Quotes
Every quote in this book, grouped by who said or wrote it and by what it’s from.
By author
By source
2007 USC Law School Commencement Speech
Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity add disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity can get pretty close to paranoia. Paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.
I had a friend who carried a thick stack of linen-based cards. When someone would make a comment that reflected self-pity, he would slowly and portentously pull out his huge stack of cards, take the top one, and hand it to the person. The card said, “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.”
Well, you can say that’s waggery, but I suggest that every time you find you’re drifting into self-pity—I don’t care what the cause, your child could be dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation—just give yourself one of those cards. It’s a ridiculous way to behave and when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard condition and yet you can train yourself out of it.
2025 letter
Steep yourself in the last months of 2015. The program AlphaGo has just defeated the European champion in Go, the first time a computer has ever beaten a human professional. The 18-time world champion Lee Sedol would be quite unmoved, remarking that “the level of the player that AlphaGo went against in October is not the same level as me.” (AlphaGo would defeat Lee the following March.) Elsewhere in the world, there is war in Ukraine. SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 for the first time. Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered. A new startup called OpenAI was founded.
A Bona Fide Killer, episode 7
After nearly dying recently, I realized a few things. I mean... Just looking at the sky, watching the leaves change. "Wow, I'm glad I'm alive." "It's good to be alive." Joking around with friends, getting nagged by your family, worrying about silly things like, "What should I eat today?" or "What should I wear tomorrow?" That ordinary everyday life is precious. It's really is precious.
A book can’t change your life
A book can’t change your life. But you can. Especially if your community is there to help. All help is self-help, multiplied by the expectations, support and compassion of the people around you.
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That's what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first.
"If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life.
I'm a good mother to three good children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make my marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
So I supposed the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes... It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.
And I went back to school and I looked around at all the kids I knew who found it kind of a drag and who weren't sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.
C'mon, let's be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good. I don't mean in any cosmic way. I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way. I think of it in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close beside me on the couch; the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him; fettuccine Alfredo, fudge; Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice. Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.
I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that this is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.
School never ends. The classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
that nothing was useful which was not honest
Breaking Through: My Life in Science
Do not believe that hard work and happiness are in opposition. Do not believe that one must embrace leisure to know joy.
Confucius Analects
2.24: The Master said, "To sacrifice to spirits that are not one's own is to be presumptuous. To see what is right, but to fail to do it, is to be lacking in courage."
1.1:
子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？人不知而不慍，不亦君子乎？」
The Master said, "To learn and then have occasion to practice what you have learned — is this not satisfying? To have friends arrive from afar — is this not a joy? To be patient even when others do not understand — is this not the mark of the gentleman?"
15.24:
子貢問曰：「有一言而可以終身行之者乎？」子曰：「其恕乎！己所不欲，勿施於人。」
Zi Gong asked, saying, "Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?" The Master said, "Is not RECIPROCITY such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."
13.17:
子夏為莒父宰，問政。子曰：「无欲速，无见小利。欲速则不达，见小利则大事不成」
Zi Xia, being governor of Ju Fu, asked about government. The Master said, "Do not be desirous to have things done quickly; do not look at small advantages. Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly. Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished."
2.24:
子曰：「非其鬼而祭之，諂也。見義不為，無勇也。」
The Master said, "To sacrifice to spirits that are not one's own is to be presumptuous. To see what is right, but to fail to do it, is to be lacking in courage."
3.7:
子曰：「君子無所爭，必也射乎！揖讓而升，下而飲，其爭也君子。
The Master said, “A person of virtue has no contentions, except perhaps in archery! They bow and yield to each other as they go up [to the shooting platform], and come down to drink [the penalty cup if they lose]. Their competition is that of a gentleman (junzi).”
Daemons of the Shadow Realm, episode 21
I'd love to watch a ball game together. I want to hang out with everyone at places like that. Attend school and whine about studying like a normal kid. Scream about wanting a hot boyfriend. Complain about work on a commuter train. I want to live a normal life.
Developing Creative Identity
Both Brand and Darwin are writing to discover. But they're doing it in different ways. Darwin only decided to write the Origin after he'd already understood the principle of evolution by natural selection. That is, he had not only his question, but also confidence in his answer, building on decades of prior work and creative output. And so Darwin is sharpening and developing an idea he already believes; he also, en route, discovers many surprising implications and applications. By contrast, Brand seems to have begun with a question, and discovered the basic shape of his answer through the writing process.
Writing is a miraculous technology to support exploration and discovery, enabling a kind of gradient ascent in human understanding. You make tiny improvements, over and over. It may be a word or phrase you throw out and replace with a better; it may be an entire book. Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have thrown the first draft of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" into the fire. You write down your confusions, your discomforts, your exceptions, your crazy ideas. And slowly, you agglomerate improvement. You can keep improving for years. I do not believe you can think well without using an external medium [^33], something to help you improve thoughts too complex for your unaided mind. This can be a trudge, all those often tiny improvements in understanding. But it adds up and at peak moments is transformative. As the New Yorker editor William Shawn said to John McPhee: "It takes as long as it takes." And for those of us developing new creative identities, writing is one of the most powerful servants we have.
feed it to your children
Never lose your sense of wonder.
Guard it the way you would a small flame in bad weather.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns having made the commitment… and having made it willingly instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice, or whether the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
Adventures are made up of ordinary, shitty days like these.
“Even if things don’t go as you hoped for, it’s fine as long as the process was fun”
Getting into Print
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
Golden
"No, my dear. Sadness might be many things, but it is rarely stupid. The good sadness, I think, is always trying to tell us something very important."
How not to forget what matters
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation,1 in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
...
The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.
how to cultivate your own taste…and how to protect your inner life while posting online
I’ve been reading very little this week and reconciling with nature instead—swimming, cycling, and applying large quantities of sunscreen
I Deleted My Second Brain
PKM systems promise coherence, but they often deliver a kind of abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.
Incentives are for losers
COME HELMET OR HIGH WATER
When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2
A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.
I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.
A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose. That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong. Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for? How can I make myself useful?
Latent Space as a New Medium
The model isn’t reasoning privately and then writing it down — the writing-it-down is the reasoning.
Lovingly launching your kids through the school gates
Here’s the thing. We all know we shouldn’t wish away the last days of summer—calculating the remaining time until they’re finally standing awkwardly on the front doorstep, forcing out a smile, for that quintessential “first day back” photo. But you can’t help calendar-watch. In the last few days, I’ve had countless friends message to share their delight in being back on the school run, and having a clean, quiet home to return to. I feel guilty thinking about it, and wrong writing about it. Because the number of summers we’ll spend with our kids is finite, and one day they won’t want to spend them with us.
mushroom season
I have been told that they signal health and that they will soon relent to the soil beneath summer's crushing embrace.
On the Education of Children
Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust. Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
Let him examine every man’s talent; a peasant, a bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these in their several capacities, and something will be picked out of their discourse whereof some use may be made at one time or another; nay, even the folly and impertinence of others will contribute to his instruction. By observing the graces and manners of all he sees, he will create to himself an emulation of the good, and a contempt of the bad.
Let an honest curiosity be suggested to his fancy of being inquisitive after everything; whatever there is singular and rare near the place where he is, let him go and see it; a fine house, a noble fountain, an eminent man, the place where a battle has been anciently fought, the passages of Cæsar and Charlemagne:
Quæ tellus sit lenta gelu, quæ putris ab æstu,
Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.What country is bound in frost, what land is friable with heat, what wind serves fairest for Italy.Prop. (4.3.39)
Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes, things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know.
And so of all the rest. Pythagoras was wont to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; there are, also, some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.
To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know —
Quid fas optare, quid asper
Utile nummus habet; patrix carisque propinquis
Quantum elargiri deceat; quem te Deus esse
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur —Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we are and to what purpose engendered.Pers. (3.69)
what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and design of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended;
Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem;
And how you may shun or sustain every hardship.Verg., Aen. (3.459)
by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to die and well to live. Among the liberal sciences, let us begin with that which makes us free.
Not that they do not all serve in some measure to the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end.
But the governor that I would have, that is such a one as knows it to be his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection than reverence to virtue, will be able to inform him, that the poets have evermore accommodated themselves to the public humor, and make him sensible, that the gods have planted more toil and sweat in the avenues of the cabinets of Venus than in those of Minerva. And when he shall once find him begin to apprehend, and shall represent to him a Bradamante or an Angelica for a mistress, a natural, active, generous, and not a viragoish, but a manly beauty, in comparison of a soft, delicate, artificial, simpering, and affected form; the one in the habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then look upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall choose quite contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia. Such a tutor will make a pupil digest this new lesson, that the height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own: it is by order, and not by force, that it is to be acquired. Socrates, her first minion, is so averse to all manner of violence, as totally to throw it aside, to slip into the more natural facility of her own progress; ’tis the nursing mother of all human pleasures, who in rendering them just, renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses, whets our desire to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude: unless we mean to say, that the regimen which stops the toper before he has drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten to a surfeit, and the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to pleasure. If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other. She can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed beds: she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good things, and how to lose them without concern: an office much more noble than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life is unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that men may justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices. If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition, that he had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of some noble expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the beat of drum, that excites the youthful ardor of his companions, leaves that to follow another that calls to a morris or the bears; who would not wish, and find it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize of those exercises; I see no other remedy, but that he be bound prentice in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of a duke; according to Plato’s precept, that children are to be placed out and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own souls.
Putting Ideas into Words
The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.
Storyworthy
"The other reason I can recommend storytelling, and learning about it with the book you're holding, is that we're all disappearing — you, me, everyone we know and love. A little heavy for a foreword maybe, but when you tell stories, you do yourself a kind favor by taking a moment to write your name in the wet cement of life before you head to whatever is next. This is a much more selfless act than conventional wisdom would have you believe. It's a little like leaving a note in the logbook on the trail that others will be hiking after you, a note that might give the next hiker a clue."
The Discipline Required To Create The Life You Want
You might ask: “But isn’t this a privileged way to live?” Yes, I do feel very privileged that for me happiness is relatively cheap. My ideal day doesn’t require me to be rich or powerful or important. It just requires that I be good enough at something to sell my services on the open market and strong enough to say no to things that are beyond my needs. That is a privilege, and it’s more accessible than we think. There are plenty of billionaires who don’t have it, plenty of ordinary people who have never lost it.
So it doesn’t take some enormous amount of money. Nor do you have to be famous or well-connected or wildly successful.
It takes discipline.
The discipline to figure out what you actually want your life to look like.
The Notebook
We should note, too, that the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forced the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts.’ You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better.
The Writing Life
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Writing to Learn
Once again I was stuck by one of the miracles of the cognitive process—that the act of writing will summon from the buried past exactly what we need exactly when we need it.
He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns in end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.
You Learn By Living: 11 Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.