Great Quotes

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

Madness is the result not of uncertainty but of certainty.

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Action produces information.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

My how the days go, always full of something, something beautiful, if you’re paying close enough attention.

Philosophy is a largely a matter of solving problems created by philosophy.

In the Left Hemisphere world the future is a fantasy under our control. And all will be well because we’ll be able to solve all the problems we’re just now creating.

You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.

We will need to embrace continual mistake-making and correcting…nature’s learning process. We will need to surrender the personal need for control…that resides in all of us.

Nature does not hurry. Yet everything is accomplished.

If I need things to be a certain way, I’m held hostage by them.

Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.

People return to the part of the song they love. That’s what keeps them coming back.

The ear goes to the irritant.

Attention is a moral act...and attention changes the world. If you attend to it in a certain way, you see certain things. If you attend in another way you see quite different things and therefore attention helps, our consciousness helps, to bring into existence the experiential world, which is the only world that we can ever know.

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…the span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.

AI takes abundance to infinity, and Meta is the purest play of all.

I don’t have to be right. I just want to be the least wrong.

We now see from Beethoven's notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and, to a degree, selected them out of disparate beginnings…The artist who separates less rigorously, liking to rely on his imitative memory, can in some circumstances become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging.

Everyone is jealous of what you’ve got. No one is jealous of how you got it.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

“My ideological framework had been, ‘What’s the next step? How do I make my gaming PC better? How do I upgrade it?’” he told me. “But then I just had this light bulb moment where I said, ‘Next step doesn’t matter. What’s the last step?’ And that flipped my thinking upside down, because it allowed me to think in just a totally different way about the problem. And I immediately concluded, ‘Oh, it’s virtual reality. It’s the ability to literally feel like you’re inside of a game, as real as the real world. That’s the real purpose of all of this. The next step might be eight monitors instead of six, but the last step is virtual reality. That’s what I’m going to do.’”

We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.

Market breadth is an expression of confidence (and vice versa).

Seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly.

Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.

In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.

A genius is the one most like himself.

Do not envy success that does not reproduce well.

There is a texture to attention. (like sandpaper…course-grained to fine-grained)

The categorization of things really limits us.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

Limitation creates possibilities.

Every important thing we've done has been misunderstood.

Pessimism can spark an idea. Annoyance can drive ingenuity. Disappointment can redirect effort towards change. But creativity requires optimism.

Don’t let the critic become bigger than the creator.

It doesn’t follow that just because everything is available, that everything of value is understood.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy — this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality — these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris's world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

The more you know, the more humble you become.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

The reason the world felt like a better place during your childhood is because you were a child.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Crypto is the substrate that computers use to pay each other.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.

We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.

The pessimist criticizes, the optimist creates.

Time heals what reason cannot.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.

The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown.

“Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.

The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The opportunity cost of reading a newsletter is higher than the price of a subscription.

One deserves what one allows.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

Children spell love T-I-M-E.

Our satisfactory results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions – that would be about one every five years.

One is lucky to find just four good investment opportunities at any given time.

Excluding our top 15 or so investments across 70+ years of investing would give us an unremarkable track record.

Ironically enough, the aggregate of profits accruing from this [GEICO] investment decision far exceeded the sum of all the others realized through 20 years of wide-ranging operations…. Are there morals to this story of value to the intelligent investor? ...[One] is that one lucky break, or one supremely shrewd decision – can we tell them apart? – may count for more than a lifetime of journeyman efforts.

Cycles can be reframed as volatile periods around a relatively consistent adoption curve.

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

Most technology is deterministic. A.I. is probabilistic.

Natural order is deterministic. Social order is probabilistic.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Envy is the tax which all distinctions must pay.

It’s hard to get really depressed until your dreams come true. Once your dreams come true and you realize you feel the same way you did before then you get a feeling of hopelessness.

By the time we’ve made it, we’ve had it.

We had about the same amount of fun all the way through. We’re having fun now.

A young man knows the rules. An old man knows the exceptions.

It was never easy. And it’s harder now.

I don’t want to be any more of a guru to people than I already am. It’s getting hard out there.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end…but we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Freedom is the right to say “no”.

You can’t be spontaneous within reason.

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.

The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

We are the masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.

I never understand anything until I have written about it.

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.

A problem well-put is half-solved

I know a lot of people with rings who aren’t champions.

Two of my rules for life: [1] The person that has the most fun wins; [2] the climb is the fun part.

Cloud computing infrastructure is akin to giving every tinkerer in past technological revolutions access to immediately scalable and inexpensive textile mills, steam engines, steel furnaces, moving assembly lines, and microprocessors. Providing the masses the freedom to experiment unlocks the potential of technological breakthroughs in ways that was simply not possible in past technological revolutions.

For any innovator, business, or problem solver, the sum of all human knowledge is only a smartphone away. The implication of this level of connectivity to this depth of knowledge is only just beginning to be realized.

We have gone from thinking that self esteem comes from achievement to thinking that achievement comes from self esteem.

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

The Virtue of Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.

Work as if you were to live 100 years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.

One today is worth two tomorrows.

He that would catch fish must venture his bait.

To be proud of virtue is to poison yourself with the antidote.

When a friend deals with a friend, let the bargain be clear and well penn’d, that they may continue friends to the end.

The honest man takes pains, and then enjoys pleasures; the knave takes pleasure, and then suffers pains.

Where there is hunger, law is not regarded, and where law is not regarded, there will be hunger.

Most fools think they are only ignorant.

Proportion your charity to the strength of your estate, or God will proportion your estate to the weakness of your charity.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Vice knows she’s ugly, so puts on her mask.

Pardoning the bad is injuring the good.

A wise man will desire no more than what he may get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully and leave contentedly.

Liberality is not giving much, but giving wisely.

He that doth what he should not shall feel what he would not.

When sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

A long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander Time, for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.

Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.

A change of fortune hurts a wise man no more than a change of the moon.

‘Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

The good or ill hap of a good or ill life is the good or ill choice of a good or ill wife.

Great estates may venture more; little boats must keep near shore.

If your riches are yours, why don’t you take them with you to t’other world?

If worldly goods cannot save me from death, they ought not hinder me of eternal life.

I never saw an oft-transplanted tree, Nor yet an oft-removed family, That throve so well as those that settled be.

Calamity and prosperity are the touchstones of integrity.

The wise and brave dares own that he was wrong.

The Golden Age never was the present age.

Reading makes a full man — meditation a profound man — discourse a clear man.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

Since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.

The ancients tell us what is best, but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.

Many a man would have been worse if his estate had been better.

Pray don’t burn my house to roast your eggs.

He that speaks much is much mistaken.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself a slave to it.

Forewarned, forearmed.

Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor liberty to purchase power.

Read much, but not too many books.

Diligence is the mother of good luck.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Success has ruined many a man.

Many have quarreled about religion, that never practiced it.

If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.

That behaves best which has grown gradually.

Whatever’s begun in anger ends in shame.

What one relishes, nourishes.

Lost time is never found again.

He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.

Full of courtesy, full of craft.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

There is no little enemy.

He’s the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.

The things which hurt, instruct.

Many complain of their memory, few of their judgement.

Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden; it is forbidden because it is hurtful.

Learn of the skillful. He that teaches himself hath a fool for his master.

What signifies knowing the names, if you know not the nature of things?

Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?

Tho’ modesty is a virtue, bashfulness is a vice.

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.

Many foxes grow grey, but few grow good.

Little strokes fell great oaks.

Each year one vicious habit rooted out, in time might make the worst man good throughout.

Wink at small faults — remember thou hast great ones.

If you have time, don’t wait for time.

Wish not so much to live long, as to live well.

Observe all men; thyself most.

Drive thy business, or it will drive thee.

Hear Reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

Sloth (like rust) consumes faster than labor wears. The used key is always bright.

What you would seem to be, be really.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Wise men learn by others’ harms; fools by their own.

Keep conscience clear, then never fear.

Well done is better than well said.

They who have nothing to trouble them, will be be troubled at nothing.

If passion drives, let reason hold the reins.

Eat few suppers and you’ll need few medicines.

The whole process [of doing great work] is a kind of dance with curiosity.

Curiosity it the key…in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them.

It’s a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions.

There’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

Rivals exist to inspire you to be better.

Use the difficulty

I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered a shipwreck.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

They say, best men are moulded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better, For being a little bad.

If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.

You can’t be a good innovator if you don’t know how to make the stuff you are designing.

$ → Generosity

Love is spelled T.I.M.E.

I will have to remember “I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.”

You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.

People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

Life is long, if you know how to use it.

Socialists don’t like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose socialism.

If software is a bicycle for the mind, A.I. is an army for the mind to command.

Don’t argue with reality.

The day you sell is reasonably certain to mark the end of the decline, because you are not the only one who was finally scared into selling. You, being an average man, were merely representative.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.

The fears we don’t face become our limits.

Only pay attention to signals that are costly (to create), and honest (from good incentives).

A sense of injustice is the biggest limiter of performance.

The job of the poet is to name without narrowing.

Individuation in service of the collective.

If you can choose to add mass or velocity, always choose velocity.

Small teams are magic.

An arch consists of two weaknesses which, leaning one against the other, make a strength.

It is an act of service to ask for help.

The most important things in life have been stumbled upon.

Search, and climb.

Create structure to leave structure.

Discipline = Freedom.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Planning is overrated. Planting is underrated.

We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

The fundamental algorithm of life: repeat what works.

Wisdom is prevention.

The fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.

Patience is a product of confidence and trust.

Is your glass half empty or half full?" asked the mole. "I think I'm grateful to have a glass," said the boy.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information, than wonder. In noise, rather than silence. Oh my, this is a noisy world.

The biggest mistake parents make raising their children is not remembering their own childhood. The best thing that we can do is to think about what it was like for us, and know what our children are going through.

Your children won’t remember the money you spent. Only the time.

Successful investing is about having people agree with you...later.

Self control is strength. Calmness is mastery. You have to get to a point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else. Don’t allow others to control the direction of your life. Don’t allow your emotions to overpower your intelligence.

Now will never come again.

Thinking is all about the ability to look at complex situations and strip away things that don’t count — the ability to filter out situations and find what’s at their core.

There is only one nature — the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure: it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.

Don’t imagine having things that you don’t have. Rather, pick the best of the things that you do have and think of how much you would want them if you didn’t have them.

Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.

Pressure is a privilege.

If you want to know how to live your life, write your obituary and reverse engineer it.

What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things.

In pursuit of wisdom, sometimes it’s better to seek out the richest, most accurately-researched stories.

When trust is broken, chaos reigns.

Escape competition through authenticity

What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything, is that the world will do most of the work for you, provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities.

Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance.

Dare to be naïve.

We do not look at cash to determine whether to buy stocks; we look at stocks to determine whether to deploy cash.

If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport.

We’ll never run out of money.

It took a long time to focus on very few things.

Anyone who uses the word “quality” is an idiot.

In our frantic attempt to know everything through use of the rational mind alone, we have fractured knowledge into hundreds of incestuous specialties and fragmented those specialties into thousands of isolated, insular trades and disciplines. The world is filling with people who know more and more about less and less. Within each specialty, we dismiss as largely irrelevant all things, events, and ways of understanding outside the ever-narrower boundaries of our discipline. We can ignore all relationships not essential to our ever-narrowing perspective. We can ignore all consequences not immediately affecting or affected by our ever more constricted pursuit. We can abdicate responsibility for even thinking about them. We can each decide and act with our ever-smaller intellectual prisons and narrower mental cells, and defend our acts with logical, efficient, methodical rationality. Never mind that the sum of the whole is social, commercial, and biological madness.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.

You become what you give your attention to.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Taken to its logical conclusion, [AI chat bot] plugins will provide infinite choice without the Paradox of Choice.

The instinct was to curate a culture, not to teach, not primarily.

History is rarely on the side of the book burners.

Where your fear is, there is your task.

We make our money on the startups that work and we make our reputation on the ones that don’t.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

I wish everyone could get rich and famous and get everything they ever dreamed for, so they can see it’s not the answer.

After winning the championship I learned that much hadn’t changed. I thought it would fill a certain void. It didn’t.

Mental health is a commitment to reality at all costs.

Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings!

You have two ears but only one mouth for a reason.

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

You always have the right to have no opinion.

We love ourselves more than other people but for some reason we care about their opinions more than our own.

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices.

To finish first, you first must finish.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

You’ve got to be lucky. Everybody’s going to be lucky at some time or another. The thing I’d say is that I was lucky enough to be lucky early. [unsaid: he kept creating opportunities to be lucky]

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Money often costs too much.

Genuine curiosity is the precursor to understanding. A good listener helps the other person feel understood.

I never lose. Either I win or learn.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.