Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable, not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically) best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to distinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study, and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features of our world, which, if anything, are overfamiliar, so that their ‘inexorable’ pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an object of study.

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

…no mortal has the time or attention span to lay out every last premise and implication in an argument, so in practice almost all arguments are enthymemes.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened).

— Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor, On Kindness

Google’s massive, internal study of what distinguishes high-performing teams from low-performing ones: Not team cohesion, motivation, or average IQ, but rather frequent turn-taking in conversations and high social sensitivity toward what team members are thinking and feeling.

— David Komlos and David Benjamin, Cracking Complexity

I don’t do the thing where you figure out your life’s purpose and then come up with 5-year plans to support that, your 2-year plans to support your 5-year plans, and so on. You know what’s important to you, and if something is a priority you’re already doing it.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath