundamentals as connected with superhuman mystery…I’ll go even further: the pathos of religion, in and of itself, is needed. I’m not sure it can be rekindled in anyone’s soul – perhaps, like musical pitch, it’s an innate trait that few people are born with. Still, if it were possible to create a generation of believers, I’d be pleased.” -Vladimir Jabotinsky |
| “Something freely given has no value.” |
| “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.” -Sun Tzu |
| “MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.” Ernest Shackleton |
| “Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” |
| “Figuring things out for yourself is all the freedom you really have.” Starship Troopers |
| “Man has gone out to explore other worlds without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.” – Stanislaw Lem, Solaris |
| “The obedient always think about themselves as virtuous, rather than cowardly”-Robert Anton Wilson |
| “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” —T. S. ELiot |
| “We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.” —F. A. Hayek |
| “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.” —Joseph A. Schumpeter |
| “Genius is often just persistence in disguise.” |
| “Behind mountains are more mountains. One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles.” |