Favourite excerpts from everywhere

… So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever…..

“You must be joking Mr Feynman” PP 110

Wozniak: “… Steve I am not making jokes anymore, making jokes is really important to me…”

Steve Wozniak quitting scene from Pirates of silicon valley

 

Natasha:…. It is a very complicated situation cousin sonja, I am in love with Aleksei, he loves Alicia, Alicia is having an affair with Lev, Lev loves Tatiana, Tatiana loves Simkin, Simkin loves me. I love Simkin but in a different way than Aleksei, Aleksei loves Tatiana like a sister, Tatiana’s siter loves Trigorin like a brother, Trigorin’s brother is having an affair with my sister….
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Sonja:…. Natasha, to love is to suffer, to avoid suffering one must not love but then one suffers from not loving therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer… To be happy is to love, to be happy is then to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness… I hope you are getting this down…..

Woody Allen, “Love and death”, 1975

 

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past

                                                                                 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

 

We live our lives forward but understand it backward

                                                                                                                                Soren Kierkegaard

 

…People make the mistake of thinking that everything they need to know can be learned in a biochemistry course. You need it all–and the sooner you get started, the better. If you don’t know something, you can go and learn it yourself. What is graduate education about? At the end of the day, it’s learning how I can become an expert on a subject in two days and apply that to solve a problem that I just discovered I have. You’re not going to be able to predict what it is you need.

                                                                                                                               Tom Knight
Dear Karen,
If you’re reading this, it means I actually worked up the courage to mail it, so good for me. You don’t know me very well, but if you get me started I have a tendency to go on and on about how hard the writing is for me. But this, this is the hardest thing I ever had to write.
There is no easy way to say this so I’ll just say it, I met someone. It was an accident, I wasn’t looking for it, I wasn’t on the make. it was a perfect storm, she said one thing, I said another and the next thing I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation. Now there’s this feeling in my gut that she might be the one.  She’s completely nuts in a way that makes me smile, highly neurotic, a great deal of maintenance required. She is you Karen. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I don’t know how to be with you right now, and that scares the shit out of me. Because if I am not with you right now I have this feeling we’ll get lost out there. It’s a big bad world full of twist and turns and people have a way of blinking and missing the moment. The moment that could have changed everything.
 
I don’t know what’s going on with us and I can’t tell you why you should waste a leap of faith on the likes of me. But damn you smell good, like home and you make excellent coffee that’s got to count for something, right? Call me!
Unfaithfully yours,
                                                                                                                  Hank Moody

…. You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives….

Carol Dweck: Mindset: How you can fulfill your potential

 

….If there something where there is doubt, don’t claim you are certain, it’s amazing how relaxing it is not to pretend more than you do. I am surprised those who claim to speak in the name of God don’t take more advantage of this….

 

Christopher Hitchens