Bureaucracies fall in love with the details and entirely miss the destination. They pour all their efforts into making comprehensive, multiyear plans in lieu of starting to make any actual changes and improvements, or asking how the world will be any different after its plan is complete.

— Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai, Hack Your Bureaucracy

Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one’s life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Being able to “lie” to ourselves that everything is going to be okay, that things happen for a reason, or that some seemingly bad occurrence will turn out for the best is a huge part of emotional resilience. Psychologists call this “cognitive reframing,” and it’s one of the best techniques out there for being a happier, more grounded person.

— Jonathan A. Levi, The Only Skill That Matters

…without a reliable and complete data flow, a Hadoop cluster is little more than a very expensive and difficult-to-assemble space heater.

— Jay Kreps, I Heart Logs

Hedonists have long known that happiness, when aimed at, is harder to achieve. If my strongest desire is that I be happy, I may be less happy than I would be if I had other desires that were stronger. Thus I might be happier if my strongest desire was that someone else be happy.

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons