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But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references “money” in his conversation.
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
Fitness is certainly the sign of strength, but outside of natural stimuli the drive to acquire fitness can signal some deep incurable weakness.
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed. –
They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.
Never hire an A student unless it is to take exams.
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.
Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.
People usually apologize so they can do it again.
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.
It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them.
If someone gives you more than one reason why he wants the job, don’t hire him.
People are so prone to overcausation that you can make the reticent turn loquacious by dropping an occasional “why?” in the conversation.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
whut
The most important aspect of fasting is that you feel deep, undirected gratitude when you break the fast. –
My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.
I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for free-range humans.
Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits. –
In real life exams, someone gives you an answer and you have to find the best corresponding questions.
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.
Some ideas are born as you write them down, others become dead.
Their idea of the sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my idea of the sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.
Life is about early detection of the reversal point beyond which your own belongings (say, a house, country house, car, or business) start owning you.
We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
A heuristic on whether you have control of your life: can you take naps?
You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.
Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.
Technology is at its best when it is invisible.
When I look at people on treadmills I wonder how alpha lions, the strongest, expend the least amount of energy, sleeping twenty hours a day; others hunt for them. Caesar pontem fecit.* –
I fail to see the difference between extreme wealth and overdose.
If the professor is not capable of giving a class without preparation, don’t attend. People should only teach what they have learned organically, through experience and curiosity … or get another job.
Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
In any subject, if you don’t feel that you don’t know enough, you don’t know enough.
What I learned on my own I still remember.
Unless we manipulate our surroundings, we have as little control over what and whom we think about as we do over the muscles of our hearts.
It is very difficult to argue with salaried people that the simple can be important and the important can be simple.
A hotshot is someone temporarily perceived to be of some importance, rather than perceived to be of some temporary importance.
The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite. –
