Sonali Sengupta > Sonali's Quotes

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  • #1
    Richard Francis Burton
    “Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.”
    Sir Richard Francis Burton

  • #2
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    “Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

  • #3
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    “The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference”
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

  • #4
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb
    “If there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: 'innocent until proven guilty' as opposed to 'guilty until proven innocent', let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.”
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

  • #5
    Irving Stone
    “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.”
    Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

  • #6
    Irving Stone
    “One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”
    Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

  • #7
    Irving Stone
    “How difficult it is to be simple.”
    Irving Stone, Lust for Life

  • #8
    Ayn Rand
    “Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”
    Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

  • #9
    Ayn Rand
    “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
    Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

  • #10
    Walter Kirn
    “Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.”
    Walter Kirn

  • #11
    Steve Goodier
    “An important decision I made was to resist playing the Blame Game. The day I realized that I am in charge of how I will approach problems in my life, that things will turn out better or worse because of me and nobody else, that was the day I knew I would be a happier and healthier person. And that was the day I knew I could truly build a life that matters.”
    Steve Goodier

  • #12
    Lauren Oliver
    “At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.”
    Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

  • #13
    Claire Cross
    “It's so much easier to point a finger than to take responsibility yourself, isn't it? Maybe it isn't so simple as this person's fault or that one. Maybe we make up the dance together, as we go along, and no one knows what the result will be.”
    Claire Cross, Double Trouble

  • #14
    Eckhart Tolle
    “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”
    Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

  • #15
    Eckhart Tolle
    “Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
    Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

  • #16
    Eckhart Tolle
    “Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of
    ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.”
    Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

  • #17
    Mahatma Gandhi
    “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.”
    Mahatma Gandhi

  • #18
    Sylvia Plath
    “I am too pure for you or anyone.

    From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”
    Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

  • #19
    John Lubbock
    “Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.”
    John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life

  • #20
    Mahatma Gandhi
    “Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”
    Mahatma Gandhi

  • #21
    John Ruskin
    “The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”
    John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

  • #22
    Toba Beta
    “‎If heart filled with purity,
    then mind found the beauty.”
    Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

  • #23
    Michio Kaku
    “In 1967, the second resolution to the cat problem was formulated by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose work was pivotal in laying the foundation of quantum mechanics and also building the atomic bomb. He said that only a conscious person can make an observation that collapses the wave function. But who is to say that this person exists? You cannot separate the observer from the observed, so maybe this person is also dead and alive. In other words, there has to be a new wave function that includes both the cat and the observer. To make sure that the observer is alive, you need a second observer to watch the first observer. This second observer is called “Wigner’s friend,” and is necessary to watch the first observer so that all waves collapse. But how do we know that the second observer is alive? The second observer has to be included in a still-larger wave function to make sure he is alive, but this can be continued indefinitely. Since you need an infinite number of “friends” to collapse the previous wave function to make sure they are alive, you need some form of “cosmic consciousness,” or God. Wigner concluded: “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Toward the end of his life, he even became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. In this approach, God or some eternal consciousness watches over all of us, collapsing our wave functions so that we can say we are alive. This interpretation yields the same physical results as the Copenhagen interpretation, so this theory cannot be disproven. But the implication is that consciousness is the fundamental entity in the universe, more fundamental than atoms. The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them.”
    Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest To Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind

  • #24
    Michio Kaku
    “Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.”
    Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

  • #25
    Michio Kaku
    “sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?”
    Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

  • #26
    Dale Carnegie
    “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”
    Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

  • #27
    “Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
    Stephen Hawking

  • #28
    Daniel J. Boorstin
    “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
    Daniel J. Boorstin

  • #29
    “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. ”
    Stephen Hawking

  • #30
    Albert Einstein
    “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
    Albert Einstein



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