Collection of meaningful lines from 2021
"Celestial bodies always change twice. But when there are two new moons in March, those years turn out to be leaner. Cold and rainy." Agafia Tiagru
"Dern, we should be herding fish" - Dish Bogget
"The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over All the mountain streams." Lao Tse
"You never asked me if I wanted to be the son of God" - Sturgil Simpson
"Keep your mind on the things you desire, and as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself subconsciously seizing opportunities... We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis..." Elbert Hubbard
"Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself." Publilius Syrus
"oh how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way."
"Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance- now at this very moment- of all external events. That's all you need." - Marcus Aurelius
"Of the cro-magnons products that have been preserved, the best known are their artworks: their magnificent cave paintings, statues and musical instruments, which we still appreciate as are today." - Jared Diamond.
"A man is the resultant an exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards. His actions at any moment depends solely upon his Constitution and on the intensity and direction of the various agencies to which he is and has been subjected. Some of these will counteract each other; but as he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine" Erewhon
"As if the droplet was a Shadow without Mass, the nib of god's pen," - Cixin Liu
"The ocean was space in miniature on Earth" - Cixin Liu
"If I love you what business is it of yours" - Cixin Liu
"See me in person I look like a ghost" - Kanye West
"Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know. Close your mouth. Block off your senses. Blunt your sharpness. Untie your knots. Soften your glare. Settle your dust. This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can't be approached or withdrawn from. Benefitted or harmed. Honored or brought into disgrace. It gives itself up continually. That is why it endures." Tao Te Ching
This guy's not fighting ME, he's fighting his INSTINCT TO KILL, me." - Q Tarentino on B Pitt character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
"Photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creations entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of Life: plants eat light, air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things." - Richard Powers
It makes no difference what men think of war, war endures. Might as well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be.. ... All other trades are contained in that of war. Is that why war endures? No it endures because young men love it, and old men love it IN them.. those that fought and those that did not. Men are born for games, nothing else." Cormack McCarthy
"A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: if your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning." - Richard Powers
"Go and meet whatever needs to be met, don't wait idly for what might approach." - Augustus McCrae
"That's the wild for you- it's got its dangers, which is part of the beauty. Course the Indians have had this land forever. To them it's precious because it's old. To us it's exciting because it's new " - Augustus McCrae
If you want skin like leather you better get used to scarring
"if you climb on top of a job, trying to master it, the work will suffocate. Let it take you, play with it, search for its own life." - Norman Potter
"I value my ability as an American to raise the middle finger practically above everything else." - Eric Weinstein
"If any part of a system depends on the internals of another part, then complexity increases as the square of the size of the system." - Dan Ingalls
"At scale everything breaks no matter what you do and you have to deal reasonably cleanly with that and try to hide it from the people actually using your system.... The biggest challenge is keeping things simple and scalable." - Urs Hölzle
"All input is loss, unless it's a game." Elon Musk
“A person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.” - JP Morgan
"He had known several men who blew their heads off and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him that it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men." Larry McMurty,
"Big ass chopper make God flinch" J Cole
"He dissects verses but knows not ecstasy, which is the soul of the verses." Gordon Wasson
"Identity is dissolved in the higher wordless truth of ecstasy. In that world, all divisions are overcome. There is only the One Great Life; it sees itself at play, and it is glad." - T McKenna
"Every individual is that once the beneficiary and victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born." - A. Huxley
"Through the act of speaking vividly, we enter into a flirtation with the domain of the imagination." T. McKenna
"Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency." - Calvino
"Enthusiasm arouses an eager want that no amount of discussion or threat can accomplish." "First arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way." Carnegie
"I shall pass this way but once, any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, before I shall not pass this way again." HtWF&IP, Carnegie
"The introduction of numbers as coordinates is an act of violence." Hermann Weyl
We need an agnostic AI, and that is called the singularity. When the idea of connectedness becomes unity becomes what it already was- unincumbered participation in the present eternity.
"Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise." Sam Pascoe
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone." Alan Watts
"The art of zen is like deceiving a child with an empty fist." Rinzai
"The fool who persists in his folly will become wise" - William Blake
"There is no progressive like a regressive. "
"The growth phase of a civilization is led by a creative minority with a strong self confident sense of style, virtue and purpose. The uncreative majority follows along through memisis, a mechanical and superficial immitation of the great inspired originals. In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a "lapse into truancy" (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship), and a "surrender to a sense of promiscuity" (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that "are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of 'proletarianization." - Charles Murray, Toynbee
"Critical Theorys obsessive compulsion with it's genitals is not a sign of a mature culture, but a childish one." - Michael Walsh
"Devilish boredom follows mastery."