Teo

“We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's biography, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: "It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious–but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classrooms, Archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys–if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn’t give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.”
― Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun

“Fortunately, we do not have to be perfect in order to make a significant difference, and even modest contributions can still be extremely helpful. Rather than getting stuck in a binary mindset according to which we are either making a perfect contribution or no contribution at all, it is both more accurate and more motivating to view our compassionate impact in gradual terms: as something we can always incrementally do more of, without there being any magic threshold along the way. And even if we have made many mistakes in the past, it is still not too late for us to move in a better direction from where we are.”
― Magnus Vinding, Compassionate Purpose: Personal Inspiration for a Better World