Quotes
Some quotes to live by.
- “Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action.” Source
- “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.” [Richard Hamming: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering]
- “We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?” Source
- “Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often.” (re: friendship)
- “Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.” Source
- “Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.” Source
- “If an architect believes for a moment that there are hooks in the sky to hang his creations from, he may be able to conceive of structures that he would otherwise not dare to think about. Once the design starts to take shape, he may then begin to see ways in which the essence of it can still be achieved without the need for sky-hooks at all. Maybe this will work for us, too.” (Source: Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It) (re: skyhooks)
- “People need to be able to shape, extend, reconfigure, and repair their environment to feel truly at home within it… And when there’s no space to call your own, there’s no opportunity to take refuge in quiet and solitude, and it’s more difficult to share space with others.” Source
- “You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea. Only in the awareness of the present, can your hands feel the pleasant warmth of the cup. Only in the present, can you savor the aroma, taste the sweetness, appreciate the delicacy.” Source
- “Even if it’s not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.” Source
- “We’re all just walking each other home.” ― Ram Dass
- “磨刀不誤砍柴功” – Chinese Proverb. Taking a break to sharpen your saw will not delay you from cutting wood more
- Never be ashamed to let your feelings, smiles and tears shine a light in this world.
- Be humble at the mountaintops, be strong in the valleys, and be faithful in between. Source
- “Anything new is by nature without precedent — meaning, without data to know whether it will work or not. So when we approach building new things, we don’t optimize for metrics. We optimize for feelings.” Source
- “Yet I live earnestly, building the most beautiful sandcastles I can, knowing they will be washed away. And getting others on the beach to build with me, at times even suspending our belief of the fact that it will disappear; letting ourselves be fooled for a moment that it will last.” Source
- “Time is not linear, but a series of concentric circles, like the rings of a tree. Ourselves today, our newest selves, are the outermost rings of a tree. We are comprised also of every person we were in the years leading up to today, even if those layers have compressed into the past.” Source
- “You can’t build railroads before it is railroad time.” (Chuck Thacker)
- “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will.” (Charles Baudelaire)
- “In place of occasional experiences of depth that renew and satisfy us, we are simply given an infinite surface upon which to skim indefinitely.” ( Source)
- “Many a failure of love follows on the—usually false—opinion that we have exhausted the other person’s inside, that there is no further promise of depth.” (
Source)
- Deep attention as diversification: gaining access to a bit more of the world.
- “exhaling does not take valuable time away from inhaling”