Thomas Neil > Thomas's Quotes

“It’s hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“If we are lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who love us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live…we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it’s doing for you these days, or what it’s not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off—especially you.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are

“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”
― Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole

“Change is critical to productivity and growth—personal, professional, or otherwise. It can be a powerful way to alter our circumstances, but it can backfire. Large changes trigger our fear response. The more afraid we are, the more we need to calm ourselves. Many a great productive gesture or action has resulted in an equal or greater measure of inactivity. Peaks where we believe anything is possible are followed by shadowed valleys where we think maybe nothing is.”
― Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future

“The Oxy filled holes in me I hadn’t even realized were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled. I felt blessed. In reality, though, my life was now on a downward course. Under the influence of the Oxy, I lost even the ambition to steal other people’s belongings.”
― Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

“There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.”
― Mark Twain