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Japanese proverb: Reverse side
“The reverse side also has a reverse side.” —Japanese proverb.
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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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Frank Zane: Great things take time
“Never give up. Great things take time.” —FRANK ZANE.
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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.
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Gore Vidal: Never have children
“Never have children, only grandchildren.” —Gore Vidal.
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Jonathan Swift: Our ailments are the same
“We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same.” —Jonathan Swift.
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Kenneth Tynan: Neurosis
“A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you’re keeping.” —Kenneth Tynan.
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Manoj Srivastava: Ease of use
“Perhaps Debian is concerned more about technical excellence rather than ease of use by breaking software. In the former we may excel. In the latter we have to concede the field to Microsoft. Guess where I want to go today?” —Manoj Srivastava.
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Charlie Munger: Moral obligation to become rational
“I like understanding what works and what doesn’t in human systems. To me that’s not optional; that’s a moral obligation. If you’re capable of understanding the world, you have a moral obligation to become rational.” —Charlie Munger.
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Aldous Huxley: Words form the thread
“Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.” —Aldous Huxley.
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Anne McCaffrey: Make no judgments
“Make no judgments where you have no compassion.” —Anne McCaffrey.
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Konrad Adenauer: Conciliating a tiger
“An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.” —Konrad Adenauer.
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Leo Buscaglia: Perfect love
“Perfect love is rare indeed — for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.” —Leo…
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Will Rogers: Fire with two sticks
“The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is a match.” —Will Rogers.
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E W Howe: Rights and wrongs
“Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs.” —E.W. Howe.
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Voltaire: Metaphysics
“When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics.” —Voltaire.
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Daniel Dennett: The mind is the effect
“The mind is the effect, not the cause.” —Daniel Dennett.
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Walt Disney: Lights and shadows
“I don’t believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want…
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Alfred de Vigny: History is a novel
“History is a novel whose author is the people.” —Alfred de Vigny.
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Somerset Maugham: French Riviera
“[The French Riviera is] a sunny place for shady people.” —Somerset Maugham.
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Paul Erdos: Why are numbers beautiful?
“Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.” —Paul Erdos.
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George Bernard Shaw: First love
“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity, no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.” —George Bernard Shaw.
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Robert Quillen: Union of two forgivers
“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” —Robert Quillen.
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Howard Marks: Mistakes
“The desire for more, the fear of missing out, the tendency to compare against others, the influence of the crowd and the dream of the sure thing—these factors are near universal. Thus they have a profound collective impact on most investors and most markets. This is especially true at the market extremes. The result is…
