Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.

— Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats

Knowledge work is a domain for which Taylorism was never intended. Knowledge work is just not very like factory work.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’… This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

Hegel’s place historically is to have institutionalized four theses in nineteenth-century metaphysics. 1. Reality is an entirely subjective creation; 2. Contradictions are built into reason and reality; 3. Since reality evolves contradictorily, truth is relative to time and place; and 4. The collective, not the individual, is the operative unit.

— Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

Don Quixote’s madness was his refusal to accept the world as it appears to those who see only the world’s back, who smell only the world’s perspiration. Men and women of faith, in their madness, affirm both a compassionate God and a life after death in spite of evidence which suggests (though of course it does not prove) that both affirmations are delusions.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener