“Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”
― The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
― The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
“To get the right things done, choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing where to focus.”
― 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done
― 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done
“I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”
― Principles: Life and Work
― Principles: Life and Work
“Having the basics—a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sex—is most important, and those things don’t get much better when you have a lot of money or much worse when you have less. And the people one meets at the top aren’t necessarily more special than those one meets at the bottom or in between.”
― Principles: Life and Work
― Principles: Life and Work
“If you believe that science provides not basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, there for, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature or human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful may to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
Ryan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ryan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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