quotes

Largely inspired by http://worrydream.com/#!/quotes.

The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or thenumber of laps you can now run around the track, or even your gradepoint average - though those things are important, to be sure. It'swhat you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days,and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatestmeasure of success.

— Unknown

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed atnight, and in between he does what he wants to do.

— Bob Dylan

something something olin shivers reject things machines can do

What's the greater risk - letting go of what people think or lettinggo of how I feel, what I believe and who I am?

— Brene Brown, src

I would like this to signal the end of "wasted angst" in my life: I’venever regretted anything so much as having particular individualworries, in a certain sense anachronistic ones, whereas generalworries, worries about our time (or at any rate those that can bereduced to such: like your problem in paying the rent, for instance)are so many and so vast and so much "my own" that I feel they areenough to fill all my "worryability" and even my interest andenjoyment in living. So from now on I want to dedicate myself entirelyto these latter (worries) — but I am already aware of the traps inthis question and that's why for some time now my first need has beento "de-journalistize" myself, to get myself out of the strangleholdthat has dominated these last few years of my life, reading books toreview immediately, commenting on something even before having to timeto form an opinion on it. I want to build a new kind of daily programfor myself where I can finally get into something, somethingdefinitive (within the limits of historical possibility), somethingnot dishonest or insincere (unlike the way today’s journalist alwaysbehaves, more or less). For that reason I make several plans formyself: … to maintain my contacts with reality and the world, butbeing careful, of course, not to get lost in unnecessary activities;and also to set up my own individual work not as a "journalist" anymore but as a "scholar," with systematic readings, notes, comments,notebooks, a load of things I've never done; and also, eventually, towrite a novel.

— Calvino

"At midnight, alone on the shore. One moment more and then I shall setsail. The sky itself has weighed anchor, with all its stars, likethose ships which at this very hour gleam throughout the world withall their lights and illuminate dark harbour waters. Space and silenceweigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisiveact, a thought which transfigures, all these at certain moments bringthe same unbearable anxiety, linked with an irresistible charm. Isliving like this in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisiteproximity to a danger whose name we do not know the same as rushing toour doom? Once again, without respite, let us go.

I have always felt that I was living on the high seas, threatened, atthe heart of a royal happiness."

— Camus, standing before the sea of Algiers.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, bydefinition, not smart enough to debug it." — Brian W. Kernighan and P.J. Plauger

“It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) thepeople we love any other consolation than that which works of art giveus. These help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love andto be loved only serves mutually to render this existence moreconcrete, more constantly present to the mind." — Gravity andGrace

I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. Thedrones do not fly when the skies are grey.