Baptiste Coulange > Baptiste's Quotes

“The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Ce qui revient à dire que l’autoérotisme, loin d’être une activité purement hédoniste et vaine, se révèle essentiel à la survie de la race humaine.”
― Thibault de Montaigu, Voyage autour de mon sexe

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”
― Bill Bryson

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“The day you are not solving problems or are not up to your butt in problems is probably a day you are no longer leading. If your desk is clean and no one is bringing you problems, you should be very worried. It means that people don't think you can solve them or don't want to hear about them. Or, far worse, it means they don't think you care.”
― Colin Powell, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership

“In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people. It would be so much easier if everyone could just read my database.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. That meant as close as possible to no rules at all.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“Most of systems still depended on some central node to which everything had to be connected [...]. I wanted the act of adding a link to be trivial. If i was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“E-mail allowed messages to be sent from one person to another, but did not form a space in which information could permanently exists and be referred to.”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP and HTML. There was no central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even organisation anywhere that "ran" the Web. The Web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place". It was a "space" in which information could exist.”
― Tim Berners-Lee

“I had argued that it was ridiculous for a person to have two separate interfaces, one for local information (the desktop of their own computer) and one for remote information (a browser to reach other computers). Why did we need an entire desktop for our own computer but get only a window through which to view the entire rest of the planet? Why, for that matter, should we have folders on our desktop but not on the web?”
― Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all is for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
― Peter Brook, The Empty Space

“What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison