When you value planning above outcomes, it’s easy to conflate effort with achievement. Having done work or checked things off a list isn’t the same as creating value through your actions.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

The danger of symmetry, and repetition especially, is that it can be used as a substitute for thought.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action. … more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

Lewis explains: How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself….If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

In short, there was terrible disorder. It seemed to me, at first glance, that both of them—the gentleman and the lady—were decent people, but reduced by poverty to that humiliating state in which disorder finally overcomes every attempt to struggle with it and even reduces people to the bitter necessity of finding in this disorder, as it increases daily, some bitter and, as it were, vengeful sense of pleasure.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot