Wed
Dec
23
It’s a very consistent pattern in this business that collectively as a society and as individuals we all suffer from what I call macro- myopia. A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short-term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long-term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short-term impact of this stuff [the Internet] will be less than the hype would suggest but the long-term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today.
Thu
Dec
17
See through things. Reality is an illusion. The real things are invisible and can only be felt. Live in the now at least some part of the day. Realize that everything is a miracle. You included.
Thu
Sep
17
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!
Randy Pausch
Fri
Jan
23
Every few hundred years in Western Civilization, there occurs a sharp transformation … Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself - its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world, and the people born can’t even imagine the world in which their grandparents live and into which their own parents were born.
We are currently living through just such a transformation.
Sat
Oct
11
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, April 1910
Tue
Sep
2
If you really want to know who I am, you have to be as absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other, and only emptiness will be mirrored. Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me.
Osho
Fri
Aug
29
Don’t believe anything. Regard things on a scale of probabilities. The things that seem most absurd, put under ‘Low Probability’, and the things that seem most plausible, you put under ‘High Probability’. Never believe anything. Once you believe anything, you stop thinking about it. The more things you believe, the less mental activity. If you believe something, and have an opinion on every subject, then your brain activity stops entirely, which is clinically considered a sign of death, nowadays in medical practice. So put things on a scale or probability, and never believe or disbelieve anything entirely.
— Robert Anton Wilson