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December 16 - December 22, 2017
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom.
Much of the difference between what is work and what is leisure is branding.
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
The first one who uses “but” has lost the argument.
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.
If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.
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Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate.
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Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.
Usually, what we call a “good listener” is someone with skillfully polished indifference.
It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
The dream of having computers behave like humans is coming true, with the transformation, in a single generation, of humans into computers.
If powerful assholes don’t find you “arrogant,” it means you are doing something wrong.
When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.
People feel deep anxiety finding out that someone they thought was stupid is actually more intelligent than they are.
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Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
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.
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
It is not possible to have fun when you try.
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
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Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: both take religion too literally.
*2 For instance, many people said to be unbribable are just too expensive.
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.
Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.
Business wars are typically lost by both parties; academic wars are won by both sides.
I went to a happiness conference; researchers looked very unhappy.
There is no clearer sign of failure than a middle-aged man boasting of his performance in college.
You want to avoid being disliked without being envied or admired.
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee. I wonder how many people would seek excessive wealth if it did not carry a measure of status with it. Catholic countries had more serial monogamy than today, but without the need for divorce—life expectancy was short; marriage duration was much, much shorter. 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
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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.
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
Do not socialize with people much richer than you; but if you do, do it in your own territory (restaurants you can afford, wine, etc.).
For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.
You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references “money” in his conversation. The difference between love and happiness is that those who talk about love tend to be in love, but those who talk about happiness tend to be not happy.
The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
I wonder if anyone ever measured the time it takes, at a party, before a mildly successful stranger who went to Harvard makes others aware of it.
It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong.
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Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.
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Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes.
I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
It is good to not feel envy; but better to neither envy nor be envied.
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness
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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.
