quotes

I’ve thought from time to time that people don’t do a great job of quoting things. I figure I might as well make my own list. Here we go.

“it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.” – 95%-ile isn’t that good, by Dan Luu

“…an ambitious person on an optimal trajectory will often read to the system as an instance of breakage.” – How to do great work, by Paul Graham

“Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.” – Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

“When we give – in the world, what we want the most – we heal the broken part inside each of us. […] Happiness exists in action, it exists in telling the truth and saying what the truth is, and it exists in giving away what you want the most.”
– Eve Ensler, playwright of The Vagina Monologues, TED 2004

“… the self-important always know, at some level of their consciousness, that their egotism is going to be punctured by humor. That’s why they see it as a threat.” – John Cleese

“The best advice is not to tell people what to do, but to ask them the right questions. Find out what’s going on in their head, and help them frame that in a way that’s useful.” – David Allen (@gtdguy)

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home.”
– Joan Didion

“You have brains in your head.
you have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.”
— Dr. Seuss, Oh, the places you’ll go!

“What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.” – Eugene Gendlin

All you need to write a script is paper and pencil.”
– Akira Kurosawa

“Have you ever used a new program or system and found it to be obnoxiously buggy, but then after a while you didn’t notice the bugs anymore? If so, then congratulations: you have been trained by the computer to avoid some of its problems.” – Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.”
– William Faulkner

“I’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song” – Sugar we’re going down, Fall Out Boy

“When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modern times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man.” – Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, 1961