Surprisingly deep insights can be had ruminating about, you know, stuff.
...life is not about stuff; it’s about possibilities, which the right tools can enable.
Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. ... When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.
Get rid of the trash to make room for the treasures. Let the things that are important take center stage.
The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by “organizing” stuff I don’t want or will never need.
Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love – it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning.
Free trade is when a trade doesn’t need the consent of anyone but the traders.
A trader is an owner of property to be traded.
The above definitions after this inspiring but somewhat muddled definition of free trade. I particularly like the second, satellite definition because it safeguards the first: If you want to contort a party into a trade and still call it free, having to specify exactly what it is this party owns can make the contortion clearer—all sorts of patronizing, noble-sounding words can be used to camouflage deception, but to own is a very strong word that makes us pay attention and rightly so.
It’s claimed that government is a legitimate party in sex trade
(say, prostitution) because it has to defend public morals, clients and prostitutes, but what is it that gov’t
owns? Clients’ and prostitutes’ bodies and money? Public morals? Gov’t is also claimed a legitimate party to international trade
(say, immigration) in the name of protecting domestic industry, but what is it that gov’t
owns? Domestic industry? Employers’ or employees’ time and money?
Sarah Manguso wrote a short memoir on her 9 years with a strange, terrible, Guillain Barre -ish disease: The Two Kinds of Decay. There’s something about her style—short paragraphs, understatement, detachment—that compels me, and though on occasion she can be clumsy with metaphors, she can write fragments of simple, unexpected poignancy:
I waited seven years to forget just enough—so that when I tried to remember, I could do it thoroughly. There are only a few things to remember now, and the lost things are absolutely, comfortingly gone.
I studied math in college because I didn’t believe it. Never could understand how or why someone would come up with the stuff we were being teached. Thanks to some innate verbal ability and motherly discipline, I was thankfully “good” at it though, good enough to realize that what we were “learning” was nothing but mindless regurgitation.
Jump Point’s presentation the other day neither captivated nor disappointed me. Author Tom Hayes rapid-fired commonplaces for every enticing bit. About to forget it as yet one more glib futurist book, I saw it again today at my B & N, added it to my skimming pile (oh, the joys of American bookstores: they’re even better places for free reading than public libraries), and stumbled on a quote that took my heart away:
..they simply believed anything was possible and that the path forward would reveal itself eventually. When they hit a wall, they turned to the Internet, to the crowd, for help.
Their story is not an uncommon one.
Everywhere you look, you can see entrepreneurs and true believers hurling themselves into the unknown, fortified only with a faith that the “net” will catch them, that small acts by many everyday people can be as useful as the influence of the connected and powerful.
To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives — Wikipedia, Google, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.
his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.
Blaise Pascal famously commented in a letter that it was long because he didn’t have the time to make it shorter. Another possibility comes to mind, perhaps more appropriate for our era of small pieces loosely joined, of fragmentation of the units of content (think email, IM, posts, tweets, minute-long YouTube videos, individual iTune songs, Wikipedia articles…): he didn’t have the time to split it into many short letters.
[The
One Ring] was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency
(or perhaps potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passes, to a greater or lesser degree, out of one’s direct control.
for the ring. How precise and intricate a sentence.
No creo que ganen tales o cuales caballos porque les apostamos, sino que les apostamos para legitimar mejor nuestro deseo de que ganen, de que el ganar los haga nuestros.
..no deseamos a nuestros amantes por su belleza, sino que deseamos que tengan belleza para asi poder justificar nuestro deseo.
Fernando Savater, A caballo entre milenios, emphasis mine
I don’t believe these or those horses win because we bet on them, rather that we bet on them to better legitimize our desire for them to win, for them to become ours in their winning.
..we don’t desire our lovers for their beauty, we rather desire that they be beautiful so that we may justify our desire.
I can barely believe that this blog has been up for 2 years already
(!) and I had’t yet posted this quote, which is one of all my all time favorites.
