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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f37376c | Craig said the problem with things is that everyone is always comparing everyone with everyone and because of that, it discredits people, like in his photography classes. Bob said that it was all about our parents not wanting to let go of their youth and how it kills them when they cant relate to something. Patrick said that the problem was that since everything has happened already, it makes it hard to break new ground. Nobody can be as bi.. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| a6f5a1a | We can't choose where we come from but we can choose where we go from there. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 8ff10aa | After I finished, I just laid around in my bed, looking at the ceiling, and I smiled because it was a nice kind of quiet. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 2ef5ad2 | And I know that my aunt Helen would still be alive today if she just bought me one present like everybody else. She would be alive if I were born on a day that didn't snow. I would do anything to make this go away. I miss her terribly. I have to stop writing now because I am too sad. Love always, Charlie | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 5870aaf | I get the feeling that it's all a big lie. The problem is I don't know who's lying. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| e753cb0 | Somos quienes somos por un monton de razones.Quizas nunca conozcamos la mayoria de ellas.Pero aunque no tengamos el poder de elegir de donde venimos,todavia podemos elegir a donde vamos desde ahi.Todavia podemos hacer cosas.Y podemos intentar sentirnos bien con ellas. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 6805f49 | Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something. "I feel infinite." | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| fa52157 | We except the love we think we deserve"." | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| b21dc04 | It's like my very first memory, which I guess is the first time I was aware that I was alive. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 2aa269f | I think its bad when the most honest way a boy can look at a girl is through a camera. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| e02cf92 | You shouldn't tell her she looks pretty. You should tell her how her outfit is nice, because her outfit is her choice whereas her face isn't. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 0f2dde3 | I don't know if it's good or bad. I don't know if it's better to have your kids be happy and not go to college. I don't know if it's better to be close with your daughter or make sure that she has a better life than you do. I just don't know. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 3cab432 | I was looking at this tree but it was a dragon and then a tree, | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| b69c4f7 | The reason I am thinking so far in advance is because school is terribly lonely. I think I've said that before, but it's getting harder every day. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| e48862d | Some people really do have it a lot worse than I do. They really do. | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 1f3ca1b | I was last. Sam walked up and held me for a long time. Finally, she whispered in my ear. She said a lot of wonderful things about how it was okay that I wasn't ready last night and how she would miss me and how she wanted me to take care of myself while she was gone. 'You're my best friend,' was all I could say in return. She smiled and kissed my cheek, and it was like for a moment, the bad part of last night disappeared. But it still felt .. | goodbye goodbyes numb numbness | Stephen Chbosky | |
| ca07271 | It's just hard to see a friend hurt this much. Especially when you can't do anything except "be there." I want to make him stop hurting, but I can't. So, I just follow him around whenever he wants to show me his world." | Stephen Chbosky | ||
| 92e2d4e | The gifts of our colors may be different, but God has so placed us as to journey in the same path. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| b0d8f35 | And am I answerable that thoughtless and unprincipled men exist whose shades of contenance may resemble mine? | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 0fb9092 | Patience is the greatest of virtues in a woodsman. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| d5e52fb | We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes. | James Fenimore Cooper | ||
| 4e560ef | It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f6206fa | Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the s.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0096ddb | there is something in nature you don't understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 26f86ae | This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing--and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f9cb8dc | Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 6a9b590 | Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| bffa474 | In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| f9d31c0 | Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the "normal," particularly with "bell curve" methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud... | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 8f24e5f | Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical "evidence" (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence)." | science statistics | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| 2f82481 | It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 61c1095 | A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 1c9e654 | I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed. We consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist. And we have been doing this for millenia. In Pharaonic Egypt, which happens to be the first comple.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| edb2479 | Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel--just as fire does. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e99d267 | It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues. ... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| da68d7f | Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse,.. | confidence hubris humility instrospection | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | |
| a2c5ea4 | for Mother Nature, opinions and predictions don't count; surviving is what matters. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| c2e6090 | Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself. How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfec.. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 25a2721 | A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| e5298a4 | What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 507b3f1 | common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen. Furthermore, What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| a22d851 | Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| cbf8c69 | The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition--or a bonus--for it. I will be taking the concept deeper in Book VII, on ethics, about the unfairness of a bonus system and how such unfairness is magnified by complexity. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | ||
| 0052c0e | Nature likes to overinsure itself. Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We humans have two kidneys (this may even include accountants), extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus), while human design tends to be spare and inversely redundant, so to speak--we have a historical track record of engaging in debt, which is the opposite of .. | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |