Quotes I Like

If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you'll do important work.

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

Scars signal skin in the game.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

It is amazing how often the reason you can't find a convincing explanation for something is because your conclusion is wrong.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...

Tell me why the stars do shine,Tell me why the ivy twines,Tell me what makes skies so blue,And I'll tell you why I love you.Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,Tropisms make the ivy twine,Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,Testicular hormones are why I love you.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.

Some could say it is the external world which has molded our thinking-that is, the operation of the human brain-into what is now called logic. Others-philosophers and scientists alike-say that our logical thought (thinking process?) is a creation of the internal workings of the mind as they developed through evolution "independently" of the action of the outside world. Obviously, mathematics is some of both. It seems to be a language both for the description of the external world, and possibly even more so for the analysis of ourselves. In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.The very existence of mathematics is due to the fact that there exist statements or theorems, which are very simple to state but whose proofs demand pages of explanations. Nobody knows why this should be so. The simplicity of many of these statements has both aesthetic value and philosophical interest.

One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,

If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.

Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.

the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

moving first is a tactic, not a goal.

you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.

anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.

Success is never accidental.

Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?

if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?

Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.

take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.

Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.

Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.

This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.

the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,

There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.