Hồ Vinh

“Don’t you know that most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Accurate knowledge does not improve people's lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy... There are channels through which reality can become unreal, or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn't mean we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.”
― Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

“The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.
...
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try to bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have mental models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models.”
― Charlie Munger