Prateek Joshi > Prateek's Quotes

“Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.”
― Aristophanes

“Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.”
― T.C. Boyle

“Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.”
― Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

“I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique? For months, for years, no, all my life I sought to find out who I am. Why do you think I became a Baptist? Why did I try to force myself into the Riverbank Swimming Pool? And did I become a lawyer just to prove to the publishers I could do something worthwhile? Any idiot that sees only the obvious is blind. For God sake, I have never seen and I have never felt inferior to any man or beast.”
― Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

“Why don't you have a right to say you are Jesus? And why isn't the proper response to that "congratulations"?”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me
whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?”
― Salvador Dalí