Quotes

We ignore what created us; we adore what we create.

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.

Since the time of his youth, Crazy Horse had known that the world men lived in was only a shadow of the real world. To get into the real world, he had to dream, and when he was in the real world everything seemed to float or dance. In this real word his horse danced as if it were wild or crazy, and this was why he called himself Crazy Horse. He had learned that if he dreamed himself into the real world before going into a fight, he could endure anything.

Can you think of anything funnier than a man having the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the river and his king quarrels with mine, although I don't with him?

Could I interest you in everything all of the time?

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded

Aren't there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed?

Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it's gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that's fine in low doses but if it's the basic main staple of your diet you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.

If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't taking enough risks

What a liberation to realize that the "voice in my head" is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

You'd shoot a man in the back?" "Well, it's the safest way, isn't it?

It's great when the things around us run smoothly, but it's even better when they don't do so by default. That, after all, is how we gain the space to make decisions—many of them undoubtedly wrongheaded—and, through trial and error, to mature into responsible adults, tolerant of compromise and complexity.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around every once in a while, you might miss it.

You know what I love most about Mars? They still dream. We gave up. They're an entire culture dedicated to a common goal, working together as one to turn a lifeless rock into a garden. We had a garden and we paved it.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Training is like fighting with a gorilla. You don't stop when you're tired. You stop when the gorilla is tired.

In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh - whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish - thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The realization that we collectively have no idea what we're doing here, that a whole lot of what we believe to be real and permanent is imaginary and temporary, and that there are no rules to life, no winners, that we should take care of nature and each other, and that you should follow your muse to do what you find interesting and beautiful.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Reality is that which is revealed to the patient eye of love.

I don't know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

When a man strays from the right path, a kind man needs the courage to raise his fist and correct him.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.

I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people

That day, beginning with the fissure opening on the frontier, the shape of the world began to crumble.

It's not about the number of hours you practice, it's about the number of hours your mind is present during the practice.

Benefit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge.

For god's sake, ignore rules for writing. Except the ones that end up making you money.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth

It is not possible to come into contact twice with a mortal being in the same state.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty - some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Life has many doors Ed-boy

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

The purpose of a system is what it does

The possible has been tried and failed. Now it's time to try the impossible.

You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

Your reward for doing something good is to do something else good.

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

It's a responsibility to be as open as you possibly can to the world as an aesthetic object.

Although the bag on the oxygen mask may not inflate, oxygen is flowing.

Change gives the illusion of progress.

Don't do anything in extremes, including not doing anything in extremes.

Don't hate the media. Be the media.

Don't ignore your dreams, but also critically examine your dreams to ensure they're healthy and would actually bring you happiness.

Everything just gets worse as you age. Sure, my dad said it too back then, but he just didn't get how the world moved on and improved. This time around though it's real, everything gets more stupid and dumb and I hate it.

If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.

If you want to succeed but cannot see the solution, think about how you might fail, then just don't do that.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Some people thrive on adversity and struggle; I'm not one of them, and I believe adversity and struggle come anyway, there's no need to seek them out.

Teach a man to fish, and you reduce the chances of maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.

That's the thing about opinions. They're like tattoos - some of them you'll keep for life but most of them you don't want after awhile.

The software isn't finished until the last user is dead.

There are bold X, and old X, but no old, bold X. Replace X with any practitioners subject to sufficient risk as a result of their practice.

Truth is dead. There is just output.

You don't need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun your hiking partner.

The difference between a journeyman and a master is the journeyman is saying "it's never done that" whilst the master is already running.

A good lesson for anyone who wants to shift power structures: The ones who do the shifting often are not the ones who get the power.