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

YAGNI is pernicious because the words as written can’t be properly understood without a ton of context.

— David Bryant Copeland, SOLID Is Not Solid

If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

— Paul Bloom, Against Empathy

Past the asceticism of discipline for the sake of excellence is the discipline of going eyeball to eyeball with reality, letting our fantasies about ourselves die a quiet death.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought