Miranda Hajishengallis > Miranda's Quotes

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“And the secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is giving the other side the illusion of control.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. to think more flexibly entails a risk-we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated - or welcomed, depending on your point of view - to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life

“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”
― Aldous Huxley

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Trust your internal observations too much and too long, and you might be in for a very rude awakening. Second, we believe that our introspections are more reliable than those of others, which creates an illusion of superiority. Remedy: Be all the more critical with yourself. Regard your internal observations with the same skepticism as claims from some random person. Become your own toughest critic.”
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

“That is the power of formlessness — it gives the aggressor nothing to react against, nothing to hit.”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“If you don't say what you think then you kill your unborn self.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“It is said that the best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor,inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.”
― TALEB NASSIM NICHOLAS

“As Nietzsche wrote, “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.” Perhaps you will attain your goal, and a worthy goal at that, but at what price? Apply this standard to everything, including whether to collaborate with other people or come to their aid. In the end, life is short, opportunities are few, and you have only so much energy to draw on. And in this sense time is as important a consideration as any other. Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others—that is too high a price to pay. Power”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it).”
― Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“It is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know the questions that produced them. Indeed, one must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences that look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and, as Francis Bacon said, if they linger in our minds, they become obstructions to clear thinking.”
― Neil Postman

“Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Remember, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. Once you’ve got flexibility in the forefront of your mind you come into a negotiation with a winning mindset.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In conclusion: In new or shaky circumstances, we feel compelled to do something, anything. Afterward we feel better, even if we have made things worse by acting too quickly or too often. So, though it might not merit a parade in your honor, if a situation is unclear, hold back until you can assess your options”
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman— like a man— on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can— if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered , irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We can’t reimpose old myths on ourselves or believe in new ones made up out of a desire for comfort; therefore, the path of self-examination is the only one a person of conscience can reasonably follow.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.”
― Karl Popper

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming—in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you—means a loss of opportunity for some other task.”
― Marcus Aurelius Antonius

“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
― Charles Bukowski