Quotes¶
Here live some quotes that I want to periodically remind myself of. I don’t “agree” with each quote per se, but each quote does prompt something to think about. I try to distill each quote down to their essence, but punch lines often ring empty without context. If a punch line tickles you, it’s probably worth looking up the context.
A Zen koan
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Frank O’Hara, ‘Having a Coke With You’
… and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
Richard Feynman, ‘Feynman’s Rainbow’
I’m not going to psychoanalyse myself. Sometimes it is good to know yourself, but sometimes it isn’t. When you laugh at a joke, if you think about why laughed, you might realise that, after all, it wasn’t funny, it was silly, so you stop laughing. You shouldn’t think about it. My rule is, when you are unhappy, think about it. But when you’re happy, don’t. Why spoil it? You’re probably happy for some ridiculous reason, and you’d just spoil to know it.
‘Lady Bird’
SISTER SARAH JOAN: You clearly love Sacramento.CHRISTINE ‘LADY BIRD’ MCPHERSON: I do?SSJ: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.LB: I was just describing it.SSJ: Well it comes across as love.LB: Sure, I guess I pay attention.SSJ: Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?
Kishimi and Koga, ‘The Courage to be Disliked’ (p. 39, 252, 254, 262)
PHILOSOPHER: That you, living in the here and now, are the one who determines your own life.
…
PHILOSOPHER: Imagine that you are standing on a theatre stage. If the house lights are on, you’ll probably be able to see all the way to the back of the hall. But if you’re under a bright spotlight, you won’t be able to make out even the front row. That’s exactly how it is without lives. It’s because we cast a dim light on our entire lives that we are able to see the past and the future. Or at least we imagine we can. But if one is shining a bright light on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.
…
YOUTH: But that’s just living for the moment. Or worse, a vicious hedonism!
PHILOSOPHER: No. To shine a spotlight on here and now is to go about doing what one can do now, earnestly and conscientiously.
…
YOUTH: If I change, the world will change. No one else will change the world for me…
Simone De Beauvoir, ‘The Second Sex’ (p. 17)
Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential.
Mike LeFevre, interviewed in ‘Working’ by Studs Terkel (Preface 1)
It’s hard to take pride in a bridge you’re never gonna cross, in a door you’re never gonna open. You’re mass-producing things and you never see the end result of it.
Immanuel Kant, ‘Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals’ (p. 36)
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.
Kishimi and Koga, ‘The Courage To Be Disliked’ (p. 146, 150)
PHILOSOPHER: It’s about community feeling, after all. Concretely speaking, it’s making the switch from attachment to self (self-interest) to concern for others (social-interest) and gaining a sense of community feeling. Three things are needed at this point: “self-acceptance”, “confidence in others”, and “contribution to others.”
David Foster Wallace, ‘This is Water’
The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ‘rat race’—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
David Foster Wallace, ‘Infinite Jest’ (p. 860), via ‘The Gosepel According to David Foster Wallace’
No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering… He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
Adam Miller, ‘The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace’ (Ch. 7)
Achievement can be more dangerous than failure. At least failure leaves you with the fantasy of some uppercase Substance. But imagine what happens when “you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life OK as you are, in the culture, educated to assume” (IJ 680).
G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Common Man’
The phrase would probably be misunderstood; but I should begin my sermon by telling people not to enjoy themselves. I should tell them to enjoy dances and theatres and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; to enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if they can enjoy nothing better; to enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to this other alternative; but never to learn to enjoy themselves. Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside…
The moment the self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean emblems of thirst and of despair…
Viktor Frankl, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualise the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system… The more one forgets himself — by giving himself a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualises himself.
C.S. Lewis, ‘Mere Christianity’
I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off—getting rid of the false self, with all its ‘Look at me’ and ‘Aren’t I a good boy?’ and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
Paul Graham, ‘Life is Short’
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.
‘The Serenity Prayer’
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,courage to change the things I can;and wisdom to know the difference.
Michael Lewis, ‘The Undoing Project’
“Amos [Tversky] thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.” What all those who came to know Amos eventually realised was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do.
Kishimi and Koga, ‘The Courage to be Disliked’ (p. 146, 150)
YOUTH: Are you free, now?
PHILOSOPHER: Yes. I am free.
YOUTH: You do not want to be disliked, but you don’t mind if you are?
PHILOSOPHER: Yes, that’s right. Not wanting to be disliked is probably my task, but whether or not so-and-so dislikes [or likes] me is the other person’s task. Even if there is a person who doesn’t think well of me, I cannot intervene in that. To borrow from the proverb I mentioned earlier, naturally one would make the effort to lead someone to water, but whether he drinks or not is that person’s task.
Eliud Kipchoge, ‘Breaking 2’
In life, the idea is to be happy. So, I believe in calm, simple, low-profile life. You live simple, you train hard, live a honest life. Then you are free.
Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your emotions and your passions.
Abraham Heschel
Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement … Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Tadashi Tokieda, ‘Collects Math and Physics Surprises’
I don’t think I’ve had an unusual life, but it would be regarded as unusual if you take the standard sort of life people are supposed to have in a certain type of society and try to fit me in it. It’s just a matter of projection, if you see what I mean. If you project on the wrong axis, something looks very complicated. Maybe according to one projection, I have an unusual past. But I don’t think so, because I was living my life day by day in my own way. I never tried to do anything weird — it just happened this way.
Tadashi Tokieda, ‘Collects Math and Physics Surprises’
Sometimes adults have a regrettable tendency to be interested only in things that are already labeled by other adults as interesting. Whereas if you come a little fresher, and a little more naive, you can look all over the place, whether it’s labeled or not, and find your own surprises.
And so that’s what you do. You just look around. And sometimes you feel tired, or you feel dizzy, or you feel preoccupied by other things, and you cannot do this. But you’re not always tired and you’re not always preoccupied. In those moments, you can find lots of wonderful things.
Paul Graham, ‘The Age of the Essay’
The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can’t have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.
Steve Weinberg, ‘Four Golden Lessons’
When I received my undergraduate degree — about a hundred years ago — the physics literature seemed to me a vast, unexplored ocean, every part of which I had to chart before beginning any research of my own. How could I do anything without knowing everything that had already been done? Fortunately, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good luck to fall into the hands of senior physicists who insisted, over my anxious objections, that I must start doing research, and pick up what I needed to know as I went along. It was sink or swim. To my surprise, I found that this works. I managed to get a quick PhD — though when I got it I knew almost nothing about physics. But I did learn one big thing: that no one knows everything, and you don’t have to.
David Deutsch, ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ (p. 24)
That is a good explanation - hard to vary, because all its details play a functional role. For instance, we know — and can test independently of our experience of seasons — that surfaces tilted away from radiant heat are heated less than when they are facing it.
Neal King on Richard Feynman, ‘How hard a worker was Richard Feynman?’ (Quora)
A colleague of Feynman’s from Los Alamos told me that Feynman used to go through the Physical Review every month. For each article, he would first read the abstract, and then think about how the article should end. Then he would check the end of the paper to see if there were any surprises. If there were no surprises, he figured that he had nothing new to learn from the paper, and he’d go on to the next. But if the conclusions of the paper were different than he had guessed from his reading of the abstract, he would take the time to read and study the whole paper.
Freeman Dyson, ‘No Ordinary Genius’
The Feynman diagram approach to quantum electrodynamics was combining this very pictorial approach with strict adherance to quantum mechanics. And that’s what made it so original. Quantum mechanics is generally regarded as a theory of waves. Feynman was able to do it by ignoring the wave aspect completely. The pictures show you just particles traveling along in straight lines. These then were translated into mathematics, but in a very simple fashion, so that once you had the geometrical picture, it was simple to go straight to the answer. And that made his methods very powerful, as compared to the conventional way of doing things, which is much more analytical.
David McAllester, ‘Fundamentals of Deep Learning’
Examples confuse me. Abstraction makes things clear. (Paraphrased)
Charles Townes, ‘How the Laser Happenned’
The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, ‘Gee, I could have thought of that.’
Charles Townes
It’s like the beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam. ‘No, I didn’t build it myself. But it’s based on an idea of mine!’
Quote banks I’ve taken from: