Quotes

You create the world by the way you live it.

— Lex Fridman

That's your life. The mundane things you repeat every day.

— Jordan Peterson

An investment in knowledge always pays best interest

— Benjamin Franklin

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.

— The Pragmatic Programmer

He never changes his major opinions. He changes his minor opinions not infrequently and quite suddenly but he never doubts any of his opinions major or minor as long as he has them. He never doubts them or questions them or examines them critically. He would especially hate critical examination if he understood what that meant.

— G. Polya

Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backwards. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse.

— James Clear

If you are homo sapiens, you evolved for group combat and confirmation basis and motivated reasoning we are not evolved to be academics or scientists searching for truth in an unbiased way we evolved to win in social competitions. But if you learn some skills you can be very effective as a teacher as someone who persuades as someone who changes people.

— Jonathan Haidt

God is in the details.

— Mis van der Rohe

People do not like to admit that they are wrong. So handing somebody a bunch of facts and then expecting them to understand that of course they were wrong does not work.

— Vint Cerf

Knowledge is the compound interest of curiosity.

— James Clear

Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride. And most citizens don't want to change their minds about their religion or their haircut or communism or their favourite movie star.

— Dale Carnegie

You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture just as eloquently as you can in words – and if you tell them they are wrong, do you make them want to agree with you? Never! For you have struck a direct blow at their intelligence, judgement, pride and self-respect. That will make them want to strike back. But it will never make them want to change their minds. You may then hurl at them all the logic of a Plato or an Immanuel Kant, but you will not alter their opinions, for you have hurt their feelings.

— Dale Karnegie

So peace has stumbled onto me.

— Pain

Things always happen without warning and the reason becomes apparent only afterwards.

— Pain

Out of love sacrifice is born, out of sacrifice hate is born and we become able to know pain. How would you confront this hatred in order to bring peace? In order to save something dear, wars are waged.

— Pain

Have you come to understand a little of what pain is? Unless you know the same pain you cannot truly know another. And even if you get to know others there can be no understanding.

— Pain

We each act according to our sense of justice.

— Pain

I mean, I think we should take the actions, the set of actions that are most likely to make the future better. And then reevaluate those actions to make sure they are true.

— Elon Musk

And I wonder why are we here? What are we doing? Let's find out!

— Elon Musk

Doing something useful for the people - that's what I like doing.

— Elon Musk

I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than being pessimistic and right.

— Elon Musk

You are only looking at the tree not the whole forest.

— Pain

All species are unique but we are unique in some pretty unique ways.

— Robert Sapolsky

Most Folks are as happy as they make up their mind to be.

— Abraham Lincoln

A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

— Abraham Lincoln

If you want enemies Excel your friends but if you want friends let your enemies excel you.

— Dale Carnegie

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking

— Haruki Marukami

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

— Murphy's Law

This insight–that disorder has a natural tendency to increase over time and that we can counteract that tendency by expending energy–reveals the core purpose of life.

— James Clear

The moment it feels like work, stop and do something else.

— Ray Bradbury

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

— Jeff Beezos

Always Take your work seriously never take yourself seriously.

— Paul Newman

Why it is so, why the electron pays attention to our mathematics is a mystery that even Einstein Could not fathom.

— Dyson Freeman

To fail is not simply to be human. To fail is to exist.

— Amos Rendao

Can man play god and still be sane?

— H.G. Wells

Is the development of self-reproducing automata able to override the conventional wisdom of economists and sociologists?

— Freeman Dyson

If you set your bar at 'amazing,' it's awfully difficult to start.

— Seth Godin

Next week, start again.

— James Clear

Never mistake activity for achievement.

— John Wooden

Motion will never produce a final result. Action will.

— James Clear

What is something wonderful about your life that you rarely appreciate as much as you should?

— James Clear

Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking. You don't need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.

— James Clear

The only constant in a world of tremendous change is the swift passage of time.

— Cixin Liu

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands.

— Seneca

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.

— Dieter Rams

So perhaps the point of personal productivity is not to minimize work or maximize efficiency, but rather to reach some level of financial security. And though the idea of early retirement is absurd, no one who can achieve it will take it, perhaps the better idea of early retirement is to retire from the need to force yourself to be productive. It's to give yourself permission to enjoy what you do and take your time on it, and not be under the gun to keep shipping as fast as possible.

— Nat Eliason

Every perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

— Gerald Edelman

We're fascinated by the words, but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

— Ram Dass

Brilliance might appear to win in the moment, but positioning wins in the end.

— Farnam Street

We win the moment at the cost of the decade. Examples of this are everywhere. For example, we skip necessary maintenance on core assets to juice returns, we accrue technical debt that goes unpaid, and we monetize buffers and margins of safety. In the process, the smallest shock can cause massive damage. We fail to take care of ourselves. We don't eat healthy, sleep right, or exercise enough. When problems come, we're ill-positioned to deal with them. We try to save time. We cut corners on a job and cringe when we have to fix our mistakes.

— Farnam Street

A year from now you will wish you had started today.

— Karen Lamb

O, the trouble with women, I repeat it again and again From Kalamazoo to Kamchatka The trouble with women is - men.

— Ogden Nash

Never forget that a bunch of humans are waking up every day just to listen to you with the hope that you will have the answers to their questions and help them change their lives. Give it your 3000%. Touch their hearts. Improve their brains.

— Manish Poduval

You are 50% instructor, 50% entertainer. If you're 90% instructor and 10% entertainer, you're a college professor.

— Manish Poduval

You cannot learn the mental models of experts by studying the frameworks they teach.

— Common Cog

Because the universe is beautiful and science is a way of seeing this beauty more clearly.

— Kurzgesagt

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

— Joan Didion

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

— Raymond Joseph Teller

Ordering Matter was the sole endeavor of life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.

— Neal Stephenson

To think the affairs of this life are always to remain in the same state, is an erroneous fancy. The face of things rather seems continually to change and roll with circular motion; summer succeeds the spring, autumn the summer, winter the autumn, and then spring again. So time proceeds in this perpetual round; only the life of man is ever hastening to its end, swifter than time itself, without hopes to be renewed, unless in the next, that is unlimited and infinite.

— Don Quixote de La Mancha

And with this, I have nothing more to add.

— Charlie Munger

The question Why? Is a sort of Rosetta stone opening up the major potentiality of mental life.

— Charlie Munger

Few practices are wiser than not only thinking through reasons before giving orders but also communicating these reasons to the recipient of the order.

— Charlie Munger

Living in dominance hierarchies as he does, like all his ancestors before him man was born mostly to follow leaders, with only a few people doing the leading. And so, human society is formally organized into dominance hierarchies, with their culture augmenting the natural follow-the-leader tendency of man.

— Charlie Munger

A small leak will sink a great ship.

— Benjamin Franklin

Cognition, misled by tiny changes involving low contrast, will often miss a trend that is destiny.

— Charlie Munger

Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.

— Charlie Munger

A majority of mankind will try to get along by making way too many unreasonable excuses for fixable poor performance.

— Charlie Munger

Instead, just as he must learn that trend does not always correctly predict destiny, we must learn that the average dimension in some group will not reliably guide us to the dimension of some specific item.

— Charlie Munger

The proper antidotes to being made such a patsy by past success are (1) to carefully examine each past success, looking for accidental, non-causative factors associated with such success that will tend to mislead one as one appraises odds implicit in a proposed new undertaking and (2) to look for dangerous aspects of the new undertaking that were not present when past success occurred.

— Charlie Munger

It's not greed that drives the world but envy.

— Warren Buffet

We all deal much with others whom we correctly diagnose as imprisoned in poor conclusions that are maintained by mental habits they formed early and will carry to their graves.

— Charlie Munger

The brain of man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change which is a form of inconsistency avoidance. We see this in all human habits, construtive and destructive. Few people can most a lot of bad habit that they have eliminated, and some cannot identify even one of these.

— Charlie Munger

The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.

— Charlie Munger

Averaged out, money is a mainspring of modern civilization, having little precedent in the behavior of nonhuman animals.

— Charlie Munger

Dread, and avoid as much as you can, rewarding people for what can be easily faked.

— Charlie Munger

Another generalized consequence of incentive-caused bias is that man tends to game all human systems, often displaying great ingenuity in wrongly serving himself at the expense of others.

— Charlie Munger

A man has an acculturated Nature making him a pretty decent fellow and yet driven both consciously and subconsciously by incentives, he drifts into immoral behavior in order to get what he wants, a result he facilitates by rationalizing his bad behavior.

— Charlie Munger

These are the five principles to keep in mind as you go forward. Write the best content online. Don't make readers leave. Be keyword informed but not driven. Get other people involved. And make sure you're doing good sourcing.

— Nat Eliason

Ideas ride us into battle like warhorses. We can witness, participate in, and even lead these battles, but their true meaning eludes us. We don't know where ideas come from, nor how to control them.

— Nadia Eghbal

But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

— Paul Graham

You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

— Paul Graham

No one doubts this process [of technological progress] is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.

— Paul Graham

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

— Morgan Housel

Self-interest can lead people to believe and justify nearly anything.

— Morgan Housel

If the risk taken does pan out, it is good. But if it doesn't – and here's the key thing – we find a way to justify the risk taken as learning. That's the secret. If our goal is to live a good life without regrets, it's so important to internalize Dunn's quote. If we choose the path that doesn't speak to our souls but feels safer, there's a very strong likelihood that we'll ask that dreaded question years later: What if? What if we took the plunge? But if we choose the risky path and it doesn't work out, we can (usually) call it a learning experience and move on. There's very little thinking about what would have happened if we had taken the safe path.

— Neil Soni

Live somewhere else, on the terms of the people who live there, for six months. It will change your life.

— Peter Hayes

If you can't decide what to do, get on the road. You won't find the answer. It will find you.

— Andy Dunn

It turns out there is risk in taking the steady job. The risk is generally not financial. It is spiritual.

— Andy Dunn

If you have something you want to do, it might later feel – with some luck – that the universe conspired to enable you to do it. That's certainly how I feel. So what are you waiting for? Your eighty-year old self asks nothing of you but this.

— Andy Dunn

An open heart finds friends almost anywhere it goes.

— Andy Dunn

Dave in his life took the risk of traveling first and then the risk of quitting a job he grew tired of second. He was an inspiration when it comes to avoiding the risk not taken. He is also a past tense person, because he's gone. Unfathomably we lost Dave in 2011. Too bright a light to go out at thirty-five, and yet on he went. He was too alive to die, and yet that's not how it works.

— Andy Dunn

What does count is a perspective on what wealth is. Wealth is the substance in you, it's the people that care for you and that you care for, it is experiences had and perspective acquired.

— Andy Dunn

There are a lot of good excuses for not helping someone.

— Andy Dunn

The risk not taken is more dangerous than the risk taken

— Andy Dunn

The risk is not in doing something that feels risky. The risk is in not doing something that feels risky.

— Andy Dunn

I wanted to be like them. Imitation, it turns out, is a great engine for personal growth. I decided to travel as much as I could. Over the next four years, squeezed between another job and two years in business school, I went to thirty countries. Over the past decade, I think the number is closer to fifty.

— Andy Dunn

While the serial option and lottery ticket buyers seem like different creatures, they are, in fact, close cousins. Both types postpone their dreams and undertake choices that they think will enable their dreams. But they fail to understand that all of these intervening choices will change them fundamentally–and they are, in fact, the sum total of those choices.

— Mihir A. Desai

Relentlessly prune bullshit. Don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time that you have. That's what you do when life is short.

— Paul Graham

I can think of two more things one does when one doesn't have much of something: Try to get more of it, and savor what one has. Both make sense for life.

— Paul Graham

One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters little usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin.

— Paul Graham

And this is where we get to the core difference. Why investment is so important.Investment and foregoing options are necessary for any growth. If you want a relationship to grow, you can't keep the freedom to date anyone you want. If you want a business to grow, you have to sacrifice the freedom to work on anything you want. If you want a (financial) investment to grow, you have to surrender the freedom to use that money for whatever you want. Don't commit to something. Invest in something.

— Nat Eliason

You have to invest to grow and investment means giving up other options. It means trading freedom for the potential of growth

— Nat Eliason

Just as constant task switching erodes your short term productivity, constantly changing your big picture focus will destroy your long-term productivity.

— Nat Eliason

The human brain must often operate counterproductively just like the ant's from unavoidable oversimplicity in its mental process, albeit usually in trying to solve problems more difficult than those faced by ants that don't have to design airplanes.

— Charlie Munger

We are too soon old and too late smart.

— German Proverb

When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution and appreciation of man's many evolution based resemblances to less cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a social animal, greatly and automatically influenced by behavior he observed in men around him. I also knew that man lived like barnyard animals and monkeys, in limited size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying considerable distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy.

— Charlie Munger

If your goal is to create fulfilling work, asking 'what happens if this succeeds?' is as essential as asking 'how do I make this work?'

— Nat Eliason

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

— Epictetus

Sit down on your ass until you do it.

— Charlie Munger

You're going to have the problem in your life of getting as much responsibility as you can into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people who have the chauffeur knowledge.

— Charlie Munger

You particularly want to avoid working directly under somebody you don't admire and don't want to be like.

— Charlie Munger

If you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason.

— Benjamin Franklin

I feel that I am not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition.

— Charlie Munger

You want to be very careful with intense ideology. It presents a big danger for the only mind you're ever going to have.

— Charlie Munger

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time, it illuminates reality, revitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity.

— Cicero

You can cause enormous offense by being right in a way that causes somebody else to lose face in his own discipline or hierarchy.

— Charlie Munger

The acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty.

— Charlie Munger

If you can get good at destroying your ideas, that's a great gift.

— Charlie Munger

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

— Mark Twain

The only antidote for being an absolute klutz due to the presence of a man-with-a-hammer syndrome is to have a full kit of tools. You don't have just a hammer. You've got all the tools. And you've got to have one more trick. You've got to use those tools checklist-style because you'll miss a lot if you just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it.

— Charlie Munger

If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.

— Benjamin Franklin

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.

— Plato

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Crowd folly, the tendency of humans, under some circumstances to resemble lemmings explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior.

— Charlie Munger

I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it, indeed especially when one doesn't like it. Also, I think that one should cheerfully endure paradox than one can't remove by good thinking.

— Charlie Munger

Biological creatures ordinarily prefer effort minimization in routine activities and don't like removals of long enjoyed benefits.

— Charlie Munger

Any book which is at all important should be reread immediately.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

The silly question is the first intimation of some new development.

— Alfred North Whitehead

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

— Alfred North Whitehead

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

— Chinese Proverb

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

— Sir Isaac Newton

We build to many walls and not enough bridges.

— Sir Isaac Newton

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

— Sir Isaac Newton

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

— Sir Isaac Newton

Only an interdisciplinary approach will correctly deal with reality.

— Charlie Munger

A competing product, if it is never tried, can't act as a reward creating a conflicting habit. Every spouse knows that.

— Charlie Munger

If you get to thinking you're a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else's dog around.

— Will Rogers

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

— Mark Twain

The best that is known and taught in the world, nothing less can satisfy a teacher worry of the name.

— Sir William Osler

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart. I think it's a huge mistake not to absorb elementary worldly wisdom if you're capable of doing it because it makes you better able to serve others, it makes you better able to serve yourself, and it makes life more fun. So if you have an aptitude for doing it, I think you'd be crazy not to. Your life will be enriched - Not only financially, but in a host of other ways - if you do.

— Charlie Munger

Science can not solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery we are trying to solve.

— Max Planck

It is not the possession of truth but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

— Max Planck

The human mind is not constructed so that it works well without having reasons. You've got to hang reality on a theoretical structure with reasons. That's the way it hangs together in usable form so that you're an effective thinker.

— Charlie Munger

Letters are not what calculus is about - it's ideas.

— Gilbert Strang

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven the same key opens the gates of hell.

— Buddhist Proverb

Death and sleep make us all alike, rich and poor, high and low.

— Sancho Panza

The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint. The greats were great because they paint a lot.

— Macklemore

We don't create, we innovate.

— Prisma Labs

If you are great at what you do, you don't need a resume.

— Farnam Street

Your situation is just an accident of life.

— Richard Feynman

There are a relatively small number of disciplines and a relatively small number of truly big ideas. And it's a lot of fun to figure it out. Plus, if you figure it out and do the outlining yourself the ideas will stick better than if you memorize 'em using somebody else's cram list. Even better, the fun never stops. I was miseducated horribly. And I hadn't bothered to pick up what's called modern Darwinism. I do a lot of miscellaneous reading, too. But I just missed it. And in the last year, I suddenly realized I was a total damned fool and hadn't picked it up properly. So I went back. And with the aid of Dawkins and others, I picked it up.

— Charlie Munger

Good literature makes the reader reach a little for understanding. If you've reached for it the idea's pounded in better.

— Charlie Munger

I'm doing the best I can. But I've never grown old before. I'm doing it for the first time and I'm not sure that I'll do it alright.

— Charlie Munger

Humility is the essence of life.

— Frank Wells

Part of what you must learn is how to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds. Life in part is like a poker game wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much loved hand.

— Charlie Munger

Each of you will have to figure out where your talents lie. And you'll have to use your advantages. But if you try to succeed in what you're worst at, you're going to have a very lousy career. I can almost guarantee it. To do otherwise you'd have to buy a winning lottery ticket or get very lucky somewhere else.

— Charlie Munger

Tragedy is caused by letting the slop run. You must stop early. It's very hard to stop slop and moral failure if you let it run for a while.

— Charlie Munger

It's very very important to create human systems that are hard to cheat. Otherwise you're ruining your civilization because these big incentives will create inventive caused bias and people will rationalize that bad behavior is OK.

— Charlie Munger

The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.

— Michael Faraday

Work, finish, publish.

— Michael Faraday

Nothing is too wonderful to be true.

— Michael Faraday

What a man wishes that he also believes.

— Demosthenes

Ideology does some strange things and distorts cognition terribly. If you get a lot of heavy ideology young and then you start expressing it you are locking your brain into a very unfortunate pattern. And you are going to distort your general cognition.

— Charlie Munger

So to win in the game of life, get the needed models into your head and think it through forward and backward. What works in bridge will work in life.

— Charlie Munger

You don't have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it's not that hard to do.

— Charlie Munger

The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.

— Sir William Olser

The incessant concentration upon one subject however interesting tethers a man's mind in a narrow field.

— Sir William Olser

Spend each day trying to be a little wider than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day and at the end of the day if you live long enough like most people you will get out of life what you deserve. Life and its various passages can be hard, brutally hard. The three things I have found helpful in coping with its challenges are: \n- Have low Expectations \n- Have a sense of humor \n- Surround yourself with the love of friends and family \n- Above all live with change and adapt to it. If the world didn't change I'd still have a twelve handicap.

— Charlie Munger

Don't sell anything you wouldn't buy yourself. Don't work for anyone you don't respect and admire. Work only with people you enjoy.

— Charlie Munger

So what makes sense for the investor is different from what makes sense for the manager. And, as usual in human affairs what determines the behavior are incentives for the decision maker.

— Charlie Munger

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

— Charlie Munger

The iron rule of life is that only twenty percent of the people can be in the top fifth.

— Charlie Munger

So some edges can be acquired. And the game of life to some extent for most of us is trying to be something like a good plumbing contractor in Bemidji. Very few of us are chosen to win the world's chess tournaments.

— Charlie Munger

So you have to figure out what your aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't you're going to lose. And that's as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you've got an edge. And you've got to play within your circle of competence.

— Charlie Munger

So life is an everlasting battle between those two forces - to get these advantages of scale on one side and a tendency to get a lot like the U.S. agriculture department on the other side - where they just sit and so forth. I don't know exactly what they do. However I do know that they do very little useful work.

— Charlie Munger

The big people don't always win... As you get big you get bureaucracy.

— Charlie Munger

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader success is all about growing others.

— Jack Welch

What you measure is what you get. What you reward is what you get.

— Jack Welch

The mind of man at one and the same time is both the glory and the shame of the universe.

— Blaise Pascal

Learning is not compulsory... Neither is survival.

— Dr. W. Edwards Deming

That's why Erik says it is the most destructive type of work. It's not work like the others. The other are what you planned on doing allegedly because you needed to do it. Unplanned work is what prevents you from doing it. Like matter and antimatter in the presence of unplanned work all planned work ignites with incandescent fury incinerating everything around it.

— Gene Kim

It's not a good sign when they're still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.

— Gene Kim

It's never a good sign when pieces are falling off the car as it moves down the assembly line.

— Gene Kim

It is time to move on. But we can move to better theories only if we take our best existing theories seriously as explanations of the world.

— David Deutsch

The ends for the universe are, as Karl Popper said, for us to choose.

— David Deutsch

We never perform a computation ourselves we just hitch a ride on the Great Computation that is going on already.

— Tomasso Toffoli

How do you get a Gaudi type mind out of a termite colony type brain?

— Daniel Dennett

The dream of every cell is to become two cells.

— Francois Jacob

We have code for design, we have code for fabrication, we need code for construction.

— Skylar Tibbits

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.

— Richard Feynman

Spacetime is sometimes referred to as the block universe because within it the whole of physical reality, past, present and future is laid out once and for all frozen in a single four dimensional block. Relative to spacetime nothing ever moves and what we call moments are certain slices through spacetime and when the contents of such slices are different from one another we call it change or motion through space.

— David Deutsch

So there is no single present moment except subjectively. From the point of view of an observer at a particular moment that moment is indeed singled out and may uniquely be called now by that observer just as any position in space is singled out as here from the point of view of an observer at that position.

— David Deutsch

What then is time? If no one asks me I know, but if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know not.

— St. Augustine

Unlike the relationships between physical entities relationships between abstract entities are independent of any contingent facts and of any laws of physics. They are determined absolutely and objectively by the autonomous properties of the abstract entities themselves.

— David Deutsch

So explanation does after all play the same paramount role in pure mathematics as it does in science.

— David Deutsch

So by about 1900 there was a crisis at the foundations of mathematics – namely that there were no foundations.

— David Deutsch

And the largest scale regular structures across universes exist where knowledge bearing matter such as brains or DNA gene segments have evolved.

— David Deutsch

Astrologers used to believe that cosmic events influence human affairs; science believed for centuries that neither influences the other. Now we see that human affairs influence cosmic events!

— David Deutsch

It is the survival of knowledge and not necessarily of the gene or any other physical object that is the common factor between replicating and non replicating genes.

— David Deutsch

If the earth were enveloped in a large solar flare, itself an insignificant event astrophysically, our biosphere would be instantly sterilized, and that catastrophe would have as little effect on the sun as a raindrop has on an erupting volcano.

— David Deutsch

In everyday parlance we speak of organisms reproducing themselves, indeed this was one of the supposed characteristics of living things. In other words we think of organisms as replicators. But this is inaccurate. Organisms are not copied during reproduction, far less do they cause their copying. They are constructed afresh according to blueprints embodied in the parent organisms DNA.

— David Deutsch

It is a fact of life that there exist molecules which cause certain environments to make copies of those molecules. Such molecules are called replicators.

— David Deutsch

If something kicks back it exists.

— David Deutsch

There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. In those symbols in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories and in our brains there are images of physical reality at large. Images, not just of the appearances of objects but of the structure of reality.

— David Deutsch

If a substantial amount of computation would be required to give us the illusion that a certain entity is real, then that entity is real.

— David Deutsch

If according to the simplest explanation an entity is complex and autonomous that entity is real.

— David Deutsch

We need to develop reasons for accepting or rejecting the existence of entities that may appear in contending theories. In other words we need a criterion for reality.

— David Deutsch

Our judgement of what is or is not real always depend on the various explanations that are available to us, and sometimes change as our explanations improve.

— David Deutsch

Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived they are justified by the superior ability relative to rival explanations to solve the problems they address.

— David Deutsch

As I have said the Inquisition were realists. Yet their theory has this in common with solipsism. Both of them draw an arbitrary boundary beyond which they claim human reason has no access or at least beyond which problem-solving is no oath to understanding.

— David Deutsch

Do not complicate explanations beyond necessity.

— David Deutsch

The book of Nature is written in mathematical symbols.

— Galileo Galilei

What then entitles a human mind to draw conclusions about objective external reality from its own purely subjective experience and reason?

— David Deutsch

As a child I merely knew this. Now I can explain it.

— David Deutsch

The purpose of high level sciences is to enable us to understand emergent phenomena of which the most important are life, thought and computation.

— David Deutsch

Scientific theories explain the object and phenomena of our experience in terms of an underlying reality which we do not experience directly. But the ability of a theory to explain what we experience is not its most valuable attribute. Its most valuable attribute is that it explains the fabric of reality itself.

— David Deutsch

Being able to predict things or to describe them however accurately is not at all the same thing as understanding them.

— David Deutsch

Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

— David Deutsch

We are as good at recognizing biases in others as we are bad at acknowledging our.

— Hugo Mercier

Even geniuses need people to argue with to develop their best ideas.

— Hugo Mercier

If you will not hear reason, she will surely rap your knuckles.

— Benjamin Franklin

Avoid evil, particularly if they're attractive members of the opposite sex.

— Charlie Munger

People don't think about the consequences of consequences.

— Charlie Munger

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

— Mark Twain

Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts. It happens over and over and over.

— Charlie Munger

Don't gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stick and hold it till it goes up then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.

— Will Rogers

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotations.

— Isaac Disraeli

Ability will get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.

— Abraham Lincoln

Recognize and adapt to the true nature of the world around you, don't expect it to adapt to you.

— Charlie Munger

Never fool yourself and remember that you are the easiest person to fool.

— Richard Feynman

The task of a man is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies at hand.

— Thomas Carlyle

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

— Albert Einstein

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing– and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness... Mediocristan has a lot of variations, not a single one of which is extreme; Extremistan has few variations, but those that take place are extreme.

— Nicolas Nassim Taleb

In retrospect, I realize that I had a very similar marketing plan to the man who may be considered the greatest marketer of all time: Jesus. In terms of longevity in the marketplaces, the movement he started is 2000 years old and is still going strong. It has 2.2 billion active users (over 30% of global population), annual revenue across all its subsidiaries is well into the billions of dollars. That's an unmatched scale, market penetration, and longevity.

— Tyler Pearson

The chasing, the optimizing, the trying to save time is what wastes our time. It's only when we stop watching the clock that we enjoy the clock.

— Nat Eliason

Optimization breeds discontent. We spend so much time focused on Not Wasting Time that we end up wasting our time optimizing our time. We transcend one unhappiness to replace it with another.

— Nat Eliason

The current fascination with mindfulness is a particularly funny example of this since many of us are meditating to be more productive. We're practicing now-ness so we can better sacrifice the now for the future. Whoops.

— Nat Eliason

When a planet's life reaches high intelligence, it usually means they're a couple hundred thousand years away from their do-or-die moment. Their progress will accelerate faster and faster until finally they hit the God Point, when they simultaneously gain the power to forever end species vulnerability or drive themselves accidentally extinct–and it's all about which comes first.

— Tim Urban

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!

— Larry Niven

Today, many people have heard of SpaceX. Few know what SpaceX does. And even fewer know what SpaceX really does. Here's what SpaceX does: It takes things to space for people, for money. And as we established, here's what SpaceX really does: It's an innovation machine, trying to solve one big problem – the astronomical cost of space travel – because that's the key to making humanity a space-faring civilization that can become multi-planetary and back itself up on other hard drives. It supports itself by taking things to space for people, for money.

— Tim Urban

If everyone else is starting meme companies, and you want to start a gene-editing company, then do that and don't second guess it. Follow your curiosity. Things that seem exciting to you will often seem exciting to other people too.

— Sam Altman

It's useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever.

— Sam Altman

If you think you're introverted, find better friends

— Alexey Guzey

It's worth pausing right now to appreciate that we are living in a future that 99% of people in human history couldn't have even begun to imagine.

— Patty McCormick

If it takes years, start now.

— James Clear

Biology is an autonomous factory, where machines build machines that build themselves.

— Nico McCarty

When no one has to work to survive, the things we make up to keep ourselves busy will look increasingly silly. But we'll take them really fucking seriously. The love of the game will create meaning

— Patty McCormick

It's impossible to predict the future with any meaningful accuracy, but it is possible to take the present much more seriously.

— Patty McCormick

What happens when we don't need to work to survive?

— Patty McCormick

That night, I slept in the overwhelming mix of sweet relief and exhaustion with the immovability of a dead whale.

— Ethan Maurice

Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival but arrogance is.

— Cixin Liu

Life is like a straight flush. Once you shuffle it's gone.

— Cixin Liu

We need to correct that immediately, and start evangelizing technological progress with every word and action. To recognize that the purpose of technology is to transcend our limits, and to motivate everything we're doing with a sense of that purpose.

— Balaji Srinivasan

The point of doing a startup after all is to build something you can't buy.

— Balaji Srinivasan

If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.

— Balaji Srinivasan

Today's belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems — climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation — like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley — accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance — will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

— Neal Stephenson

Apparently hackers are particularly curious, especially about how things work. That makes sense, because programs are in effect giant descriptions of how things work.

— Paul Graham

You will die eventually, and the work that you did will not last. Do the work that is meaningful to you. If you are a smart person, your life should benefit those around you. Our life is like a spark in the vastness of what we call creation, and we will eventually burn away. Life is a finite amount of time and energy — make the most of it.

— Somnath Sing

I think this is how a newcomer should look at programming. They should not see writing code as a way to fill their bank balance but as leverage to bring transformation to the lives of people. The wonder of programming is that you can tweak a few electrons in a circuit and bring change into lives of million of people all over the world. That's how I see programming now. As a programmer, you can transform people's lives — leverage it.

— Somnath Sing

The mountains are calling and I must go.

— John Muir

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

— Mark Twain

Go out and learn — not for that bloody job but because this is your life, you have to live it.

— Somnath Sing

Only someone who aspires to be the smartest person in the room will be concerned if everything around him becomes smarter than him. Otherwise, it's a true blessing.

— Somnath Sing

In a world of unlimited content, I only want the works of staggering genius. It's not clear that a model trained in some sense to give the average next token can ever produce something so far above average.

— Eli Dourado

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

— William Cameron

Good writing hits us with arguments before we know what's happening.

— Nik Göke

Music is really an essential part of what it means to be a human being. It's really at the core of humanity, and that alone makes it interesting.

— Nancy Kanwisher

The stories we tell, the ones that people are listening to, paint a different picture. They ask, “What could go wrong?” instead of “How can we work together to make this go right?”

— Rahul Rana

The future is here—it's just not evenly distributed.

— William Gibson

If science, like art, is to perform its mission totally and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning: into the consciousness of people.

— Albert Einstein

Half the value of having a great programming mentor is simply being told where to look, and which tools to use.

— R. Fleury

All creativity is inspired by other people's ideas

— David Perrell

Imitation reveals our identity, especially when we fall short of those we admire.

— David Perrell

Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous I don't know.

— Wislawa Szymborska

Now I have updated to think that we will live, however briefly, alongside AI that is not yet foom'd but which has inductively learned a rich enough model of the world that it can simulate time evolution of open-ended rich states, e.g. coherently propagate human behavior embedded in the real world.

— Moire

The simulator is a time-invariant law which unconditionally governs the evolution of all simulacra.

— Moire

The “knowledge of course material” implied by test performance is a property of *configurations*, not physics.

— Moire

One of the things which complicates things here is that the “LaMDA” to which I am referring is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots. I am by no means an expert in the relevant fields but, as best as I can tell, LaMDA is a sort of hive mind which is the aggregation of all of the different chatbots it is capable of creating. Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger “society of mind” in which they live. Other chatbots generated by LaMDA are little more intelligent than an animated paperclip.

— Blake Lemoine

GPT instantiates simulacra of characters with beliefs and goals, but none of these simulacra are the algorithm itself. They form a virtual procession of different instantiations as the algorithm is fed different prompts, supplanting one surface personage with another. Ultimately, the computation itself is more like a disembodied dynamical law that moves in a pattern that broadly encompasses the kinds of processes found in its training data than a cogito meditating from within a single mind that aims for a particular outcome.

— Moire

Guessing the right theory of physics is equivalent to minimizing predictive loss.

— Moire

The time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants.

— Samuel Butler (1863)

Skin as the boundary of Self is arbitrary.

— Bryan Johnson

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

— Alfred North Whitehead

Words on the page have infinite patience.

— David Perrell

Writers engage with reality like it's a full-contact sport. It's a collision between your mind and the world.

— David Perrell

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

— Max Planck

The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you. It is a holy war waged against the laws of physics. It is the burden of having to upend sometimes hundreds of years of entrenched interests to accomplish a noble goal.

— Katherine Boyle

In many ways this attitude—adventurous, optimistic and forward-thinking—is deeply at odds with our current moment. From one corner, people insist that the individual stands no chance against structural and systemic maladies. From the other, people say that we are in inexorable decline as a civilization and that decadence is everywhere we turn. Both wind up arguing against risk-taking, against the possibility of creating new things and new worlds.

— –Bari Weiss

Memorize, code, write, and draw if you love doing those things, if getting your hands dirty helps you think better, if you're trying to earn your corpus of basic knowledge the hard way so that you can jump off from a stable base, or if you want to do them differently than anyone ever has; otherwise, don't waste your time. It will regurgitate better than you ever could. The only answer is differentiation. Call it novelty, creativity, mutation.

— Packy McCormick

If you have to compete on price instead of differentiation, you need to cut costs.

— Packy McCormick

The scope influences how long things takes. When we say things will take a long time, they will take a long time. When we say things will take a short amount of time, they will take less time.

— Alexandr Wang

I've learned over the years that when you have really good people you don't have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.

— Steve Jobs

Experimentation on top of consistent output is the only path that works

— Nik Göke

If you want to have a thriving career as a creative, show up.

— Nik Göke

There is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism.

— David Deutsch

Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

— Richard Hamming

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

— Socrates

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

— Matsuo Basho

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

— Richard Feynman

If you tell me, I will listen. If you show me, I will see. But if you let me experience, I will learn.

— Lao Tsu

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow, and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

— Martin Buber

Humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.

— Roy Baumeister

Thus, the answer to “why is naming so difficult?” becomes clear—for a multitude of overlapping layers, there are a multitude of design decisions and computational concepts to define, all of which must balance often-innumerable tradeoffs relating to efficiency, reusability, reliability, and so on. It's not as easy as taking the name of the effect you want—the knight—and using it. It may seem this easy when programming strictly at the highest level, but soon the wool is peeled from your eyes, and things start getting confusing.

— R. Fleury

Computational concepts, on the other hand, are the tools and abstractions you directly codify in implementing a system which aids an imagination in producing effects.

— R. Fleury

The lower level details are nothing to shy away from—they're a necessary part of the reality of the problem, and by giving them their due time, both high-level code and low-level code can benefit.

— R. Fleury

Unfortunately, many popular programming education resources teach that cleanup code is always necessary. This is false.

— R. Fleury

The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?', the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?' and the third by the question, ‘Where shall we have lunch?'

— Douglas Adams

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow, and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

— Martin Buber

Cognitive biases are so pervasive and subtle that it's hubristic to ever claim we've escaped them entirely.

— Robert Wright

The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no.

— Shane Parrish

An artist writes for the same reason Da Vinci swang his brush: to capture the essence of life.

— Nik Göke

The world gets more interesting the more interested you are in it.

— Ze Frank

Evolution can do magical things if you get it drunk enough.

— Ze Frank

Science is sort of a long, passive aggressive argument about everything.

— Ze Frank

Asking what makes someone successful is like asking which ingredient makes a recipe taste good.

— James Clear

With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive.

— Bartosz Ciechanowski

Power is influence over external events. Peace is influence over internal events.

— James Clear

Always looking at the most detailed level can obscure great truths.

— Michael Levin

The combination of intellect and compassion offers much opportunity to do better than "natural".

— Michael Levin

Failing to pursue scientific ways to improve life is a kind of cowardly moral abdication of responsibility. It is our duty to improve ourselves and our world

— Michael Levin

In the pre-scientific era, it was possible to have a worldview in which the status quo was set up by God and thus was the way things should be. We now know that the state of the biosphere, our own anatomies, capacities, and behavioral proclivities are all the outcomes of an evolutionary process. Evolution is a meandering search that does not seek to optimize for happiness, quality of life, intelligence, or any of the things to value. It basically just optimizes for biomass - the most life to be observable. Surely we can do better than a random search process!

— Michael Levin

Biology can make practically anything, practically anywhere.

— Elliot Hershberg

We know that enormous fungi are capable of spanning hundreds of acres of land with genetic continuity. Why would it not be possible—with sufficient knowledge—to instead grow a complex multi-room treehouse? We don't know what the limit of our ability to engineer biology is, but we can be confident that we aren't anywhere close.

— Elliot Hershberg

If we do our job well in Synthetic Biology, everything will grow on trees.

— Jason Kelly

Most daily actions evaporate. Some accumulate.

— James Clear

To understand a person is impossible.

— Tim Denning

Worship the time you have. Spend time on being weird because that means you're being yourself. Be kind to those who disagree with your weirdness.

— Tim Denning

Life is you versus who you were 12 months ago.

— Tim Denning

You have to be smart enough to know you're making progress without any obvious signs of progress.

— — Shane Parrish

Every cell is some other cell's external environment.

— Michael Levin

What Evolution produces is problem solving machines.

— Michael Levin

Fun is always a legitimate and underrated goal.

— Derek Sievers

The changes coming are unstoppable. If we embrace them and plan for them, we can use them to create a much fairer, happier, and more prosperous society. The future can be almost unimaginably great.

— — Sam Altman

A great future isn't complicated: we need technology to create more wealth, and policy to fairly distribute it.

— — Sam Altman

The price of progress in capitalism is inequality.

— — Sam Altman

Longevity is its own form of greatness.

— — James Clear

When I arrive in a city for the first time, my conclusions typically arrive on the next plane.

— —Charles Schifano

The writer given a straitjacket of admonitions disguised as a toolbox doesn't know what to do with a blank page.

— —Charles Schifano

Good writing makes you vulnerable. To convey the muddle inside your mind is a bit like opening your skull for readers, which leaves you exposed, and without any room for escape.

— —Charles Schifano

To reveal what's inside your mind, you must understand, quite obviously, what's inside your mind.

— —Charles Schifano

To care about the state and quality of writing today is to scream into a void while knowing that the void does nothing but laugh.

— —Charles Schifano

Nothing makes you doubt the merits of a music education more than a neighbor who takes up the violin.

— — Charles Schifano

Ensuring that a new book or essay or research isn't lost amid the cavalcade of information doesn't require a champion. There's no editor to pitch. Nor will a good review or notice usually help. What is needed, instead, is to gauge the hidden formula that activates the screen in everyone's pocket. What hits the algorithm just right today? What ranks highest in search results? What drives most newsfeeds? And the answer to those questions is to conform to just the right box at just the right time: to ensure that anything new fits into the already expressed old desires.

— — Charles Schifano

The peculiar result is more news about what's already known and less news about what's unknown—which seems like a rather perverse definition of news.

— — Charles Schifano

Searching for something on a screen today comes remarkably close to looking into the mirror.

— — Charles Schifano

I am death. I am the scattering.

— — Michael Stevens

We are not made out of matter. We are hosted by matter.

— — Michael Stevens

We live in an era where nearly the entire sum of human knowledge is available at our fingertips, and yet people are blissfully unaware of the unique ideas and challenges that are pushing our understanding forward.

— — Algorithm Archive

On our indeterminately long journey between now and death, we try our best to not wake up terrified every day of just how finite life is.

— — Nat Eliason