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July 2 - September 3, 2018
“Wealthy” is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use intead the subtractive measure “unwealth,” that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.
You want to avoid being disliked without being envied or admired.
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
To figure out how well you will do ten years from now relative to someone else, count your enemies, count his, and square the ratio.
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Success in all endeavors requires the absence of specific qualities. 1) To succeed in crime requires absence of empathy, 2) To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at hiding risks, 3) To succeed in school requires absence of common sense, 4) To succeed in economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, second-order effects, or about anything, 5) To succeed in journalism requires an inability to think about matters that have even an infinitesimally small chance of being relevant next January, 6) But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that
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To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.
Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.
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.
In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.
Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
The rational heuristic is to avoid any market commentary from anyone who has to work for a living.
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
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?
Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.
Real life (vita beata) is when your choices correspond to your duties.
You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of clichés in your writing.
It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.
The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.
It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
Regular minds find similarities in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
True love is the complete victory of the particular over the general, and the unconditional over the conditional.
For an honest person, freedom requires having no friends; and, one step above, sainthood requires having no family.
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.
The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.
A golden saddle on a sick horse makes the problem feel worse; pomp and slickness in form make absence of substance nauseating.
Your silence is only informational if you can speak skillfully.
If you find any reason why you and someone are friends, you are not friends.
Soldiers are more loyal to their comrades (and willing to die for them) than to their country. Academics are more loyal to their peers than to truth.
People reveal much more about themselves while lying than when they tell the truth.
If we are the only animal with a sense of justice, it would clearly be because we also are about the only animal with a sense of cruelty.
Supposedly, if you are uncompromising or intolerant with BS you lose friends. But you will also make friends, better friends.
To value a person, consider the difference between how impressive he or she was at the first encounter and the most recent one.
Every angel is an asshole somewhere. Every asshole is an angel somewhere.
You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.
Your duty is to scream those truths that one should shout but that are merely whispered.
It is quite a predicament to be both evil and risk-averse.
If you lie to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth.
Any action one takes with the aim of winning an award, any award, corrupts to the core.
Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.
There are those who will thank you for what you gave them and others who will blame you for what you did not give them.
A prostitute who sells her body (temporarily) is vastly more honorable than someone who sells his opinion for promotion or job tenure.
People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
Virtue is when the income you wish to show the tax agency exceeds what you wish to show your neighbor.
