Dan > Dan's Quotes

“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.”
― Socrates

“Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they're fools, and fools who think they are wise.”
― Socrates

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
― Aristotle

“Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
― Aristotle

“One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day. “During slow-wave sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up more and remove metabolic waste from your brain,” Roxanne explained to me. Every night, when you go to sleep, your brain is rinsed with a watery fluid. This cerebrospinal fluid washes through your brain, flushing out toxic proteins and carrying them down to your liver to get rid of them. “So when I’m talking to college students, I call this brain-cell poop. If you can’t focus well, it might be you have too much brain-cell poop circulating.” That can explain why, when you are tired, “you get a hung-over sort of feeling”—you are literally clogged up with toxins. This positive kind of brainwashing can only happen when you are asleep.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“There's a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“There’s this thing about speed that feels great…. Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it’s awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it.” But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: “It becomes exhausting.” More importantly, Sune said, “what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again