love

We talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, til gradually both reached the central fire. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves in such a region...I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs. - John Gray, '7 Types of Atheism', page 43, qt. Bertrand Russell on meeting Joseph Conrad

I miss you, it's as simple as that. I want to tell you everything. - Phantom Thread

self-determination

Everybody wanna be like Mike / but Mike wanna be like L - Big L

"Will you or won't you have it so?" is the most probing question we are ever asked. We answer by consents or nonconsents and not by words. What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as human beings. - William James

He that is choice of his time will also be choice of his company, and choice of his actions, lest the first engage him in vanity and loss, and the latter by being criminal, be a throwing his time and himself away, and a going back in the accounts of eternity. - Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living

influence

In conclusion, life is messy and I don't have any advice. - Dan Luu

Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves. - Virginia Woolf

A lot of people like "let me walk you out". Whatcha gonna walk me out to? Naw, that don't fit the bill. You talking too much about robbing, killing, stealing, and shooting. That aint what I'm standing for. - Terence Crawford

I’d say the history that Charlie [Munger] and I have had of persuading decent, intelligent people who we thought were doing unintelligent things to change their course of action has been poor...we really don’t believe in buying into organisations to change them. - Warren Buffet

Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is a short parenthesis in a long period, and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been. - John Donne, Devotions

I am not an American. I am the American. - Mark Twain

practice

The joy of practicing leads you to the celebration of the creation. - Cecil Taylor

You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself - Miles Davis

You have to practice before you can become aware of your original nature, your original face - Road to Heaven

大道甚夷，而民好径 - 老子

The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate. - Dan Luu

You can never go somewhere you've never been without doing something you've never done. - Chris Paul

I was pretty good by the time [I was in] 8th or 9th grade and then I just kinda sorta quit practicing and playing and by the time I left high school I was having a hard time breaking 80 two days in a row...I'd never broken 70 until my second year in college. Five years after that I was Player of the Year on tour. - Paul Azinger

Every night before I go to bed I meditate. And every morning and evening I chant the Dizang Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. I only attended the first grade, but I’ve learned to read the characters in the sutras. I can tell you from my own experience that you can achieve something if you practice. If you don’t practice, you achieve nothing. - Road to Heaven

Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.

"The biggest thing is my confidence and belief in my work. I think I didn't have it because I wasn't putting a substantial amount in and it was really showing. But from everything that I did this summer, physically in the weight room, tough workouts, pushing myself to exhaustion, throwing up in workouts, almost in tears," he says. "Pushing myself to that limit to try and make this season easier, and it did, man...before it felt like games started to feel like those workouts. And [then] they started to feel easier than those workouts. And I think when you can get to that point, that's when you really start to make improvements." Jalen Suggs

PR

If you complain, no one wants to hang out with you. - Gil Scott-Heron

Culllaaaah struck! - Zora Neal Hurston

We want to be, honestly, what we are. We like humans. We like people. We think people have great potential, and even if they aren't what they seem, we are happy with them. - Robin Hanson

thinking

Therefore, when I saw so much nervous apprehension that, if I were permitted to speak -- when I found they were afraid to have me speak -- when I found that they considered my speaking damaging to their cause -- when I found that they appealed from facts and reasonings to mob law -- I said, no man need tell me what the heart and secret counsel of these men are. They tremble and they are afraid. - Henry Ward Beecher

Marginalism is more scientific, more exact, more concrete, always trying to steer our attention to "What is going to work, given where we're starting from?" I think almost everyone gets it, and indeed almost everyone lives it in most of their choices, say when they go to the supermarket, "Should I buy a bag of rice? How much rice do we have at home?". Hard to think of many people who can't think that way. But that said there's another part of the brain that switches on when issues are emotional or involve status rankings or politics and then that way of thinking flies out the window. And I'm just trying to nudge people to be a little more consisent, be more marginalistic, more concrete in a larger set of your choices. That so far has been a losing battle to me in many ways. - Tyler Cowen

software

If you think this is good software, you have lost your goddamn minds. - Jeff Atwood

Because computers are dumb, pedantic beasts, programming is fundamentally tedious and frustrating - Marijn Haverbeke

Computers are deterministic, structured, simplistic, repetitious, unimaginative, unsympathetic, uncreative. - William Kent

history

History teaches us nothing except that something will happen - Lord Dacre

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian