Writers are always impatient to find their style, as if they expect it to descend on them, heaven-sent, in their twenties or early thirties. Usually it takes longer; we grow into our style. I could argue that I didn't really find my style until I wrote On Writing Well, in my fifties. Until then my style more probably reflected who I wanted to be perceived as -- the urbane essayist or columnist or humorist -- than who I really was. Only when I began to write as a teacher and had no agenda except to be helpful -- to pass along what I knew -- did my style become integrated with my personality and my character.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
It’s a fact of the publishing industry that at least 90 percent of the manuscripts that academics submit for general publication are too poorly written to be considered. Their style is one that has been decreed by other academics—gatekeepers of the lodge—as the passport to a Ph.D., to tenure and to the approval of their peers. It’s a language squeezed dry of human juices—a Sargasso Sea of passive verbs, long and generalized nouns, pompous locutions and unnecessary jargon.
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know.
I also loved Wilder’s pleasure in presenting excellence to his readers; he doesn’t include poor songs in order to shoot them down. That policy connected with my own belief in not teaching by bad example. Except for a few scraps of jargon and pomposity that I put in my books to warn against the prevailing bloatage, I don’t deal in junk. If writing is learned by imitation, I want every learner to imitate the best.
...writing is primarily an exercise in logic and that words are just tools designed to do a specific job.
Maybe, in fact, it’s time to redefine the “three R’s”—they should be reading, ’riting and reasoning. Together they add up to learning.
Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow.
“I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”
This is a man with hard-won knowledge of a subject that requires an understanding of both a creative process and a technical process, and he states his opinions boldly; there is nothing feathery-edged about them.
Writing and thinking and learning had merged into one process.
A writer who comes at his discipline from an oblique angle is almost always more fun to travel with. Risk gives writing an edge.
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. Our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings, for it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities will be at its height. It is not those creatures with well-organized, uncluttered minds who will be most moved by the sight of a clean and empty room in which sunlight washes over a generous expanse of concrete and wood, nor will it be the main with every confidence that his affairs are in order who will crave to live under -- and perhaps even shed a tear over -- the ceilings of a Robert Adam townhouse.
The maturity of man -- that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.
He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.
How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force!
[...] the inward distrust which lies at the bottom of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals, has again and again to be overcome.
Aren't people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don't have; they have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life's reality.
Independently of me the grass grows, the rain falls on the grass that grows, and the sun shines on the patch of grass that grew or will grow; the hills have been there for ages, and the wind blows in the same way as when Homer heard it, even if he didn’t exist.
Rather than the cessation of my existence, which may or may not be possible, this weariness makes me long for something far more horrifying and profound: never to have existed at all, which is definitely impossible.
The day, like happiness, kept procrastinating – indefinitely, it seemed.
It’s been raining for two straight days, and the rain that falls from the cold grey sky has a colour that afflicts my soul. For two straight days… I’m sad from feeling, and I reflect it at the window, to the sound of the dripping water and pouring rain. My heart is overwhelmed, and my memories have turned into anxieties. Though I don’t feel tired and have no reason to feel tired, I’d love to go to sleep right now.
Better to write than to dare live, even if living means merely to buy bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.
Dreaming is the one thing we have that’s really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.
‘No matter how high we climb or how low we descend, we never escape our sensations.’ We never disembark from ourselves. We never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are.
The downfall of classical ideals made all men potential artists, and therefore bad artists. When art depended on solid construction and the careful observance of rules, few could attempt to be artists, and a fair number of these were quite good. But when art, instead of being understood as creation, became merely an expression of feelings, then anyone could be an artist, because everyone has feelings.
...to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I’ve seen cats look at the moon, and it may well be that they were longing to have it.
There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.
To be loved has always seemed impossible to me, like a stranger calling me by my first name.
I know no pleasure like that of books, and I read very little. Books are introductions to dreams, and no introductions are necessary for one who freely and naturally enters into conversation with them. I’ve never been able to lose myself in a book; as I’m reading, the commentary of my intellect or imagination has always hindered the narrative flow. After a few minutes it’s I who am writing, and what I write is nowhere to be found.
The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches us nothing. True experience comes from restricting our contact with reality while increasing our analysis of that contact.
To discover ways of not acting has been my main concern in life. I refuse to submit to the state or to men; I passively resist. The state can only want me for some sort of action. As long as I don’t act, there’s nothing it can get from me. Since capital punishment has been abolished, the most it can do is harass me; were this to occur, I would have to armour my soul even more, and live even deeper inside my dreams. But this hasn’t happened yet. The state has never bothered me. Fate, it seems, has looked out for me.
And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.
Everything is going smoothly on the surface of life.
If I were to travel, I’d find a poor copy of what I’ve already seen without taking one step.
Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself.
A cat wallows in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all of its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal law of being what he is. Neither one tries to shake off the weight of being.
...to return to the inn with its happily laughing fools and to drink with them as one more fool, as God made us, content with the universe we were given and leaving the rest to those who climb mountains to do nothing at the top.
I’d like, I’d like… But there’s always the sun when the sun is shining and the night when the night falls. There’s always grief when grief troubles us and dreams when dreams lull us.
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
By three o’clock the sun had ceased being functional.
A dreadful light suddenly cracked and splintered. It froze inside every brain and chamber. Everything froze. Hearts stopped for a moment. They’re all very sensitive people. The silence terrifies, as if death had struck. The sound of increasing rain, as if everything were weeping, is a relief. The air is like lead.
I follow wherever my dreams lead, making the images into steps that lead to other images; I unfold -- like a fan -- each chance metaphor into a large, inwardly visible picture; I cast off my life like a suit that's too tight.
Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you’re forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.
I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.
Some say that without hope life is impossible, others that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture that includes me and that I look at, like a show without a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind every which way around the city.
I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body. That’s why I’ve sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light – where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.
This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.
To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted – to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling – isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations?
My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning.
I feel more inner fatigue than will fit in me. And there’s nothing I want, nothing I prefer, nothing to flee.
We live as unconsciously, as uselessly and as pointlessly as animals, and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not assuredly) they don’t, we anticipate it through so many distractions, diversions and ways of forgetting that we can hardly say we think about it.
A sensitive and honest-minded man, if he’s concerned about evil and injustice in the world, will naturally begin his campaign against them by eliminating them at their nearest source: his own person. This task will take his entire life.
I prefer life, yes, to the very God who created it. Since this is the life he gave me, this is the life I’ll live.
I could easily memorialize this moment by buying bananas, for the whole of today’s sun seems to be focused on them like a searchlight without a source. But I’m embarrassed by rituals, by symbols, by buying in the street. They might not wrap the bananas the right way. They might not sell them to me as they should be sold, since I don’t know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice strange when I ask the price.
Stepping back from myself, I see that I’m the bottom of a well.
To see all the things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events.
I consider myself fortunate for no longer having family, as it relieves me of the obligation to love someone, which I would surely find burdensome.
I left my rented room with a great goal in mind, which was simply to get to the office on time.
There are inner sufferings so subtle and so diffuse that we can’t tell whether they belong to the body or the soul, whether they’re an anxiety that comes from our feeling that life is futile or an indisposition originating in some organic abyss such as the stomach, liver or brain.
Poor devils with their insatiable hunger – either hungry for lunch, hungry for fame, or hungry for life’s desserts.
The greatest self-mastery is to be indifferent towards ourselves, to see our body and soul as merely the house and grounds where Destiny willed that we spend our life.
Life is a ball of yarn that someone got all tangled. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight, or if it were unrolled and completely stretched out. But such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.
I’m nothing but a vague nostalgia, not for the past nor for the future but for the present – anonymous, unending and unintelligible.
Everyone has his alcohol. To exist is alcohol enough for me. Drunk from feeling, I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it’s time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.
We no longer work; we amuse ourselves with the labour to which we’re condemned.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.
Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.
When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits.
These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.
Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.
Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.
The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.
The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day.
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet—if a hero ever has a valet—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
In Thoreau’s view, the cost of that new leather jacket you bought was not the price written on the tag – it was the three days of your labouring time needed to purchase it. Buying a sofa might cost twenty days, and a car three hundred. We pay not with our wallets but with the precious days of our lives.
‘Seeing is believing,’ we say, not realising that the original expression from the seventeenth century was ‘seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth’.
The greatest explorers have not been those who pushed back the geographic frontiers on colonial maps, but rather those who have travelled beyond the frontiers of their own prejudices and assumptions – whether they are based on race, class, gender or religion.
Erich Fromm made a distinction between ‘falling in love’ and ‘standing in love’: he said we expend too much energy on the falling and should focus more on the standing, which is primarily about giving love rather than receiving it.
Those who pursue a calling, like Van Gogh, also find that their work merges with the rest of their life. Due to their single-minded commitment, they may have few hobbies outside their work, their friendships are found through their jobs, they don’t live for the weekends and often work right through them. To follow a calling is to question the ideology of ‘work-life balance’ – a term first used in the 1970s – which assumes that your professional activities and your ‘real life’ are somehow distinct. When so much meaning derives from your work, the need to seek balance can seem less important, even a distraction.
We might live our lives in a thousand different ways. And the civilisations of the past enable us to recognise that our habitual ways of loving, working, creating and dying are not the only options before us. We need only open the wonderbox of history and look inside to see new and surprising possibilities for the art of living. Let them spark our curiosity, captivate our imaginations and inspire our actions.
So now we have two general principles of discipline. The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.
Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It’s the place you end up when things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It’s the underworld of fairytale and myth, where the dragon and the gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.
You’re bad enough, as other people know you. But only you know the full range of your secret transgressions, insufficiencies and inadequacies. No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic—and by withholding something that might do you good, you can punish yourself for all your failings.
We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.
Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix. You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to know) three questions: “What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?” and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?” If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.
Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country. It’s the warm, secure living-room where the fireplace glows and the children play. It’s the flag of the nation. It’s the value of the currency. Order is the floor beneath your feet, and your plan for the day. It’s the greatness of tradition, the rows of desks in a school classroom, the trains that leave on time, the calendar, and the clock. Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.
Another time we saw a group of convicts pass our work site. How obvious the relativity of all suffering appeared to us then! We envied those prisoners their relatively well-regulated, secure and happy life. They surely had regular opportunities to take baths, we thought sadly. They surely had toothbrushes and clothesbrushes, mattresses—a separate one for each of them—and monthly mail bringing them news of the whereabouts of their relatives, or at least of whether they were still alive or not. We had lost all that a long time ago.
The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?”
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
“The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
We apply potent antibiotics to minor scratches and seal them with plastic. Plastic is the new protector; we wrap the already plastic tumblers of hotels in more plastic, and seal the toilet seats like state secrets after irradiating them with ultraviolet light. We live in a world where the microbes are always trying to get at us, to tear us cell from cell, and we only stay alive and whole through diligence and fear.
Scientists at work have the look of creatures following genetic instructions; they seem to be under the influence of a deeply placed human instinct. They are, despite their efforts at dignity, rather like young animals engaged in savage play. When they are near to an answer their hair stands on end, they sweat, they are awash in their own adrenalin. To grab the answer, and grab it first, is for them a more powerful drive than feeding or breeding or protecting themselves against the elements.
The words themselves are marvels, each one perfectly designed for its use. The older, more powerful ones are membranous, packed with layers of different meaning, like one-word poems. “Articulated,” for instance, first indicated a division into small joints, then, effortlessly, signified the speaking of sentences. Some words are gradually altered while we have them in everyday use, without our being aware until the change has been completed: the ly in today’s adverbs, such as ably and benignly, began to appear in place of “like” just a few centuries ago, and “like” has since worn away to a mere suffix. By a similar process, “love-did” changed itself into “loved.”
There is only one excuse for a speaker’s asking the attention of his audience: He must have either truth or entertainment for them.
The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realise in some subtle way that you realise their importance, and recognise it sincerely.
In talking with people, don’t begin by discussing the things on which you differ. Begin by emphasising – and keep on emphasising – the things on which you agree. Keep emphasising, if possible, that you are both striving for the same end and that your only difference is one of method and not of purpose.
In our interpersonal relations we should never forget that all our associates are human beings and hunger for appreciation. It is the legal tender that all souls enjoy.
I made the comparison of writing software with the act of literary writing; both seem to depend fundamentally on clear thinking. Can good programming be taught? If we look at the corresponding teaching of “creative writing” courses we find most students of such courses do not become great writers, and most great writers in the past did not take creative writing courses! Hence it is dubious that great programmers can be trained easily.
Transmission through time or through space are the same problem.
It is another example of what I maintain, that there are opportunities all around and few people reach for them.
In the past engineering has been dominated to a great extent by “what can we do,” but now “what do we want to do” looms greater since we now have the power to design almost anything we want. More than ever before, engineering is a matter of choice and balance rather than just doing what can be done. And more and more it is the human factors which will determine good design—a topic which needs your serious attention at all times.
Furthermore, both the science and the engineering you will need for your future will more and more often be created after you left school. Sorry! But you will simply have to actively master on your own the many new emerging fields as they arise, without having the luxury of being passively taught.
Doing what needed to be done, though I did not want to do it, paid off handsomely in the long run.
Are you so much better in doing a simulation that you can be trusted not to find what you want to find? Self-delusion is a very common trait of humans.
If you sample a non-band-limited function, then the higher frequencies are “aliased” into lower ones, a word devised by Tukey to describe the fact that a single high frequency will appear later as a single low frequency in the Nyquist band.
For almost every modern Western man has his inventive faculty to some extent developed; the Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swims. Give a Western man a job of work and he immediately begins devising a machine that would do it for him; give him a machine and he thinks of ways of improving it.
I have been into appalling houses, houses in which I would not live a week if you paid me, and found that the tenants had been there twenty and thirty years and only hoped they might have the luck to die there.
Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.
...no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.
There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever; with Elizabeth, it was those two terms during which she rubbed shoulders with the rich. Thereafter her whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good (‘lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (‘beastly’) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious.
Like all men who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.
In the past, when it was taken for granted that life on this planet is harsh or at any rate laborious, it seemed the natural fate to go on using the clumsy implements of your forefathers, and only a few eccentric persons, centuries apart, proposed innovations; hence throughout enormous ages such things as the ox-cart, the plough, the sickle, etc., remained radically unchanged.
‘Is the water in your well good to drink, thugyi-min?’ The headman reflected, scratching the calf of his left leg with his right big toenail. ‘Those who drink it, drink it, thakin. And those who do not drink it, do not drink it.’
Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.
...under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected...
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent.
The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people.
Psychologists have discovered that our personalities differ in five major ways: we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected. Most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits in an unabridged dictionary can be tied to one of these five dimensions, including such sins and flaws as being aimless, careless, conforming, impatient, narrow, rude, self-pitying, selfish, suspicious, uncooperative, and undependable.
The answer is that the robot has to be equipped with an ability to see into the mind of the person being imitated, so that it can infer the person’s goals and pick out the aspects of behavior that the person intended to achieve the goal. Cognitive scientists call this ability intuitive psychology, folk psychology, or a theory of mind.
Computer modelers often set their models on simplified toy problems to prove that they can work in principle. The question then becomes whether the models can “scale up” to more realistic problems, or whether, as skeptics say, the modeler “is climbing trees to get to the moon.”
Bertrand Russell wrote, “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”
Language is the epitome of creative and variable behavior. Most utterances are brand-new combinations of words, never before uttered in the history of humankind.
The hand can be configured into a hook grip (to lift a pail), a scissors grip (to hold a cigarette), a five-jaw chuck (to lift a coaster), a three-jaw chuck (to hold a pencil), a two-jaw pad-to-pad chuck (to thread a needle), a two-jaw pad-to-side chuck (to turn a key), a squeeze grip (to hold a hammer), a disc grip (to open a jar), and a spherical grip (to hold a ball).
To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there."
He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.
Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false resemblance to merit deceives men.
He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know. Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may be more likely to think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals.
Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert.
Soman also found that day laborers, paid in cash, dramatically increased their savings rates when they divided their wages across several envelopes. This kind of partition effect probably explains why credit cards encourage excessive spending—they permit us to spend without partitions, like eating from a bag of chips the size of your couch.
To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming.
In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care.
In one series of interviews led by William F. Pounds of MIT, managers were asked to share the important problems they were facing in their organizations. Most managers mentioned five to eight problems. Later in the interview, they were asked to describe their activities from the previous week. Pounds shared the punch line that “no manager reported any activity which could be directly associated with the problems he had described.” They’d done no work on their core priorities! Urgencies had crowded out priorities.
Enormous efforts have been expended in modern psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychosomatic medicine to create the impression that “mental illness is like any other illness.”
There is only one way to get feeling into your speaking—and whatever else you forget, forget not this: You must actually enter into the character you impersonate, the cause you advocate, the case you argue—enter into it so deeply that it clothes you, enthralls you, possesses you wholly. Then you are, in the true meaning of the word, in sympathy with your subject, for its feeling is your feeling, you “feel with” it, and therefore your enthusiasm is both genuine and contagious.
It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolution that destroys the machinery but the friction.
Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.
...you don’t know about the dungeon known in the Middle Ages as ‘little ease’. Usually, they left you there for life. It was different from other prison cells because of its clever dimensions: it was not high enough to stand up in, but not wide enough to lie down. You had to adopt an awkward position and live diagonally. Asleep, you slumped, awake you squatted. My friend, there was genius – and I use the word advisedly – in such a simple invention. Every day, through the unchanging pressure cramping his body, the prisoner learned to know his guilt, and learned that innocence is the joyful stretching of one’s limbs.
At that time, I also had a few problems with my health. Nothing definite, I was run down if you like, and found it hard to recover my good spirits. I saw doctors and they gave me pick-me-ups. These picked me up, then I went down again.
All the time I thought of Mitka’s teachings: a man should never let himself be mistreated, for he would then lose his self-respect and his life would become meaningless. What would preserve his self-respect and determine his worth was his ability to take revenge on those who wronged him.
Sleep is of such vital necessity that no matter what the evolutionary demands of an organism, even the unyielding need to swim in perpetuum from birth to death, Mother Nature had no choice. Sleep with both sides of the brain, or sleep with just one side and then switch. Both are possible, but sleep you must. Sleep is non-negotiable.
During those five minutes of actual time, you may have felt like you were dreaming for an hour, perhaps more.
Keep in mind, though, that it’s the shorter-term goals that drive the actual work.
After I’d logged eighteen months as a product manager, Jim Lally—by then the head of systems marketing, and a great mentor and hero of mine—said to me, “Doerr, if you want to be a really good general manager someday, you need to get out in the field, sell, get rejected, and learn to meet a quota. You can have all the technical expertise in the world, but you’ll succeed or fail in this business based on whether your team makes their numbers.”
It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it,” Nathan Azrin, one of the developers of habit reversal training, told me.25 “It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”
They wander forlorn through the mists, searching for a sun they cannot find until madness or hunger claim their lives.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
By this time all the amenities and gentlenesses of the Southland had fallen away from the three people. Shorn of its glamour and romance, Arctic travel became to them a reality too harsh for their manhood and womanhood. Mercedes ceased weeping over the dogs, being too occupied with weeping over herself and with quarrelling with her husband and brother. To quarrel was the one thing they were never too weary to do. Their irritability arose out of their misery, increased with it, doubled upon it, outdistanced it. The wonderful patience of the trail which comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of speech and kindly, did not come to these two men and the woman. They had no inkling of such a patience. They were stiff and in pain; their muscles ached, their bones ached, their very hearts ached; and because of this they became sharp of speech, and hard words were first on their lips in the morning and last at night.
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.