Jeff > Jeff's Quotes

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“The pursuit of a kind of absolute safety, above all other considerations of what makes places good environments, has not only made those streets and cities less attractive, it has, in many cases, made them less safe.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Another “chant” we were required to memorize was a list of two-syllable soldierly virtues, Jingshen Da-shu, to be shouted out in the place of “one” and “two”: Xiongzhuang! (magnificent), Weiwu! (formidable), Yansu! (serious), Gangzhi! (upright), Anjing! (calm), Jianqiang! (strong), Queshi! (reliable), Sujue! (quick), Chenzhuo! (steady), Rennai! (patient), Jiji! (vigorous), Yonggan! (brave).”
― T.C. Locke, Barbarian at the Gate: From the American Suburbs to the Taiwanese Army

“It bothers Musk a bit that his kids won’t suffer like he did. He feels that the suffering helped to make him who he is and gave him extra reserves of strength and will. “They might have a little adversity at school, but these days schools are so protective,” he said. “If you call someone a name, you get sent home. When I was going to school, if they punched you and there was no blood, it was like, ‘Whatever. Shake it off.’ Even if there was a little blood, but not a lot, it was fine. What do I do? Create artificial adversity? How do you do that? The biggest battle I have is restricting their video game time because they want to play all the time. The rule is they have to read more than they play video games. They also can’t play completely stupid video games. There’s one game they downloaded recently called Cookies or something. You literally tap a fucking cookie. It’s like a Psych 101 experiment. I made them delete the cookie game. They had to play Flappy Golf instead, which is like Flappy Bird, but at least there is some physics involved.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.”
― Anonymous

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything's possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.”
― Marie Lu, Legend

“The Americans are masters of gathering intelligence, but they don't know what to do with it.”
― Phạm Xuân Ẩn

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all" 
                     ”
― Aristotle

“Es ist nicht unsere Aufgabe, einander näherzukommen, sowenig wie Sonne und Mond zueinander kommen oder Meer und Land. Wir zwei, lieber Freund, sind Sonne und Mond, sind Meer und Land. Unser Ziel ist nicht, ineinander überzugehen, sondern einander zu erkennen und einer im andern das sehen und ehren zu lernen, was er ist: des anderen Gegenstück und Ergänzung.”
― Herman Hesse

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. ”
― Peter Drucker

“The world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity. ”
― Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms Vol. 1

“a bullet without a body is a song without ears.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde