Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

The Bed of Procrustes

The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.

To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.

In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.

I susupect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.

modernity's double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.

Your brain is more intelligent when you dont' insturct it on what to do- something people who take showers discover on occasion.

If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.

I wonder if those who advocate generosity for its rewards notice the inconsistency, or if what they call generosity is an attractive investment strategy.

Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief.

Work destorys your sould by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.

In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury.  No randomness.

Using, as an exuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Compliance witht he straitjacket of narrow (Aristotelian) logic and avoidance of fatal inconsistencies are not the same thing.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Gratitude.

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.
It turns what we have into enough, and more.
It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity,
failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing
and mistakes into important events.
Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace to today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

-Melody Beattie

Friday, June 3, 2011

All men dream but not equally

All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.


t.e. lawrence