Latest Quotes

“Like elephant pregnancies, most books have long gestation periods.”

— Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

“But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the b…”

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.”

— David Mitchell, Q&A An interview with David Mitchell, the author behind 'Cloud Atlas'

“Days were defined, glossed, by a certain tonal consistency.”

— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life: A Novel

“I invited Mozart to dinner on condition he didn’t embarrass me. In the middle of the meal he began weeping uncontrollably. “You silly fuck,” I screamed, “what are you doing in this century if you can’t take it?”

— Greogry Orr, The Dinner

“We didn’t yet know the full extent of our sync system issues, but one thing was crystal clear: we needed to scale. A lot.”

— Christine Spang, Growing up with MySQL

“Our team knew the dangers and distractions of premature optimization, and figured the “easiest” way to shard was to avoid it for as long as possible.”

— Christine Spang, Growing up with MySQL

“Building an email system requires efficiently managing a huge amount of information essentially from day one. Our sync system has more data for a single user than most startup’s database of everything. To date, nearly 150k accounts have been synced by the Nylas Cloud system, and our datastore grows…”

— Christine Spang, Growing up with MySQL

“As a creation of light, the eye can do everything that light itself can do. Everything visible is passed on to the eye through light, the eye delivers it to the whole person. The ear is mute, the mouth is deaf; but the eye hears and speaks. From the outside, the world is reflected in the eye; from t…”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Symmetry As a Developmental Principle in Nature and Art

“Plugins keep growing and more of them are available then ever before. To keep the collection of plugins manageable package support has been added. This is a convenient way to get one or more plugins, drop them in a directory and possibly keep them updated. Vim will load them automatically, or only w…”

— brammool, Vim version 8.0.

“Vim can now start a job, communicate with it and stop it. This is very useful to run a process for completion, syntax checking, etc. Channels are used to communicate with the job. Jobs can also read from or write to a buffer or afile.”

— brammool, Vim version 8.0.

“Some designers aren’t allowed to talk to customers. Some designers don’t sit side-by-side with engineers and product managers.”

— Jack Hallahan, Forgetting how the other half designs

“People were as easy to misinterpret as they were to read.”

— Choire Sicha, Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City

“Outsiders seem to think that it was the opening of the Wall that brought us our freedom. It was the other way around. First we fought for our freedom; and then, because of that, the Wall fell.”

— Marianne Birthler, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

“The Wall’s opening was not a gift from political elites and was in no way predetermined. It resulted from a remarkable constellation of actors and contingent events that came together in a precise but entirely unplanned sequence. Rather than rely on false assumptions that matters were inevitable and…”

— Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

“I've written this against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“I write with both reckless optimism and reckless despair. I believe that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Day now inclines to the present Earth.”

— Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics: Poets in Translation)

“For humans know their house and animals know where they must build, but our souls are inexperienced here, not knowing where to be implanted.”

— Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics: Poets in Translation)