“I guess a little healthy competition won’t hurt them,” he or she will tell you. Over the years, I have come to believe that this kind of competition is almost never explicitly designed into an organization; rather, it happens without anyone really wanting it. And the manager who excuses it (who almost seems to be taking credit for it) is a sad example of the self-deluding authoritarian who assumes that anything that happens must necessarily have been exactly what he/she intended to happen.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

I often told them that I had had a presentiment of it long before, that this joy and glory had come to me on our earth in the form of a yearning melancholy that at times approached insufferable sorrow; that I had had a foreknowledge of them all and of their glory in the dreams of my heart and the visions of my mind; that often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without tears… that in my hatred for the men of our earth there was always a yearning anguish: why could I not hate them without loving them? why could I not help forgiving them? and in my love for them there was a yearning grief: why could I not love them without hating them?

— Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Nearly all self-observant persons will concede that they are not in full control of their behavior.

— Roman Gelperin, Addiction, Procrastination, and Laziness

If I fail to see what I am (and especially what I am not) it is because I am too busily imaginative, too “spiritual,” too adult and knowing, to accept the situation exactly as I find it at the moment. A kind of alert idiocy is what I need. It takes an innocent eye and an empty head to see their own perfect emptiness.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

For an eccentric is not necessarily an exception or an isolated phenomenon; indeed, it often happens that it is he who embodies the very essence of his time while his contemporaries somehow seem to have been cut loose from it by gusts of an alien wind.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Konstantin Mochulsky, and Andrew R. MacAndrew, Brothers Karamazov