Quotes collection

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them all. Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them all.

The ceiling for 'trying hard' is ~2 orders of magnitude higher than you think. If you haven't spent entire years failing, you are trying medium-hard at best.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It's the size of the drop that matters, not the size of the bucket. And if we choose, we can create an enormous drop.

Job's not finished.

If the time is not ripe, then it is your job to ripen the time!

Who do you think you are? I am!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For progress, there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.

Only boring people get bored.

Almost no one is evil. Almost everything is broken.

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Smiling through it all! Can't believe this is my life.

People do not realize just how much they are putting at risk when they don't accept what life presents them with, the questions and tasks that life sets them. When they resolve to spare themselves the pain and suffering they owe to their nature. In so doing, they refuse to pay life's dues and for this very reason, life then often leads them astray. If we don't accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. If I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. A neurosis is a much greater curse! In general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. One cannot do more than live what one really is. And we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. After much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result—because avoidance is much worse.

No love, however brief, is wasted.

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

It's kind of a really nice day. He decides to walk around the block. On the side of the road he sees a woman's tennis shoe filled with leaves, and it fills him with inexplicable sadness. He walks down his side street and sees striking colors in the faces of the people around him, details in these beautiful brick walls, and weeds that he must have passed every day but never noticed. The air smells different, brighter somehow; and the currents under the bridge look strange and vivid; and the sun is warming his face; and the world is clumsy and beautiful and new; and it's as though he's been sleepwalking for God knows how long and something has violently shaken him awake. His bathmats are gorgeous. The grain patterns in his cheap wood cabinets vibrate something deep within him. He's fascinated by the way his paper-towels drink water. He's never really appreciated these things. All this detail he's never noticed. He's alive. The stars rattle him to the core. All these lights have traveled for tens of millions of years to reach him at this moment. How, somewhere far away, our own sun looks just like one of these. How many of the stars no longer even exist, but whose ancient light is just reaching him now, an impression from a ghost, an amazing, infinite time machine every night above his head that he's ignored for most of his life. He wants to stop people in the street and say: "Isn't this amazing? Isn't everything amazing?"

You are the traffic.

How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard?

I always want a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.

In one moment I knew that the valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasant watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who dances might be superior to myself—word-bound and unable to dance. From then on I noticed how warped many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.

When I'm in a slump, I comfort myself by saying if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere, they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me.

The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind are faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.

Real G's move in silence like lasagna.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing a line somewhere.

If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.

I don't know exactly who to blame things on, but my working hypothesis is some kind of lawyer-administrator-journalist-academic-regulator axis. Lawyers sue institutions every time they harm someone (but not when they fail to benefit someone). The institutions hire administrators to create policies that will help avoid lawsuits, and the administrators codify maximally strict rules meant to protect the institution in the worst-case scenario. Journalists ('if it bleeds, it leads') and academics (who gain clout from discovering and calling out new types of injustice), operating in conjunction with these people, pull the culture towards celebrating harm-avoidance as the greatest good, and cast suspicion on anyone who tries to add benefit-getting to the calculation. Finally, there are calls for regulators to step in—always on the side of ratcheting up severity.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

The problem is that our calibration is bad. The Fear has gone too far, and is keeping too many people quiet too often. Calibration is hard, and calibration of your own skill level is very hard. It speaks well of us that we would rather think of ourselves a level below where we are, than think of ourselves as a level above, but getting it right would be better still. We also are too afraid of trying to go one level too high, and not afraid enough of false humility. I am going to suggest that everyone adjust accordingly.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

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

What are the most important problems in your field or life and why aren't you working on them?

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

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

We have founded our republic upon the theory that the average man will, as a rule, do the right thing, that in the long run the majority will decide for what is sane and wholesome. If our fathers were mistaken in that theory, if ever the times become such—not occasionally but persistently—that the mass of the people do what is unwholesome, what is wrong, then the republic cannot stand, I care not how good its laws, I care not what marvelous mechanism its Constitution may embody. Back of the laws, back of the administration, back of the system of government lies the man, lies the average manhood of our people, and in the long run we are going to go up or go down accordingly as the average standard of our citizenship does or does not wax in growth and grace.

Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude.

We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions.

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

You can't actually feel the weight of the world. The human mind is not capable of that feat. But sometimes, you can catch a glimpse.

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Nah, imma do my own thing.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

It does not matter whether or not you have the scientific or historical evidence to prove a truth if people do not have an economic incentive for adjudicating and then spreading that truth.

Priors, priors, do you have any priors?

All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.

Be rational, don't rationalize.

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death.

When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. The next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised.

Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But in fact there are actors.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness!

Rarely does anything understood deeply turn out to be useless, even though it may not serve the purpose you had hoped.

It is a shame for a man to grow old and not see what he's capable of.

The ironic tragedy is that life has to be lived forward, but only makes sense in reverse.

This little maneuver's gonna cost us 51 years.

Explore a single individual deeply enough and truths about all individuals emerge.

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it—basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

Philosophy is mainly useful in inoculating you against other philosophy. Else you'll be vulnerable to the first philosophy you hear.

You can win with a long weapon, and yet you can also win with a short weapon. In short, the Way of the Ichi school is the spirit of winning, whatever the weapon and whatever its size.

Show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.

The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.