Harsh > Harsh's Quotes

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

“Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“The very desire to be certain,to be secure,is the beginning of bondage.It's only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty,and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.”
― J.Krishnamurti

“Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.”
― William of Ockham

“The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.”
― Eugene J. McCarthy

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The geneticist Antoine Danchin once used the parable of the Delphic boat
to describe the process by which individual genes could produce the observed
complexity of the natural world. In the proverbial story, the oracle at Delphi is
asked to consider a boat on a river whose planks have begun to rot. As the
wood decays, each plank is replaced, one by one—and after a decade, no plank
is left from the original boat. Yet, the owner is convinced that it is the same
boat. How can the boat be the same boat—the riddle runs—if every physical
element of the original has been replaced?
The answer is that the “boat” is not made of planks but of the relationship
between planks. If you hammer a hundred strips of wood atop each other, you
get a wall; if you nail them side to side, you get a deck; only a particular
configuration of planks, held together in particular relationship, in a
particular order, makes a boat.
Genes operate in the same manner. Individual genes specify individual
functions, but the relationship among genes allows physiology. The genome is
inert without these relationships. That humans and worms have about the
same number of genes—around twenty thousand—and yet the fact that only
one of these two organisms is capable of painting the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel suggests that the number of genes is largely unimportant to the
physiological complexity of the organism. “It is not what you have,” as a
certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Police are bureaucrats with weapons.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

“People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder