Prateek Singh > Prateek's Quotes

“The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Human civilisation was like a young, unworldly person walking alone across the desert of the universe, who has found out about the existence of a potential lover. Though the person could not see the potential lover's face or figure, the knowledge that the other person existed somewhere in the distance created lovely fantasies about the potential lover that spread like wildfire.”
― Liu Cixin, Sun of China

“Existence is the premise for everything else.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.”
― Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“While you may be able to say with precision what the average man will do, "you can never foretell what any one man will do.”
― Lisa Sanders, Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis

“Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes willingness to try.”
― Atul Gawande

“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.”
― Atul Gawande

“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“We want perfection without practice. Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job --- not a calling.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

"Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The crucial driver of evolution, Darwin understood, was not nature’s sense of purpose, but her sense of humor).”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“But let's not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you've probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“What is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“The hidden track was proved victorious then and continues to do so, as even after a couple of decades, millions of students in India, remain hidden away from our eyes in these dark tunnels with moving shovels in their tired hands in the hope of becoming specialists and super specialists”
― Ashish Jaiswal, Fluid: The Approach Applied by Geniuses Over Centuries