Learning Life’s Lessons
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
— Søren Kierkegaard
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The Only Substitute for Time is Focus
ByHeatherThere is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.
— Timothy Ferris, 4-Hour Work Week
Of course, I interrupted the book I was reading to post and Tweet this.
Focus is hard.
Damn the Torpedos
ByHeatherDamn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
— David Farragut, Union Admiral during the American Civil War
On this date in 1862, David Farragut commanded a Union flotilla past two Confederate forts on the Mississippi River on his way to capture New Orleans. It wouldn’t be until more than two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, when he would utter his famous phrase.
Tyranny and Oppression
ByHeatherIf tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
—James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)
To Be Is To Do . . . Be Do Be Do
ByHeatherTo be is to do — Socrates
To do is to be — Jean Paul Sartre
Do be do be do — Frank SinatraI posted this quote for the sole reason that it always makes me smile. But as I looked at the list of names, and their sequence, I realized that, in a simplistic way, these simple words also reflect our evolution of philosophy and thought. Socrates lived more than 2,400 years ago and his influence on thought is legendary. Jean Paul Sartre was a prominent French philosopher at the peak of the twentieth century. Frank Sinatra was born only ten years after Sartre but has come to embody a later generation.
Creative Culture
ByHeatherDisney ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn
— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
The best evidence for the existence of intelligent life
ByHeatherThe best evidence for the existence of intelligent life in the universe lies in the fact that they have steadfastly refused to contact us.
— Richard Boyd
I saw this quote as a letter-to-the-editor in one of the San Francisco Bay Area papers several years ago. I love the twisted logic and the inherent presumptions that it contains. Some attempts at logical arguments for the existence of God share these logical fallacies.