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

It is too easy to get lost in the detail of ephemera. Which language, operating system, text editor, or framework we choose is detail that, ultimately, should matter less to us than those skills that are transferable across all of these things.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering