Oren Milman > Oren's Quotes

“An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. “How interesting,” observed the astronomer, “all Scottish sheep are black!” To which the physicist responded, “No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!” The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, “In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.”
― Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

“I think that the mark of a good society is that it’s easy to make good decisions and difficult to make bad ones. If the path of least resistance is good, then most people are going to be good. If the path of least resistance is bad, then most people are going to be bad. So … I think that if you’re asking me how evil the average person is, the real question ends up being how evil the world is. Society is only a part of it really, because there are a lot of things that society isn’t even responsible for. Is the world set up for us to be good or bad? Something like that.”
― Alexander Wales, The Dark Wizard of Donkerk

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes your performance is deep work.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Carol Dweck, a prominent Stanford psychologist, has found that people who believe their intelligence is fixed and unchanging have a very difficult time learning. The moment these people experience any form of difficulty or negative feedback, they mentally break and give up. Conversely, people who believe their intelligence is fluid and malleable are far more likely to grow and change. They are clay that can be transformed through experience, especially challenging and new experiences.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Success isn’t that difficult; it merely involves taking twenty steps in a singular direction. Most people take one step in twenty directions.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Your behavior doesn’t come from your personality. Rather, your personality is shaped by your behavior. When you act a certain way, you then judge yourself based on your actions. Hence, you can quickly alter your identity simply by altering your behavior.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Surround yourself with people who remind you more of your future than your past. —Dan Sullivan”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“The belief that you cannot change leads to a victim mentality. If you are determined by nature to be what you are, then there is nothing you can do about your lot in life. Conversely, the belief that you can change leads you to take responsibility for your life. You may have been born with certain constraints, but you can change those constraints, allowing yourself to improve and grow.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can't always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving... you will come to a better place.”
― Uncle Iroh

“The most important person to impress [...] is yourself.”
― Tim Urban

“When we reach our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.”
― Avatar Aang

“Priests discovered this principle thousands of years ago. It underlies numerous religious ceremonies and commandments. If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient. A poor peasant sacrificing a priceless bull to Jupiter will become convinced that Jupiter really exists, otherwise how can he excuse his stupidity? The peasant will sacrifice another bull, and another, and another, just so he won’t have to admit that all the previous bulls were wasted. For exactly the same reason, if I have sacrificed a child to the glory of the Italian nation, or my legs to the communist revolution, it’s enough to turn me into a zealous Italian nationalist or an enthusiastic communist. For if Italian national myths or communist propaganda are a lie, then I will be forced to admit that my child’s death or my own paralysis have been completely pointless. Few people have the stomach to admit such a thing.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination.

I will protect those who cannot protect themselves.

I will protect even those I hate so long as it is right.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive 4 Book Set: The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Edgedancer, Oathbringer

“People need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real. If that's the case, what does it matter whether people in them actually lived?”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“You get to choose who you are. Legacy, memories of the past, can serve us well. But we cannot let them define us. When heritage becomes a box instead of an inspiration, it has gone too far.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“Hello?’ M-Bot said. ‘Spensa? Are you dead?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Oooh. Like the cat!’
‘...What?’
‘I’m not sure, honestly,’ M-Bot said. ‘But logically, if you’re speaking to me then possibility has collapsed in our favor. Hurray!”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“I pointed my nose right at the bomber down below, then i hit the overburn. "Cadet?" Ironsides said. "Pilot, what are you doing?"
"My weapons are gone . . . I have to ram it."
"Understood," Ironsides whispered. "Saints' own speed, pilot."
"What?" Jorgen said over the line. "What? Ram it? Spin!"
I dove toward the enemy bomber
"Spin," Jorgen said . . . "Spin you'll die."
"Yes," I whispered. "But I'll win anyway.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“Set your sights on something higher. Something more grand.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Skyward

“You know, Mr. Lupin," Harry said, "it really takes a baroque interpretation to think that somebody would be walking around, pondering how death is just something we all have to accept, and communicate their state of mind by saying, 'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.' Maybe someone else thought it sounded poetic and picked up the phrase and tried to interpret it differently, but whoever said it first didn't like death much." Sometimes it puzzled Harry how most people didn't seem to even notice when they were twisting something around to the 180-degree opposite of its first obvious reading. It couldn't be a raw brainpower thing, people could see the obvious reading of most other English sentences. "Also 'shall be destroyed' refers to a change of future state, so it can't be about the way things are now.”
― eliezer yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality