Saeed Ramazany > Saeed's Quotes

“The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.”
― Tracy Thompson

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”
― Coco Chanel, Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons From The World's Most Elegant Woman

“There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Your brain is most intelligent when you don't instruct it on what to do - something people who take showers discover on occasion.”
― Nassim Taleb

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
― Alain de Botton

“He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run thru by a spear.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.”
― Chris Hedges

“Despair, or folly?' said Gandalf. 'It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.'
'At least for a while,' said Elrond. 'The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strenght nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“وقتی خدا میخواست تو را بسازد چه حال خوشی داشت
چه حوصله یی
این موها
این چشم ها
من همه ی این ها را دوست دارم.میفهمی؟”
― عباس معروفی

“آری ان روز چو میرفت کسی
داشتم امدنش را باور
من نمیدانستم معنی هرگز را
تو چرا بازنگشتی دیگر”
― هوشنگ ابتهاج

“به هر صورت اینطورم: آنچه را به من می‌دهند، می‌گیرم، آنچه را از من می‌گیرند، دیگر نمی‌خواهم. حقیقتاً ترک‌کردنم آسان است.”
― Christian Bobin, دیوانه‌بازی

“Do not regret what you have done”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“بدان که اول چیزی که حق بیافرید گوهری بود تابناک. او را "عقل" نام کرد. و این گوهر را سه صفت بخشید:
یکی شناخت حق و یکی شناخت خود و یکی شناخت آن که نبود، پس ببود.
از آن صفت که به شناخت حق تعلق داشت حُسن پدید آمد - که آن را "نیکویی" خوانند.
و از آن صفت که به شناخت خود تعلق داشت عشق پدید آمد که آن را "مهر" خوانند
و از آن صفت که نبود پس به بود تعلق داشت حُزن پدید آمد - که آن را " اندوه " خوانند.”
― Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, قصه‌های شیخ اشراق

“Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl

“Plan for what it is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Let us return to pathemata mathemata (learning through pain) and consider its reverse: learning through thrills and pleasure. People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“making some types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical “discoveries”are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans. This is why I have been against the state dictating to us what we “should”be doing: only evolution knows if the “wrong”thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game to allow for selection.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life