5 Bullet Archive — everything Tim Ferriss has recommended

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means th

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.” — H.G. Wells

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.” — Tim O’Reilly

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run—and often in the short one—the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.” — Arthur C. Clarke

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.” — Oscar Wilde

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Those who seek liberation for themselves alone cannot become fully enlightened. Though it may be said that one who is not already liberated cannot liberate others, the very process of forgetting oneself to help others is itself liberating. Therefore, those who seek to benefit themselves alone actually harm themselves by doing so, while those who help others also help themselves by doing so.” — Musō Kokushi (1275–1351)

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” — Gustave Flaubert

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” — Walt Whitman

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“It is the nature of man to build the most complicated cage of rules and regulations in which to trap himself, and then, with equal ingenuity and zest, to bend his brain to the problem of wriggling triumphantly out again. Lent was a challenge; the game was to ferret out the loopholes.” — Bridget Ann Henisch in Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (Kudos to author Steve Hendricks, as I found this quote in The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting.)

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” — George Bernard Shaw

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” — Kurt Vonnegut

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves—they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency ‘the narrative fallacy’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth.” — Ken Liu, author of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. — Walt Whitman, as recommended to me by Maria Popova, who invited me to read this poem alo

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“I sometimes wonder whether conspiracy theories are an attempt to re-enchant the world in a distorted way. It’s like religion knocking on the door and trying to come back in a strange and distorted form. A sense of mystery beyond our own understanding of the world. If you ever talk to conspiracy theorists, that’s the sense you get from them. A sort of almost romantic sense of awe that there is this dark mysterious thing that a rational thing could never penetrate.” — Adam Curtis

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.” — The tagline of Kevin Kelly’s website

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.” — Roger Ebert, “Go gentle into that good night.”

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind.” — Frank Herbert

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

behind the pain someone is rejoicing behind the torture there is love who’s going to buy this bullshit if you don’t become the ocean you’ll be seasick every day — Leonard Cohen, “Good Advice For Someone Like Me”

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“The hardest thing to teach a student—and the hardest thing to believe consistently—is that there is nothing ‘out there’ to go and get. There is no part, no career, no opportunity for which you should be searching and scrounging and coveting. All of the preparation is within, and you keep yourself mentally and physically fit; you remain generous with yourself and others; you stay deeply in study about your craft. Whatever is yours will then arrive.” — Marian Seldes

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.” — Anthony de Mello

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic, and more despairing: Sacred Awe!” — Nikos Kazantzakis, in Zorba the Greek.

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does the thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit war

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“Health lies in action, and so it graces youth. To be busy is the secret of grace, and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.” — Will Durant (Hat tip to Matt Mullenweg who introduced me to this quote in our most recent podcast conversation.)

QuotesTim featured this 1× · 2024

“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson