Quotes

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.

People are memory palaces, too. They can be revisited like old neighborhoods, after long periods of estrangement, calling up memories that were previously forgotten. There is no erasing your past self, because everything you’ve ever been is sharded and stored among all the people, places, and artifacts you’ve interacted with.

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

Adding more lanes to alleviate traffic is liking trying to fix obesity by loosening your belt.

If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.

A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.

This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man's innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel.

Good designers, when they see people having trouble using something they designed, don’t tell the user to try harder. They fix the design.

Theory: The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we now all like to stay so busy and bombarded with stimuli all the time.

That we end up not even knowing that we don't know is the really insidious part of most math classes.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

Don't just believe that because something is trendy, that it's good. I'd probably go the other extreme where if something, if I find too many people adopting a certain idea I'd probably think it's wrong or if, you know, if my work had become too popular I'd probably think I'd have to change.

If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

All the labour-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.

Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Between 20 to 40 percent of older adults in America are still not fully online.

Solomon was also endowed with other types of wisdom, including the ability to compose poems and proverbs, as well as an unusual knowledge of plants and animals. He was not, however, said to have excelled at mathematics, which was already highly developed in Mesopotamia. Perhaps that is why he spent too much money.

Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.

It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.