Random collections — Part I
52) Study hard in what would interest you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and the most original manner possible.
54) Pain + Reflection = Progress
58) The important thing is to not to stop questioning. Curiosity has it’s own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mystery of eternity, of life, the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.
67) It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.
75) The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.
98) The pandemic has fundamentally changed who I am. I now drink the milk from the bottom of a cereal bowl.
I came on here to complain about having a really bad day and saw that a bunch of you are hurting too.
99) Your arm moves because you predict it will and your motor systems seeks to reduce prediction error.
101) Happiness is a cookie that the brain bakes itself
If you take this as a computer game metaphor, this is the best level for humanity to play. And this best level, happens to be the last level. As it happens at the backdrop of the dying world.
But it’s still the best level.
102) Are you paralyze by fear? that is a good sign. Fear is good. Like self doubt, fear is a good indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb, the more scared we our of our work, our calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
103) Our language for describing emotions is very crude; That’s what music is for.
104) Our life is fretted/fritted away by detail. Simplify, Simplify.
105) Bill Bryson, If this book has a lesson, then it is that we are awe fully lucky to be here. And by we, I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours it appears to be quite an achievement. As humans, we are double lucky, of course, we enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, ina multitude of ways, to make it better. It is talent, we have now only begun to grasp.
106) How can a 3 pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm, imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, even question it’s own place in cosmos. Specially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms was forged in the hearts of countless far flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light years though gravity and change brought them together here now. These atoms now form a conglomerate.your brain. That can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think it’s own ability to think and wonder it’s own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This truly is the greatest mystery of all.
107) What one generation finds ridiculous, next accepts, and the third shudders when it looks back what the first did.
108) intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
109) Don’t comment bad Code. Rewrite it!
110) Beauty will save the world.
111) I do not fear computers, I fear lack of them
112) I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian , Hindu, Jewish and Muslim friends, that I am sincerely happy that the religion which chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind. And often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits contributes to your physical well being. Perhaps,it is better to be unsane and happy than sane and unhappy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy.
113) If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music, at least once every week.
114) On robots and space exploration ~ Robots are important. If I don my pure scientist hat, I’d say just send robots, I’d sit down here and collect my data. But nobody has given a parade for a robot. Nobody has ever named a high school after a robot. So when I have don my public educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people.It’s not only the discoveries, and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens, it’s the vicarious participation in discovery itself.
115) You have power over your mind, not outside events, realize this, and you will find strength.
116) Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known
117) The cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness
118) I have a friend who is an artist and who has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He will hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is.” And I’ll agree. Then he’ll say, “I, an artist can see this, then you, the scientist takes it all apart and then it is a dull thing.” And Ali think he is kinda nutty. First of all the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see so much about the flower than he sees, I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it is not just beauty at this dimension, the one cm, there is also beauty at smaller dimensions, that in a structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question, does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms. Why is it aesthetic, all kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement. The mystery and the awe of flower, it only adds, I don’t understand how it subtracts.
119) Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but a product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratching it up through natural selection. that we are composed of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic connections hum in parallel at this vast egg like fabric of micro thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these Nuero_programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, understanding this would be a numinous experience better than anything ever proposed in any holy text.
120) If there were machine which bore resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes we should still have 2 very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words or put together signs as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive a machine so constructed that it utters words that they correspond to bodily actions causing it’s changing organs but it is not conceivable that such a machine would produce different arrangements of words so as to give it an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence as adolescent men can do.
Secondly, he continues, even though some machines might do something’s as well as we do them or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. Whereas reason is an incredible instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations. These organs need some particular action. Hence, it is for all practical purposes it is not possible for a machine to have different organs to make it act in all of the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act. (~1600s, Decart)
121) The world is so exclusivities with so much love and depth that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there is little good evidence. Far better,it seems to me is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief. Ut magnificent opportunity that life provides.
122) Repeat
123) = 116)
124) Physics isn’t the most important thing. Love is.
125) Deep in the human unconscious if a pervasive need for logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe, is always one step beyond logic.
126) One of the toughest things about life, is making choices.
127) The universe rewards calculated risks and passion
128) Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit
129) It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind.
130) If you always win, then you are probably doing something wrong
131) So much of language design is about trade-offs and you can’t see those trade-offs unless you have a community of people that really represent those different points.
132) Talk is cheap, show me the code.
133) Human beings are ultimately nothing but careers, passageways for genes, they ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we are happy or unhappy. We are just means for and end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.
134) Well maybe there is a god above but all I have ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outgrew you and it’s not a cry that you hear at night. It’s not somebody that is seen the light. It’s a cold and broken, hallelujah.
135) There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight left July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November. ????
136) wisdom requires a flexible mind.
137) The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interior’s of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.
138) Do not let your fire go out. Spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swarms of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world’s you desire can be won. It exists. It is real. It is possible. It is yours.
139) I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.
140) There are not more than 5 musical notes yet the combination of these derives more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than 5 primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. There are not more than 5 cardinal tastes and yet combinations of the yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.
141) It has become appallingly obvious, that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
142) On the planet earth man, had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had acheived so much. The wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all dolphins had ever done was muck about water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man, for precisely the same reasons.
143) Think lightly of yourself, and deeply of the world.
144) If you are not having fun, you are doing something wrong.
145) Nature loves courage. …Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under.
146) It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face 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 actually strives 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 has the triumph of high achievement and the worst if he fails, while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls, who neither know victory nor defeat.
147) Science can amuse and fascinate us all but it is engineering that changes the world.
148) Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.
149) = 123) = 116)
150) People always have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and courage to take.
151) The limits of my language, mean the limits of my world.
152) The first period is one by the best technician, the second period is won by the kid in best shape and the third period is won by the kid with the biggest heart.
154) The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help to be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery everyday.
153) Biology gives you a brain, life turns it into a mind.
155) If consciousness is the way information feels when it is processed in certain ways then it must be substrate independent. It is only the structure of information processing that matters. Not the structure of the matter doing the information processing.
156) Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.
157) All civilizations become either space-faring or extinct.
158) Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
159) Games are won by players who focus on the playing field. Not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.
160) Any app that can be writing in JavaScript will be written in JavaScript
161) The number one reason a startup shuts down is not running out of money. The number one reason a startup fails is because the founder gives up.
162) Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible.
163) x
164) We should not only use the brains we have but all we can borrow.
165) The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
167) The idea of what is just and what is legal are not always the same thing. Never forget, what Hitler did in Germany was legal.
168) Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.
169) I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it is gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path. When the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
170) When the man is denied the right the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
171) Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
172) If freedom of speech is taken away then dum and silent will be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse.
173) Some birds are not meant to be caged. That’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild so you let them go and when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. The part of you that knows that it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices but still the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
174) Little else is requisite to a carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest of barbarism but peace easy to access and a tolerable administration of justice.
175) Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
176) Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient, resist shocks and stay the same, they antifragile gets better.
177) Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
178) Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh. Who help you when you are in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
179) = 143)
180) Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy therefore is education.
181) To know that we know what we know and to know that what we do not know, we do not know. That is true knowledge.
182) In fighting and competition, the objective is victory. In training the objective is skill development. Do not confuse them. As such one of the best ways to train is to identify the strengths of your various partners, and regularly expose yourself to those strengths.
183) I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
184) On titan, the molecules that have been raining down like lava from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there, largely unaltered, deep frozen, awaiting for the chemist from earth.
185) You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
184) On titan, the molecules that have been raining down like lava from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there, largely unaltered, deep frozen, awaiting for the chemist from earth.
185) You are not controlling the storm,and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
186) Our brain is a crowded chemistry lab bustling with non-stop nueroconversations.
187) Nothing happens until something moves.
188) = 170) 189) All truth passes through 3 stages, first it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, third it is accepted as being self evident.
190) Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.
191) I know not with what weapons world war 3 will be faught, but world war 4 will be faught with sticks and stones.
192) You cannot swim for new horizons, until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
193) We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
194) Ignorance more frequently begets confidence, than does knowledge. It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert, that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
195) The earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
196) Better to die fighting for freedom than to die being a prisoner all the days of your life.
197) There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
198) In three words, I will sum up everything I have learned about life, it goes on.
199) All empires are created of blood and fire.
200) The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desire of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say commonplace thing but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes — ah!
300) Once you know the way broadly, you will se it in everything.
