“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”
— Bertrand Russell

“We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin

“You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.”
— Charlie Munger

“We don't only nurture what we love. We also love what we nurture.”
— Sherry Turkle

“You're absolutely unique, just like everyone else.”
— (supposedly) Margaret Mead

“Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they will find a way to make it better.”
— Ed Catmull

“Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
— Chinua Achebe

“Waiting in line is the scariest part of a roller coaster.”
— From a random movie, but the quote is good

“When art critics get together, they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
— Picasso

“For the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to choose his home in number, change, motion, in the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from one’s home and yet to be always at home; to be in the midst of the world, to see it, and yet to be hidden from it. Any man who is bored in the midst of a crowd is a fool, a fool, and I despise him.”
— Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

“The difference between the people who do the work and the people who just reel off memorized opinion is huge.”
— Shane Parrish

“Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.”
— Donella H. Meadows

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
— Robert J. Hanlon

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
—John Williams, Stoner


“I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.”
—Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (this is a great book, based on a BBC series from 1969, and all episodes are available on YouTube)