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Quotes and extracts
Oliver Goldsmith's letter to his brother, Henry (1759)
Just once around the sun
Swept into nothing
That I may begin
Our experience is unintelligible if we are not taught a language with which to describe it.
De Brevitate Vitae 3, Seneca (49 AD)
Today, I will have lived.
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
So I walk on uplands unbounded, and know that there is hope for that which Thou didst mold out of dust to have consort with things eternal.
Joseph Conrad on art and the artist
The pain now, is part of the happiness then
The moment passes, and then you're alone again
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it
Jean-Paul Sartre on bad faith
The moment could not last
“There is only the present moment, and never will be anything else . . . what fun to drag it out! And to make it echo, and to get involved, and to fall in love, and to become attached.”
An economy primarily driven by growth must generate discontent
We both step and do not step into the same, we both are and are not
We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives
Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution
We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself
Books
Billions and Billions, by Carl Sagan (1997)
Taking Care, by David Smail (1987)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, by Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan (1992)
The Karamazov Brothers, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880)
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London (1903)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy (1886)
A Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins (2021)
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (1899)
The Meek One, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1876)
Illusion and Reality, by David Smail (1984)
The MANIAC, by Benjamín Labatut (2023)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience, by Carl Sagan (2006)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1979)
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (1990)
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (1989)
The Gentle Seduction, by Marc Stiegler (1989)
On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins (2004)
Being You, by Anil Seth (2021)
Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes (1959)
The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan (1977)
What Do You Care What Other People Think, by Richard Feynman (1988)
The Origins of Unhappiness, by David Smail (1993)
Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher (2009)
White Nights, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1848)
Everything Is Predictable, by Tom Chivers (2024)
Subliminal, by Leonard Mlodinow (2012)
To-morrow, by Joseph Conrad (1902)
Free, by Alfred R. Mele (2014)
The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley (1956)
Seven Brief Lessons On Physics, by Carlo Rovelli (2014)
Contact, by Carl Sagan (1985)
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)
The Ethics of Authenticity, by Charles Taylor (1991)
The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London (1904)
Free Will, by Sam Harris (2012)
The Poverty of Affluence, by Paul L. Wachtel (1983)
The Elephant In The Brain, by K. Simler and R. Hanson (2017)
The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel (2020)
The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli (2017)
Poems
A Shropshire Lad, by A.E Housman (1896)
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Far in a western brookland
With rue my heart is laden
Westward on the high-hilled plains
Into my heart an air that kills
The winds out of the west land blow
Etifeddiaeth
Aubade
What will we do now?
Travelogue for Exiles
Auguries of Innocence
Fy Ngwlad
Talks
The Big OOPs, by Casey Muratori (2025)
The Inner Ring, by C.S. Lewis (1944)
The Myopic View of the World, by Alan Watts (1971)
This is Water, by David Foster Wallace (2005)
Understanding the Collective Intelligence of Cells (2023)
What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System (2018)
You've Just Been Fucked By Psyops (2023)
Music
Interesting articles
A journey into Spain’s astonishing cave paintings, by Stephen Phelan (2026)
The Gradual Extinction of Softness, by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green (2021)
The Platonic Space, by Michael Levin (2025)
Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell (1946)
The Last Days Of Social Media, by James O'Sullivan (2025)
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell (1932)
Where's the Shovelware? by Mike Judge (2025)
you can never go back, by George Hotz (2024)
The Last Letter, by Daniel R Brunstetter (2025)
The internet is already over, by Sam Kriss (2022)
Obituary for a Quiet Life, by Jeremy B. Jones (2023)
The Intellectual We Deserve, Nathan J. Robinson (2018)
Essays
Why I Write, by George Orwell (1946)
That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die, by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Of Anger, by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children, by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Of Friendship, by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)
Podcasts
Characters
Lyrics
If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next, by Manic Street Preachers (1998)
Motorcycle Emptiness, by Manic Street Preachers (1992)
Vincent, by Don McLean (1971)
You Could Be Happy, by Snow Patrol (2006)
Rhondda Gray, by Max Boyce (1974)
Blackberry Stone, by Laura Marling (2010)
Get Better, by Alt-J (2023)
Now And Then, by The Beatles (2023)
Television
WTF
All Eels are born in the same place
Rome is further north than New York City
Rice cookers can be built by relying on two principles: that magnets lose magnetism past a certain temperature, and that water can’t get hotter than its boiling point.
Cancer cells that are forced to reopen communication with surrounding cells revert to behaving like healthy cells.