There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we respond to noise.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

There is one particular attitude that will surely ruin a framework. Don’t write frameworks for dummies…

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

…you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

— Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, Super Thinking

The quickest way to get from a high floor to the street is to jump out a window, but our “faith” in the laws of gravity and the fragility of our bodies make this an irrational act for anyone who cares to stay alive. On the other hand, an atheist gets along quite well, thank you, without believing in God. It only obscures the nature of faith to liken it to the inescapable necessity of believing in causal laws.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game