Latest Quotes

“The idea or theory that you are currently formulating, that seems so fresh and alive and truthful, will almost certainly be shot down or ridiculed in a few decades or centuries. And so it is best to keep this in mind and not grow too fond of your ideas or too certain of their truth.”

— Robert Greene, Mastery

“Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them.”

— Robert Greene, Mastery

“The key is to be aware of this process and to encourage yourself to go as far as you can with your doubts, your reworkings, and your strained efforts, knowing the value and purpose of the frustration and creative blocks you are facing.”

— Robert Greene, Mastery

“It really was blue: purple-blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer, diamond-blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“Now in such an age, conviction politicians may well spring up in large numbers all of a sudden, and run riot, declaring, 'The world is stupid and nasty, not I. The responsibility for the consequences cannot be laid at my door but must rest with those who employ me and whose stupidity or nastiness I…”

— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures

“The only man who has a 'vocation' for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken if the world, when looked at from his point of view, proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer it, and who, when faced with all that obduracy, can still say 'Nevertheless!' despi…”

— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures

“'So much the better,' thought Margot, and suddenly she felt extremely elated. When she had sent off the letter she had anticipated a far more trivial consequence: he refuses to show it, wife gets wild, stamps, has a fit. So the first suspicions are roused and that eases the way. But now chance had h…”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“Now, as he strolled along in the mild sunshine, he realized that the reckoning was about to begin. When he saw again the house in which he had lived for so long with Elisabeth; when he went up in the lift in which the nurse with his baby in her arms, and his wife, looking very pale and happy, had go…”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“Her gaiety, too, was like her mother's—a singular unobtrusive gaiety. It was just a quiet delight in one's own existence with a faint note of humorous surprise at being alive at all—yes, that was the tenor of it: mortal gaiety.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“She was a clinging little soul, docile and gentle. Her love was of the lily variety; but now and then it burst into flame and at such times Albinus was deluded into thinking that he had no need of any other love-mate.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

“For now, though, he'd just have to add her name to the list of people he cared about who'd moved on. It was getting to be a long list, and it contained some pretty important names. In time, he thought, Aimee would probably seem like a footnote, but just now her absence felt bigger than that, like ma…”

— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers

“To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say—that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself.”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Listening to... is Dasein's existential way of Being-open as Being-with for Others. Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being—as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears, because…”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to 'hear' a 'pure noise'. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it ce…”

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Hypervisualism tends to neglect this truth and even sets out to reduce sound itself, and for that matter all the other senses, to vision through devices such as charts and wave measurements, mathematical or oscillographic, forgetting that none of these make any noise and that hence, however informat…”

— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture

“As Stanley Crouch rightly has noted, fifty years ago black communities were the most civilized and humane in America— highly nurturing, caring, loving, and self-respecting behind the walls of American apartheid. The market invasion, including the ugly drug invasion, has transformed too many black ne…”

— Cornel West, Race Matters

“Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances.”

— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc

“Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don't understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.”

— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc

“Laurie couldn't sleep. It was her third night at the Outpost, and the transition wasn't going as smoothly as she'd hoped. Part of it was the strangeness, after twenty-three years of marriage and nine months of communal living, of once again having a room of her own. She just wasn't accustomed to sol…”

— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers