According to the Interface Theory of Perception, evolution shaped our senses to be a user interface tailored to our needs. Those needs are best served not by knowing what is really going on either in the world or in ourselves (which is anyway unmanageably complicated) but by experiences encoded in something rather like the icon on a computer screen that reveals nothing of what’s happening in the machine. Far from being ‘out there’, independent of our perceptions, spacetime is the desktop of this interface, and physical objects are among its icons, and the icons need not resemble anything of the objective reality behind them.

— Raymond Tallis, An Encounter With Radical Darwinitis

Despite ancient prejudice against it, manual labor leaves the mind free to ruminate and consider in a way that other forms of labor do not.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

Occam’s Razor is a principle, not a rule. Sometimes the simplest answer won’t in fact be the truth…

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models

The fact that you have a natural limit to any specific ability has nothing to do with whether you are reaching the ceiling of your capabilities. People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits