Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning

This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces – these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths – side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

Marx’s elaboration of Hegel: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

— Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

It is not physical sleep that is the enemy of man; it is the drifting, wandering, shiftless moving of his attention that makes man incompetent, miserable and less-than-fully-human.

— E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed

Don’t be a slave to history. Don’t let existing code dictate future code. All code can be replaced if it is no longer appropriate. Even within one program, don’t let what you’ve already done constrain what you do next – be ready to refactor… This decision may impact the project schedule. The assumption is that the impact will be less than the cost of /not/ making the change.

— Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer