"I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason."

- Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

@Library

“For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth–after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.”

– Albert Camus

@Library

"There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself."

– Virginia Woolf

@Library

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

@Library

20 books — 20 genres

@Library

"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

– Carl Sagan's prediction in 1995.

@Library

10 Most Mentioned Books on the Modern Wisdom podcast by Chris Willx

1. "Atomic Habits" by James Clear
2. "1984" by George Orwell
3. "The Precipice" by Toby Ord
4. "Deep Work" by Cal Newport
5. "Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom
6. "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright
7. "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright
8. "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel
9. "Die with Zero" by Bill Perkins
10. "Man's Search" for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

@Library

“Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.”

– Salman Rushdie

@Library

20 books to become a multidisciplinary thinker:

@Library

"We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed."

– Justin Torres, We the Animals

@Library

3 books to reclaim your attention span:

@Library

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

– Sylvia Plath

@Library

6 books every aspiring founder should read:

1. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
3. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
4. Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
5. Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet
6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

@Library

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

- 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

@Library

3 books to understand why you're always tired:

@Library

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

– Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

@Library

9 books to increase your lifespan:

@Library

"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that arises in any mind, which cannot be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and explain it for thirty-five years. Something always remains unexpressed, something that remains in the mind forever and with which one dies, without having communicated it to anyone."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

@Library

10 books to think like a strategic genius:

1) The Art of War by Sun Tzu
2) On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis
3) The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay
4) Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace by Edward Luttwak
5) Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
6) The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling
7) The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit & Barry Nalebuff
8) The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith
9) 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer
10) Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

@Library

What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

– Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

@Library