When we earn the admiration of others honestly by being respectable, honorable, blameless, generous, and kind, the end result is true happiness.

— Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

It’s common for a startup to be developing a genuinely good product, take slightly too long to do it, run out of money, and have to shut down.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying, “I probably learned more coding from random side projects that I did than the courses I took in college.”

— Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.

— Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

Show subjects a picture of an object embedded in a complex background. Within seconds, people from collectivist cultures (e.g., China) tend to look more at, and remember better, the surrounding “contextual” information, while people from individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) do the same with the focal object.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave