Enjoy!

—Mark

“We should look at moral axioms the way a prospector looks at shiny rocks: with great respect and great suspicion.”

—The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright (1994)

“Be very careful with the moral high ground. It helps to resolve conflict when you realize that everyone has different moral codes, and very few people intentionally make immoral decisions. Chase Jarvis once told me: ‘Everyone wants to see themselves as a good person.’ No matter how egregious the crime, the criminal usually has a reason for viewing it as morally acceptable.“

—Brandon Stanton of Humans of NY, quoted in Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World, by Tim Ferriss (2017)

“Effective altruism is about asking ‘How can I make the biggest difference I can?‘ and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's true, and a commitment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be.”

—Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back, by William MacAskill (2016)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”

—The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker (1967)

“Right now, we are at the edge of a new era of unlimited potential. Nobody can see what is going to happen; nobody knows.

There are no experts, and there's no reason slavishly to follow anybody's instructions about anything.
Including mine.

Do it your way, and have all the fun you can.“

—Electronic Life, by Michael Crichton (1983)

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

—Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, by Hunter S. Thompson (1967)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: ‘resulting.’ When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn't turn out well in the short run.”

—Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke (2018)

“Freedom? That’s easy. It’s in your choices. Happiness? That’s easy. It’s in your choices. Respect of your peers? That too is in the choices you make. And all of that is right in front of you. No need to take the long way to get there.“

—The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by Ryan Holiday (2016)

“What we'll want in the future depends on the choices we make today. By the time you go to sleep, you will have made it either a little bit harder or a little bit easier to want something tomorrow—for you and for someone else.”

—Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, by Luke Burgis (2021)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.”

—In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, by Robert Rubin (2003)

“If you want to be certain, then you are apt to be obsolete.“

—The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, by Richard W. Hamming (1997)

“Simone Weil wrote, ‘Doubt is a virtue of the intelligence.’ As with every other principle, enshrining doubt as the highest principle in thought may become merely another excuse for intolerance, but I believe there are forms of doubt that are virtuous. Doubt is less attractive than certainty to most people.”

—A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind, by Siri Hustvedt (2016)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“They might look noble and commanding, but they're only masters of themselves and they usually prefer to work alone. They don't suffer from the need for company that we do, and though a lack of social attachments can seem like a sort of freedom, it's a freedom from nearly everything we care about.”

—A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiburg (2021)

“We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.“

—The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by Kevin Kelly (2016)

“For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live.”

—Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, by Douglas Rushkoff (2010)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Whether you like to or not, acquire the habit of working hard, then you won't have to work hard. Idleness does not make work easy, it ensures that work will be hard.”

—The Cynic Philosophers: From Diogenes to Julian (2012)

“Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.“

—Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber (2018)

“In a world where 4.5 billion people are now online, what is the role of one? How do these creators shape our tastes, and how do we protect, encourage, and reward that sort of work, long after the glow has faded? How do platforms help or hinder that work?”

—Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, by Nadia Eghbal (2020)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“In literary terms, we might identify substitution with ‘metaphor,’ as the historian and philosopher of mathematics Reviel Netz does. ‘Mathematics,’ he says, ‘can only become truly interesting and original when it involves the operation of seeing something as something else.’’

—99 Variations on a Proof, by Philip Ording (2019)

“Every significant emergent technology inevitably enters the world of language as a new metaphor, a way of framing or illuminating some aspect of reality that was harder to grasp before the metaphor began to circulate.“

—Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, by Steven Johnson (2016)

“If categorization is central to thinking, then what mechanism carries it out? Analogy is the answer.”

—Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, by Douglas Hofstadter (2011)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

—The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)

“The word ‘decision’ comes from the Latin word caedere, which means ‘to cut.’ When we decide to pursue one thing, we necessarily cut away another. If there's no cutting, we haven't made any decision at all.“

—Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, by Luke Burgis (2021)

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

—The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath (1963)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly, the attacks served to make them even stronger. When the Spanish attacked them, the Apaches became even more decentralized and even more difficult to conquer. When the Spanish destroyed their villages, the Apaches might have surrendered if the villages had been crucial to their society. But they weren't. Instead, the Apaches abandoned their old houses and became nomads.“

—The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2008)

“In every paradigm, scientists discover a logical structure that makes sense of a portion of the world and gives them an intellectual foundation to which they cling until the discrepancies and inconsistencies grow so unsettling as to force them to break with tradition and alter some of their cherished ideas.”

—Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, by Mark Buchanan (2000)

“The fundamental equations of general relativity are nonlinear—already a signal, we know by now, that chaos lurks. ‘People aren’t always well versed in its methods,’ says Janna Levin, an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University. ‘Theoretical physics in particular is built on the notion of fundamental symmetries,’ she notes. ‘For that reason, I think it’s been a difficult paradigm shift for theoretical physics to embrace.’”

—Chaos: Making A New Science, by James Gleick (1987)

—Mark

—“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?”

—“Of course. Who said it?”

—“I don’t know.”

—“He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”

—“I don’t know. It’s hard to see inside the head of the brave.”

—“Yes. That’s how they keep that way.”

—A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (1929)

“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

—The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien (1990)

“It seemed obvious that their former hopes, their warlike dreams, their constant waiting for the enemy had been no more than a pretext to give life some significance.”

—The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati (1940)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Wrapping a present with paper gives it a crispness and pristineness that emphasize the newness and value of the present inside. Paper is strong enough to protect the present when it is sent through the mail, but so weak that even a baby can rip it open. That moment of opening transports the object inside from obscurity to celebrity in a few seconds. The unwrapping of a present is akin to the act of birth; a new life for the object begins.“

—Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World, by Mark Miodownik (2013)

“About half the nitrogen in you came out of a Haber-Bosch factory. Don't worry: Nitrogen is nitrogen, the atoms in Haber-Bosch ammonia are precisely the same as the atoms in the best natural manure, and they all come, one way or another, from the air you breathe—but half the nitrogen in your blood, your skin and hair, your proteins and DNA, is synthetic.”

—The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, by Thomas Hager (2008)

“Dark matter behaves like ordinary matter in terms of its gravitational properties—it’s attractive and it clusters, but we don’t know what it’s made of. The stuff we do know about—protons, neutrons, ordinary atoms and molecules—appear to comprise only about 5 percent of the mass of the universe.”

—The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos, edited by John Brockman (2012)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Nothing is more alien to the spirit of the age than to suggest that anyone might seek inner freedom, for it suggests doubt as to the prevailing faith that the human world is improving.“

—The Soul of the Marionette, by John Gray (2015)

“Cyclical time teaches you not just to accept the rhythms of history, but to look for ways to make use of them, to fulfill your role in those rhythms as best you can. It is an antidote to fatalism. If you wish to get more out of life (or nature), you have the power to do that, but it takes work. You and your society have the power to influence history, but that takes work too—and, always, your efforts must be appropriate for the time.”

—The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny, by William Strauss & Neil Howe (1996)

“This schism still lives with Americans today. It is especially pronounced in the nation’s role in lands that lay, as Astoria did, beyond the borders of the United States. In these places is America a beacon of democracy that will unflaggingly support individual rights? Or is it a trade empire looking out for its best economic interests? Which comes first? Where is the priority?”

—Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (2014)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“In poker, you can win with the worst hand and you can lose with the best hand. In every other game in a casino—and in games of perfect information like chess and Go—you simply must have the best of it to win. No other way is possible. And that, in a nutshell, is why poker is a skilled endeavor rather than a gambling one.”

—The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, by Maria Konnikova (2020)

“Instead of applying himself with unceasing industry to one object, he aimed too high and cultivated no special talent. The great advantages he sought made him despise the small ones within his reach and he obtained neither.“

—Selections From the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims, by Marquis de Vauvenargues (1903)

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”

—A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1), by George R. R. Martin (1996)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.”

—Life Without Principle, by Henry David Thoreau (1863)

“Nobody could have ever conceived of a more absurd waste of human resources than to dig gold in distant corners of the Earth for the sole purpose of transporting it and reburying it immediately afterward in other deep holes, especially excavated to receive it and heavily guarded to protect it. The history of human intuitions, however, has a logic of its own.“

—Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies, by Nik Bhatia (2021)

“Fawcett agreed that El Dorado, with its plethora of gold, was an ‘exaggerated romance,’ but he was not ready to dismiss the chronicles altogether”

—The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann (2009)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”

—The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, by Christopher Lasch (1979)

“‘You can't break the rules, the fundamental rules,’ he said. ‘Be a man of your word. Do what you say you gonna do. Respect people the way that you would like to be respected.’“

—The Marathon Don't Stop: The Life and Times of Nipsey Hussle, by Rob Kenner (2020)

“‘Hip’ people love parodies. But there’s no such thing as a timeless parody, is there? I have more respect for the earnest guy who does something that can last for generations, and that hip people feel the need to parody.”

—The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch ()

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Vision without execution is hallucination. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”

—Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson (2017)

“The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.“

—The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley (1954)

“Recently, a team of scientists investigating the underlying geology at Delphi discovered two hidden fault lines that cross exactly under the ruined temple. Psychoactive gases seeping up through these tectonic cracks, including sweet-smelling ethylene, which produces feelings of aloof euphoria at light doses (and anesthesia at higher doses), were very likely responsible for the Oracle's visions.”

—Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, by Gaia Vince (2020)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

—Unpopular Essays, by Bertrand Russell (1950)

“We promise according to our hopes; we perform according to our fears.”

—Reflections; Or Sentences and Moral Maxims, by Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1665)

“I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it's just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more that a deep existential angst the says, again and again, 'I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.’”

—Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert (2015)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“In college, I had met the Southern writer Jo Carson and she said, “Be careful what you get good at doin’ ’cause you’ll be doin’ it for the rest of your life.”

—Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton (2011)

“The more human beings diversified as consumers and specialised as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process.“

—The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matthew Ridley (2010)

“Experts, in looking at something new, always bring their expertise with them, as well as their particular way of looking at things. Whatever does not fit into their frame of reference is dismissed, not seen, or forced to fit into their beliefs. Thus really new ideas seldom arise from the experts in the field.”

—The Art of Doing Science & Engineering: Learning To Learn, by Richard Hamming (1997)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“...If our prisoner is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning.”

—The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (2011)

“A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.“

—Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal (2010)

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

—War Talk, by Arundhati Roy (2003)

Enjoy!

—Mark

“Seneca’s credibility as a moral philosopher (to me) came from the fact that, unlike other philosophers, he did not denigrate the value of wealth, ownership, and property because he was poor. Seneca was said to be one of the wealthiest men of his day. He just made himself ready to lose everything every day. Every day.”

—The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007)

“No affliction is more devastating to the life cycles of a big city than sudden population loss.”

—Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, by Steven Johnson (2016)

“Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws – always for other fellow.“

—The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein (1966)