Quote of the Day

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Quote of the Day

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Quote of the Day

Error is not only the absolute error of believing what is false, but also the quantitative error of believing more or less strongly than is warranted by the degree of credibility properly attaching to the proposition believed in relation to the believer's knowledge. A man who is quite convinced that a certain horse will win the Derby is in error even if he does win.

- Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge

Quote of the Day

The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic.

- Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

Wisdom Of The Week

And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like failing behind.

[---]

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benfits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasing incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

[---]

The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions. With cancer, we're still working on posing the right questions in the first place.

- Excerpts from the book I am currently reading - Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World

Quote fo the Day

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment. ... Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. ... So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.

- J. S. Mill, On Liberty

Quote of the Day

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavour.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden