Veslava A > Veslava A's Quotes

“I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Procrastination expert Rita Emmett explains: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“Focus on the process (the way you spend your time) instead of the product (what you want to accomplish).”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.
- The R-Selectors, Trunclade”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
― Jim Rohn

“A person hears only what they understand.”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.”
― Nikita Gill

“How about this,” I suggested. “Instead of feeling that you’ve blown the day and thinking, ‘I’ll get back on track tomorrow,’ try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: How to Make and Break Habits - and Build a Happier Life from the no.1 New York Times Bestselling Queen of Self-Help

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.

We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
― Desmond Tutu

“Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”
― Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps

“There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.”
― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

“Если ты огорчаешься по поводу чего-либо внешнего, то угнетает тебя не сама эта вещь, а твое суждение о ней. Но устранить последнее в твоей власти.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“For if I am interesting to you precisely to the extent that I'm not one of you, then your desire to civilize me, to turn me into a good citizen of Nuremberg, can lead to nothing but loss of interest.”
― Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”
― Steven Millhauser

“I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.”
― Steven Millhauser, In the Penny Arcade

“With your helt I have furnished myself inside and out. My thoughts are yours. These words are yours. Even my black and bitter tears are your, for I shed them at the thought of the life I ever had, which is to say, your life, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg.”
― Steven Milhauser

“Sometimes I feel that I am slowly erasing muself, in order for someone else to appear, the one I long for, who will not resemble me.”
― Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Members of this school insist that the only way to find an opening to our underground world is to seek out a quiet and secluded spot. Close your eyes. Concentrate your attention inward. Descend.”
― Steven Millhauser, The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin