Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

…objections people raise are really requests for information in disguise.

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

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