Thoughts I keep coming back to.
- On work
- The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. — Richard Feynman
- Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. — Octavia Butler
- Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. — David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, 2005
- On judgment
- What can be said at all can be said clearly. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
- I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. — Richard Feynman
- Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. — Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek, 1998
- On systems
- The purpose of a system is what it does. — Donella Meadows
- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. — John Gall
- The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ — Grace Hopper
- On attention
- Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. — Simone Weil
- There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. — David Foster Wallace
- If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them. — Alan Watts
- On self
- Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. — Paul Graham
- Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. — Daniel Kahneman
- If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. — David Foster Wallace
- When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. — Viktor Frankl
- You need to do at least a bit of what you care about now, as opposed to banking on finding time for it in the future, once the decks are clear and life’s duties are out of the way. Life’s duties will never be out of the way. And so if you really mean it when you say you’d like to write a novel or spend more of your time with your ageing parents or fighting climate change (or having fun), at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it. — Oliver Burkeman