good and bad prove to be extremely shaky categories. One changes into the other, they are subject to continuous change and reversal

— Hans-Georg Moeller, The Moral Fool

Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time.

— Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

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