Words of Wisdom
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.”
— Robert A. Heinlein
“The great power gained by specialization cost man his sense of purpose; it has become almost impossible to have an overview necessary to harness human progress into safe and beneficial directions. Fragments of knowledge are used on an ad hoc basis, but coherent direction for mankind is lacking.”
— Agnes Denes
“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”
— Maya Angelou
“Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”
— Donella Meadows
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
— Annie Dillard
“As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.”
— Natalia Ginzburg
Writing is refined thinking.
— Stephen King
“If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.
Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same.”
— Christopher Alexander
“Philosophy is the art of living a good life, and living a good life is the art of asking good questions.”
— Agnes Callard
“In the history of the world, most of the people who have ever lived either did not know how to write or, if they did, left no writing behind, which is among the reasons why the historical record is so maddeningly unfair. To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind.”
— Jill Lepore