Illuminating tweets & quotes.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
By: Alfred North Whitehead
There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.
By: Ben Horowitz
Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.
By: Karen Armstrong
Either you create a powerful meme that grows organically powering free customer acquisition, or you are doomed to pay all your gross margin to Facebook and Google ads
By: Garry Tan
History is the record of top players completing good quests.
By: www.piratewires.com
In a world of abundance, attention is the scarcest resource, and people's attention is hard to earn.
By: Packy McCormick
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade, than in all the previous centuries of its existence
By: Nicola Tesla
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” or “No one can make you feel better without your permission”
By: Eleanor Roosevelt
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.
By: Henry David Thoreau in Walden
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
By: C.S.Lewis
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
By: C.S.Lewis
It's not enough to just fix the bad things; we need to aspire to a future that involves building new amazing things. A lot of tech (and public policy) has forgotten this.
By: Sam Altman
We should not cease from exploring and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started and know the place for the first time.
By: T.S.Elliot
There will always be someone who can't see your worth. Don't let it be you.
By: Mel Robbins
Sometimes we connect with a place, but usually we connect with people. Yet people connect us to a place.
By: Derek Sivers
The mentor-protégé relationship is the most efficient and productive from of learning.
By: Robert Greene
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
By: Marcus Aurelius
It's a paradox, but unlimited tolerance can lead to the extinction of tolerance.
By: Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
By: Edmund Burke
The worst thing that can happen to you ever is to find out that the story that you created or adopted is fictional, is full of errors and mistakes. Many people would prefer to die than to do that.
By: Yuval Harari
There's no level you can rise to in a field that allows you to question the assumptions of that field
By: Eric Weinstein
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
By: William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
It is evolution and not the reward itself (money, houses, etc) that matters to us and those around us.
By: Ray Dalio
To the person undergoing it, any rapid ascent to new heights of experience can feel equally imperceptible
By: Maria Popova in her book Figuring
There is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world.
By: Walt Whitman
One writes not with the hand but with the whole person
By: Virginia Woolf
The richest relationships are often those that don't fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives — the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.
By: Maria Popova in her book Figuring
We navigate the unknown frontiers of the social universe through a sextant of existing relationships—nearly every new person we meet is within only a few degrees of separation from someone we already know. But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.
By: Maria Popova in her book Figuring
Typically, defensive, emotional reactions (ego barriers) stand in the way of progress and this is man's biggest impediment because it impedes people's abilities to address all other problems and is also probably people's greatest source of pain
By: Ray Dalio
You won't be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you've been taught to care about.
By: William Deresiewicz
Only associate with people where you don't have to drink to be around them.
By: Naval
Choose the non-emotional response to any given situation and see how much easier your life becomes.
By: Naval
Don't wait too long to have kids. More meaning in one walk around the block with your 6yo than a lifetime of bar nights and brunches.
By: @chrismanfrank
The greatest risk is not taking one
By: Brian Armstrong
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.
By: Henry David Thoreau in Walden
Live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
By: Albert Einstein
My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive. [...] I thought I should project a positive, sunny demeanor and rally the unburdened troops to victory. I was completely wrong. [...] In my mind, I was keeping everyone in high spirits by accentuating the positive and ignoring the negative. But my team knew that reality was more nuanced than I was describing it. And not only did they see for themselves the world wasn't as rosy as I was describing it; they still had to listen to me blowing sunshine up their butts at every company meeting.
By: Ben Horowitz
For Proust, art gives meaning to life because it shows the world in a way that is fresh, appreciative and alive. The opposite of art is habit. For him, much of life is ruined for us by familiarity. Habit dulls our senses and stops us from appreciating everything. Artists are people who know how to strip habit away and return life to its true, deserved glory. He wants us all to look at the world like an artist.
By: Alain de Botton
Andreessen credits Peter Thiel with having a positive impact on Valley culture. “It's hard to be around Peter and not think, ‘I have to get smarter,'” he says. “When it comes to philosophy, history, politics, the fate of humanity—Peter has up-leveled the discussion a lot. Before Peter, not a lot of people were thinking about these topics. People were thinking, ‘What's the new chip?'”
By: not sure
The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small.
By: Henry Kissinger
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
By: Louis L'Amour
Most ingenious men agree, that universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, & pedantry.
By: George Berkeley said that in the 18th century
Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
By: Sebastian Junger
Do only what is essential, and do the things that human reason alone demands, when it is needed. This brings the contentment of doing fewer things but doing them well… So on every occasion ask yourself, “Is this really necessary?
By: Marcus Aurelius
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
By: Thomas Jefferson
There are very few people in this world that you have to meet while they are still here. Tom Lehrer was one for our family.
By: Eric Weinstein
Courage is in far shorter supply than genius.
By: Peter Thiel
Picking the right direction to go in is way more important than how hard you work.
By: Naval
For progress there is no cure.
By: John von Neumann
Most successful people are people you've never heard of. They want it that way.
By: Ryan Holiday
What are you unwilling to feel?
By: Tara Brach
Without struggle no one will know what you were capable of, not even yourself.
By: not sure
Your living is the teaching. Socrates' students said of their teacher that for all the genius he possessed, Plato and Aristotle and all the other sages who learned from him “derived more benefit from [his] character than [his] words.”
By: not sure
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
By: Wayne Dyer
Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
By: Thomas Jefferson
There is no justification for taking away individual's freedom in the guise of public safety.
By: Thomas Jefferson
You are only as rich as the enrichment you bring to the world around you.
By: Rajesh Setty
There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.
By: John Dewey
Everyday life is increasingly regulated by complex technologies that most people neither understand nor believe they can do much to influence.
By: Albert Bandura
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
By: John Dewey
Maturity is realizing that silence is more powerful than proving a point.
By: not sure
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.
By: Frank Zappa
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time. None. Zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads- and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.
By: Charlie Munger
Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money.
By: Nat Friedman
As you heal yourself, you heal others too
By: Sergey Lazarev
In the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities. In the mind of the expert there are few.
By: saying in Jiu-Jitsu
It's important to remember that if you look at human history it's almost all tyranny. And the United States and Western Europe is a tiny sliver of the pie, it's a tiny period in human history in which we grew up with freedom of speech and protections, but it's not some permanent state of affairs. It definitely won't last forever.
By: Gavin de Becker
When the market turns down, a lot of people lose jobs... and that's the time people become entrepreneurs. Downturns end up being the best times to start companies.
By: Tobi Lüke
The purpose of religious structures is to stop people from having religious experiences.
By: Carl Jung
Where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place for which we will give our major gift to the community.
By: Robert Bly in “Iron John: A Book about Men”
Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.
By: David Deida
Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.
By: Naval
At watershed moments of upheaval and transformation, we anticipate with terror the absence of the familiar parts of life and of ourselves that are being washed away by the current of change. But we fail to envision the unfamiliar gladnesses and gratifications the new tide would bring, the unfathomed presences, for our imaginations are bounded by our experience.
By: Maria Popova in her book Figuring
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
By: Buddhist saying
The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.
By: Carl Jung
Instead of complaining about the rules, just learn the game, then play it. Instead of complaining about the downside of human nature, find ways to benefit from it.
By: Derek Sivers
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.
By: Robert A. Heinlein
If you want to be successful you have to work with other people and you have to figure out who can you trust over a long, long period of time, so that you can keep playing the game with them so that compound interest and high trust will make it easy to play the game and will let you collect the major rewards which are usually at the end of the cycle. If you switch locations, switch groups, you can not compound relationships and trust. Only play the game (business and relationships) with people who signal that they will be around for a long time, don't build trust with transient people. When you've been doing business with somebody / been friends with somebody for 10, 20 years it just gets better and better. You trust them so easily that the friction goes down and you can do bigger and bigger things together. Getting married to someone, having kids and raising them, that's compound interest, investing in those relationships. Those relationships end up being invaluable compared to more casual relationships.
By: Naval
A woman's loyalty is tested when her man has nothing while a man's loyalty is tested when he has everything
By: not sure
Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge.
By: David Deida
Find your anchor. Religion. Family. Friends. Kids. Whatever it is, find it. Life only gets more complicated as you grow older. Anchors help keep it simple - they remind us what actually matters.
By: Romeen Sheth
Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness
By: Yousuf Karsh
If what you is want is more pleasurable sex it's not by having sex with more strangers than you're going to have it, but by cultivating good sex with an intimate partner
By: Bret Weinstein
Your good intentions are not enough; you have to be artful. We may be filled with goodwill; we may be motivated by the desire to make the other person happy, but out of our clumsiness, we make them unhappy. Walking, eating, breathing, talking, and working are all opportunities to practice creating happiness inside you and around you. Mindful living is an art, and each of us has to train to be an artist.
By: Thich Nhat Hanh
People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy by an average of 42 percentage points. (the optimism gap)
By: Steven Pinker
Entrepreneurs get rewarded for being optimistic. Intellectuals get rewarded for being pessimistic.
By: Naval
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
By: Haruki Murakami.
I'm convinced the number 1 mistake beginner writers make is trying to be clever instead of clear. For some reason, they think the best way to "differentiate" is being clever or funny. But more often than not, this leads to a confused reader. And a confused reader = gone.
By: Dickie Bush
Her deepest desire is to feel that she can do anything to you, especially the horrible things, and you don't even flinch.
By: David Deida
The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another's darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding.
By: Maria Popova
One of the greatest gifts we can offer people is to embody non-attachment and non-fear… Everything is impermanent. This moment passes. That person walks away. Happiness is still possible.
By: Thich Nhat Hanh
If you don't want to work with somebody for life, don't work with them for a day. In dating you are in a "don't know" state. If you know it's not permanent, then move on.
By: Naval