Searching for #failing

Greatness is not intelligence, greatness comes from character. And character isn't formed out of smart people, it's formed out of people who've sufferred

The failures are the curriculum. Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. There is no shortcut through that process that doesn't leave you diminished on the other side.

This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is to-day does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.

All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When the whole world is globalized, you're going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.

Outrage follows the path of least cognitive effort, not the path of greatest harm.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Be careful what you wish for, not because you'll get it but because you'll be turned into the thing that can get it. It's not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it's a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.

What a time to be alive, it's like the collapse of Rome, but with memes.

Humans intentionally operating selflessly at large scales is basically not a thing.

When you avoid an emotion, you invite that emotion into your life in exactly the way that you avoid it.

People who are bad with money often only purchase problems.

Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

Attention is prayer. Don't spend your life worshipping gods that don't love you.

Here are the numbers I used to win the lottery.

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.

The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment.

Be careful fighting gravity. If you win, it's a long way down.

I can fail at any speed you like.

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are.

Never try and sneak out a fart while wearing headphones.

One day, everyone will have always been against this.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Clay will break your back, but sand will break your heart.

The traitor, the self, the self that cries "I want to live, let the world rot so long as I can live!" The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like a spider in a box. He talks to all of us. But only some understand him. The wizards, the singers, the makers. And the heros, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

Conrad said that only two things sold, the very best and the very worst. From my recent efforts, it has been borne to me that I am not capable of writing the very best yet. I have no doubt that I shall be able to in the future, but at present, I cannot. It remains to be seen whether I can write the very worst.

Because if I weren’t in on this I’d be, like, Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?

a lot of dev management "strategy" reflects the fact that companies desperately want to avoid the one thing that reliably works: hire a small group of good developers and pay & treat them well

Christian morality has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) "thou shalt not" predominates unduly over "thou shalt."

Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?

Expectations are resentments under construction.

You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.

… religion is defined not by what it accepts as true, but rather by what it embargoes as unworthy.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.

There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their length.

Once you learn about cheating, and you start making some money from it, you’re never going to win square again. God’s not going to let you cheat and have good luck, too.

I’m willing to fall on my ass in front of people. The embarrassment of screwing up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people is not great enough to keep me from doing it. And that’s the trick to being a good student.

The old world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born.  Now is the time of monsters.

In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work.

He lay … spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum … he felt bad.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.