Anshul > Anshul's Quotes

“Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship - that of parent and child - begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together, and the fact that the child was born to its particular parents instead of to another couple is pure happenstance. Thus, children have no choice over the relationship that is most important to their existence.
By contrast, friends and lovers choose each other, but even these choices are reactions to whatever random coincidence made the resulting relationship possible.”
― Zack Love, Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC

“With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.”
― Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?

“As Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman document in their book Networked, people who are heavily socially active online tend to be also heavily socially active offline; they’re just, well, social people.”
― Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

“People say, 'I'm going to sleep now,' as if it were nothing. But it's really a bizarre activity. 'For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I'm going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.'

If you didn't know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you'd seen.

They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the 'mind adventures' got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren't unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.'

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“But because human being tend to focus on short-term benefits and our own immediate needs, such tragedies of the commons occur frequently .”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”
― John A. Shedd

“How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
― Phil Knight (original quote by George S Patton), Shoe Dog

“how “intense mental activity hinders perception.” They found that it wasn’t just emotional arousal that altered the size of the pupil: Mental effort had the same effect. There was, quite possibly, as they put it, “an antagonism between thinking and perceiving.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“We think of globalisation as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2,000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance.”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“One caliph in the eighth century went so far as to conduct a series of experiments to freeze a range of different furs to see which offered the best protection in extreme conditions. He filled a series of containers with water and left them overnight in ice-cold weather, according to one Arabic writer. ‘In the morning, he had the [flasks] brought to him. All were frozen except the one with black fox fur. He thus learned which fur was the warmest and the driest.’22”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World