Beau > Beau's Quotes

“Our digital experiences are out of body. This biases us toward depersonalised behaviour in an environment where one’s identity can be a liability. But the more anonymously we engage with others, the less we experience the human repercussions of what we say and do. By resisting the temptation to engage from the apparent safety of anonymity, we remain accountable and present - and are much more likely to bring our humanity with us into the digital realm”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“The internet, as its proponents rightly remind us, makes for variety and convenience; it does not force anything upon you. Only it turns out it doesn’t feel like that at all. We don’t feel as if we had freely chosen our online practices. We feel instead that they are habits we have helplessly picked up or that history has enforced, that we are not distributing our attention as we intend or even like to”
― Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory - but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, by bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.”
― Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

“In a multi-tasking world where pure focus is harder and harder to come by, paper’s seclusion from the Web is an emerging strength. There’s nothing like holding a sheaf of beautifully designed pages in your hands. The whole world slows down, and your mind with it.”
― William_Powers, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Richard began to understand darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Metaphors failed him, then. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”
― Albert Einstein

“Your now is not your forever.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That's me: I'm not that.”
― John Green

“Without a shared design language and practices, collaboration is difficult.”
― Alla Kholmatova, Design Systems

“As the amount of code in a project grows, it gradually surpasses understanding. The amount of time it takes to figure out what to change just keeps increasing.”
― Michael C. Feathers, Working Effectively with Legacy Code