Sergio > Sergio's Quotes

“She asked me for some advice regarding Mark’s financial affairs. It’s a very common problem for the families of missing persons – what happens when someone disappears? How long do you wait before you clean out their flat? Do you reregister their car? Who keeps paying the car payments? How do
you access their bank account? What about rent and mortgage? When do you tell their employer you don’t think they’re coming back to their job?”
― Nicole Morris, Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons

“A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass. Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.”
― Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing

“Jerome says Peter founded the church in Antioch, Syria. If so, January 15–22, AD 34 was probably the time when Peter did it.”
― James Allen Moseley, Biographies of Jesus' Apostles: Ambassadors in Chains

“Individual Desirability / Aggregate Desirability = Your Desirability Ratio

The higher a relationship’s Desirability Ratio, the more stable a relationship will be. If a relationship’s Desirability Ratio drops below one for either partner, the relationship becomes very likely to dissolve.

To put that in other words: When your partner is much more desirable to you than their “league” would suggest, and when this dynamic is mutual (i.e., each partner values the other more than society on average values that other partner), your relationship will be uniquely stable. However, if either partner values the other less than that person would be valued on an open market, the relationship becomes unstable.”
― Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships

“Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge of Akagi would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamoto’s choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: “Admiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.”
― Dale A. Jenkins, Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway

“You never fail until you quit trying.”
― Tom Sechrist

“Suffering is a gift. In it is hidden mercy.”
― Rumi

“a safe and humble backbencher’s niche in the Senate was the inheritance of a Julius these days,”
― Colleen McCullough, The First Man in Rome

“I understand my parents quite well. They think of a wife as a man’s luxury, which he can afford only when he is making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of this view of the relationship between man and wife, because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract from the man because of her more favourable social rank . . . Which”
― Robyn Arianrhod, Young Einstein: And the story of E=mc²

“... En la puerta en la cama: agujeros. En la mano, en el diario, en el tiempo, en el aire: todo lleno de agujeros, todo esponja, todo como un colador colándose a sí mismo...”
― Julio Cortázar, El perseguidor

“When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love