It’s far more reliable to get good at cheap validation than it is to get great at consistently picking the right solution.

— Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

OK, but apart from breakthroughs in optics, mathematics, mechanics, explaining gravity, inventing calculus, something about trigonometry, predicting how planets move, and other stuff that we don’t understand, what has Isaac Newton ever done for us?

— Myles King, Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

Inaccessibility Theorem: THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU WANT. THE INFORMATION YOU WANT IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU NEED. THE INFORMATION YOU NEED IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU CAN OBTAIN.

— John Gall and D.H. Gall, Systemantics. The Systems Bible

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy