Asad > Asad's Quotes

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Love me or hate me, both are in my favor. For if you love me I will always be in your heart; if you hate me I will always be in your mind.”
― William Shakespeare

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
― Albert Camus

“Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.”
― voltaire

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.”
― Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
― Alfred Adler

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“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

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”
― William Shakespeare

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.”
― Søren Kierkegaard