With the disappearance of medium-skilled jobs, it’s not enough to get a basic education and work hard every day in order to succeed.

— Scott Young, Ultralearning

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

— John Baker, The Peregrine

Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every “little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus: knows its place, loves it, and is happy”; every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

…the demand for concrete measures of success seems to have led researchers towards less ambitious projects that admit easier evaluation, and has stymied progress on bigger and more important questions.

— Daniel Jackson, The Essence of Software

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game