More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 29 - May 27, 2018
Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts—we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.
People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than in what you are trying to hide.
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game.
Counter Narratives
The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said.
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.
Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
If you want people to read a book, tell them it is overrated.
The modern hypocrite gives the designation “respect” to what is nothing but fear of the powerful.
The most painful moments are not those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.
Hatred is love with a typo somewhere in the computer code, correctable but very hard to find.
Most mistakes get worse when you try to correct them.
I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
The main reason to go to school is to learn how not to think like a professor.
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.
The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone’s company is if you are ready to meet him again and again—the rest is spin, or that variety of sentiment now called self-esteem.
If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.
Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate.
Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference.
In your prayers substitute “Protect us from evil” with “Protect us from those who improve things for a salary.”
You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer.
Since Cato the Elder, a certain type of maturity has shown up when one starts blaming the new generation for “shallowness” and praising the previous one for its “values.”
Almost all those caught making a logical fallacy interpret it as a “disagreement.”
By praising someone for his lack of defects you are also implying his lack of virtues.
If powerful assholes don’t find you “arrogant,” it means you are doing something wrong.
People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
Friendship that ends was never one; there was at least one sucker in it.
Most people fear being without audiovisual stimulation because they are too repetitive when they think and imagine things on their own.
A government stating, “We will not stand idle in front of atrocities committed by [foreign dictator XYZ]” is typically trying to mitigate the guilt for standing idle in front of more atrocities committed by said XYZ.
It is a very powerful manipulation to let others win the small battles.
Matters Ontological
Life is about execution rather than purpose.
If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.
We need to feel a little bit lost somewhere, physically or intellectually, at least once a day.
The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain why you did something.
For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
The Sacred and the Profane
You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative.
Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: both take religion too literally.
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
Chance, Success, Happiness, and Stoicism
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.
Corollary: if you socialize with someone with a smaller bank account than yours, you are obligated to converse as if you had exactly the same means, eat in the places where he eats, at no point in time show the pictures of your vacation in Provence or anything that hints at the differential in means.
You will never know for sure if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich.
