Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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Bill Vaughn: Suburbia
“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.” — Bill Vaughn.
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R E Shay: Rabbit’s foot
“Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember, it didn’t help the rabbit.” —R.E. Shay.
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Samuel Johnson: Good and original
“Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.” —Samuel Johnson.
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Paul Graham: Programming language
“A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.” —Paul Graham.
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Publilius Syrus: Not every question deserves an answer
“It is not every question that deserves an answer.” —Publilius Syrus.
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J R R Tolkien: Merrier world
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” —J.R.R. Tolkien.
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Joseph Addison: Temper of the sufferer
“A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.” —Joseph Addison, essayist and poet.
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Ellen Goodman: Graceful Exit
“There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over — and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every…
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Henry Brook Adams: Friendship
“One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.” —Henry Brook Adams.
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Duke Ellington: Deadline
“I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.” —Duke Ellington, jazz pianist, composer, and conductor.
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Marie Ebner von Eschenbach: Rheumatism and true love
“We don’t believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.” —Marie Ebner von Eschenbach.
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Hippocrates: Brain
“Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. … It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us…
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Leonardo da Vinci: Easier to resist
“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” —Leonardo da Vinci.
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Robert C Martin: Encoded names
“Encoded names are seldom pronounceable and are easy to miss-type.” —Robert C. Martin.
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Edward R Murrow: Dissent
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.” —Edward R. Murrow, journalist.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Attic of the brain
“You see, I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best…
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Thomas Aldrich: Letter
“It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There’s a singular and a perpetual…
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William Shakespeare: To thine own self be true
“This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” —William Shakespeare, poet and dramatist.
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Gerry Spence: Arguments and relationships
“I once believed, as most do, that if arguments are to be won, the opponent must be pummeled into submission and silenced. You can imagine how that idea played at home. If, in accordance with such a definition, I won an argument, I began to lose the relationship.” —Gerry Spence.
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Madame de Stael: Desire
“The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.” —Madame de Stael, writer (22 Apr 1766-1817).
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Geoff Colvin: Three stages
“When we learn to do anything new—how to drive, for example—we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we begin to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our…
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Brianna Wiest: Happiness is a choice
“Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.” —Brianna Wiest.
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John Ruskin: Highest reward
“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.” —John Ruskin.
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Carl Sagan: Prejudice and Postjudice
“Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is…
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Daniel Kahneman: What is the base rate?
“The most important question to ask before making a decision is ‘What is the base rate?’” —Daniel Kahneman.
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Clarence Darrow: Tragedy
“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.” —Clarence Darrow, lawyer and author.
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Will Rogers: Child prodigy
“I was born because it was a habit in those days, people didn’t know anything else… I was not a Child Prodigy, because a Child Prodigy is a child who knows as much when it is a child as it does when it grows up.” —Will Rogers.
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Isak Dinesen: Birds in cages
“If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.” —Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen), author.
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Sydney Harris: Race prejudice
‘World tensions have, if anything, increased in the quarter century since H.G. Wells uttered his glum warning: “There is no more evil thing on earth than race prejudice, none at all. I write deliberately — it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of…
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Anatole France: Majestic equality
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” —Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (16 Apr 1844-1924).
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Alan Perlis: Optimization hinders evolution
“Optimization hinders evolution. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” —Alan Perlis.
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Arthur Hays Sulzberger: Information and judgement
“Obviously, a man’s judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda…
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Paul Leautaud: Love makes fools
“Love makes fools, marriage cuckolds, and patriotism malevolent imbeciles.” —Paul Leautaud.
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Erwin Knoll: Rare story
“Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.” —Erwin Knoll.
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H G Wells: Lawgiver
“The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.” —H.G. Wells.
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Leo Rosten: Conservative
“A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead.” —Leo Rosten.
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Brad Jacobs: 100% of your attention
“The single most powerful thing you can do in a relationship, whether it’s personal or professional, is to give someone 100% of your attention.” —Brad Jacobs.
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Joseph Pulitzer: Truth
“It’s my duty to see that they get the truth; but that’s not enough, I’ve got to put it before them briefly so that they will read it, clearly so that they will understand it, forcibly so that they will appreciate it, picturesquely so that they will remember it, and, above all, accurately so that…
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Joel Miller: Wisdom we grow
“Our investment in reading changes the book because the book has changed us. … If books are merely a means of transferring information, then perhaps, yes, a book is a waste of time. If a summary of its thesis and key points could be presented in a brief article or Substack post, why not just…
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Neil Strauss: Premeditated resentments
“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.” — Neil Strauss.
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Will & Ariel Durrant: Successful rebels
“Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.”— Will and Ariel Durant.
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Fred Brooks: Program maintenance
“The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.” —Fred Brooks.
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Booker T Washington: Ways of exerting one’s strength
“There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.” —Booker T. Washington, reformer, educator, and author (5 Apr 1856-1915).
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Paul Licker: Failures in system development
“In practice, failures in system development, like unemployment in Russia, happens a lot despite official propaganda to the contrary.” —Paul Licker.
