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Keigo Higashino: Playing at education
“The relationship between teacher and student is based on illusion. The teacher is under the illusion that he is teaching something, and the student is under the illusion that he is being taught. What’s important is that this shared illusion makes both teacher and student happy. Nothing good is gained by facing the truth, after…
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Keigo Higashino: Day and night
“You know how the sun rises and sets at a certain time each day? In the same way, all of our lives have a day and night. But it’s not set like it is with the sun. Some people walk forever in the sunlight, and some people have to walk through the darkest night their…
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Marcel Duchamp: Avoid confirming to own taste
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” —Marcel Duchamp.
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Albert E N Gray: Strong purpose
“Why are successful [people] able to do things they don’t like to do while failures are not? Because successful [people] have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don’t like to do in order to accomplish the purpose they want to accomplish.” —Albert E N Gray.
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Hilaire Belloc: It was my shame
“It was my shame, and now it is my boast, That I have loved you rather more than most.” —Hilaire Belloc.
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Swati Popat Vats: Weeks to damage
“Cost optimization often fails when it treats human relationships like a standard manufacturing supply chain. A laboratory can be rebuilt in months; a culture takes decades to form and only weeks to damage.” —Swati Popat Vats.
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Will Durrant: Progressive discovery
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” —Will Durrant.
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John Carmack: Rocket science
“Rocket science has been mythologised all out of proportion to its true difficulty.” —John Carmack.
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Rabindranath Tagore: Every child’s message
“Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.” —Rabindranath Tagore.
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Raymond Thornton Chandler: Two kinds of truth
“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art, science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps…
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Jessica Jensen: Flooding the world
“AI is flooding the world with a lot of junk. What matters now is real people and real voices.” —Jessica Jensen.
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Karl A Menninger: Illness
“Illness is in part what the world has done to a victim, but in a larger part it is what the victim has done with his world.” —Karl A. Menninger.
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Mithali Raj: Not a virtue
“It’s not a virtue to endure life when it fulfills all our wishes, but when it turns against us. Get confident being uncertain.” —Mithali Raj.
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Ward Cunningham: Decisions that don’t matter
“I can’t tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don’t matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. When something does go…
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Petrarch: Little love
“To be able to say how much you love is to love but little.” —Petrarch.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Contact with earth
“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
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Charlie Munger: Fast spurts
“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser 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 … In the end, most people get what they deserve.” —Charlie Munger.
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Jim Murphy: Circumstances and thoughts
“One of the biggest mistakes we make in our stories is confusing our circumstances with our thoughts about those circumstances.” —Jim Murphy.
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Sir Garfield Sobers: Coach
“A coach should be a person who is able to help a player mentally.” —Garfield Sobers.
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Milton Friedman: Understand the arguments
“You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.” —Milton Friedman.
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Sheri S Tepper: Ignorance
“Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one’s own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.” —Sheri S. Tepper.
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Arthur Miller: You’re a salesman
“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.” —ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman (1949).
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Richard Bach: Losing and learning
“That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing in a curious way is winning.”— Richard Bach.
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Pema Chodrom: Experiment
“Live your life as an experiment.” —Pema Chodron.
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Kevin Spacey: Pay for it
“Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it.”— Kevin Spacey.
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Sam Neill: You are unique
“You are unique. There is only one you. And that is you there, right here, for better or worse. Except that there is no better, and there is no worse. It’s just you.” —Sam Neill.
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Sam Neill: Moustache
“No intelligent man wears a moustache voluntarily — you can write that down.” —Sam Neill.
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Sam Neill: People turn into fools
“People turn into fools when they see a movie star and do weird things.” —Sam Neill.
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Eileen Gu: Power of sport
“As far as trusting yourself… the power of sport is unparalleled because it is evidence over affirmation. You don’t tell yourself, ‘Oh, I can handle the pressure. Oh, I’m so great.’ You do it time and time again. Sports are really honest because you can’t lie to yourself. You know when you stayed late, and…
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Jim Rohn: Success
“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals.” —Jim Rohn.
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Leo Rosten: Purpose of life
“The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.” —Leo Rosten.
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Marcel Proust: Every morning
“The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.” —Marcel Proust.
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Chuang Tzu: Chaos
“The eye is a menace to clear sight, the ear is a menace to subtle hearing, the mind is a menace to wisdom, every organ of the senses is a menace to its own capacity. …Fuss, the god of the Southern Ocean, and Fret, the god of the Northern Ocean, happened once to meet in…
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June Jordan: Life and death
“I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death.” —June Jordan.
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Chief Dan George: If
“If the very old will remember, the very young will listen.” —Chief Dan George.
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Jean de la Fontaine: Discretion
“What is called discretion in men is called cunning in animals.” —Jean de la Fontaine.
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Kalki Koechlin: Society would fall apart
“I think society is uncomfortable acknowledging the exhaustion, resentment, fear, and loss of identity that mothers experience because society would fall apart if mothers quit or mothers revolted.” —Kalki Koechlin.
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Nancy Farmer: Garden souls
“People’s souls are like gardens. You can’t turn your back on someone because his garden’s full of weeds. You have to give him water and lots of sunshine.” —Nancy Farmer.
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Danny Way: Game of failure
“Skateboarding is a game of failure. That’s what makes this sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. We’ll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure after painful failure. But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I’m really pushing the edge and skating…
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Peter Singer: Animal factories
“Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.” —Peter Singer.
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Rory McIllroy: Focus on the process
“I can get real caught up in the outcome. I just really need to remind myself that the outcome will ultimately happen if you just focus on the process. It takes care of itself.” —Rory McIllroy.
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William James: Potential being
“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.” —William…
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Norman Cousins: Adventure in forgiveness
“I have learned that life is an adventure in forgiveness. Nothing clutters the soul more than remorse, resentment, recrimination.” —Norman Cousins.
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Alfred Korzybski: Two ways
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.” —Alfred Korzybski.
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Hilary Mantel: War is not affordable
“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.’ You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got and then it breaks…
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Marwan Makhoul: Warplanes must be silent
“In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent.” —Marwan Makhoul.
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Eileen Gu: Pressure
“Pressure is just energy. It’s something that can be harnessed and used to push you to new heights.” —Eileen Gu.
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Czeslaw Milosz: Change into a tree
“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.” —Czeslaw Milosz.
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Jim Simons: Beauty
“Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. I think pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component—at least to me. Now, you might think, “Building a company that’s trading bonds? What’s so aesthetic about that?” What’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the…
