Quotes I Like

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time." - Charlie Munger

> What’s Father’s Day like for you? Do you have any Festivus-like traditions?

"I don’t need any special days. I mean they’re all special. ... I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about 'quality time' – I always find that a little sad when they say, 'We have quality time.' I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love." - Jerry Seinfeld

"It seems to almost physically pain him to see something not taught well."

- Tristan Hume, on one of his college professors (Prabhakar Ragde) at Waterloo

"Out of [this 24 hours] you have to spin health, satisfaction, cash, content material, appreciate, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its proper use, its handiest use, is a matter of the very best urgency and of the most exciting actuality. All depends on that.

"Your happiness — the elusive prize which you are all clutching for, my pals! — depends on that."

- Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (1908)

"When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise."

- Scott Adams

"It's amazing how someone's IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them."

- Tim Ferriss

"My financial advisor told me about a client who became very wealthy in tech. They owned several homes, married and had children, traveled all over the world, and bought expensive things. When asked what made them happiest, they replied, 'Sitting in a quiet room writing code.'"

- Leah Culver

"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

- Carl Sagan

"Markets, property rights, and trade provide a very powerful set of tools for coordinating the activities of a multitude of individual actors. But their functioning requires some way of defining property rights so that most of the effect of my actions is born by me, my property, and some reasonably small and identifiable set of other people.

"If there is no way of defining property rights that meets that requirement, we have a problem. The alternative institutions — courts, tort law, government regulation, intergovernmental negotiations ... work very poorly. The more dispersed the effects, the worse they work.

"If technological changes result in making actions with such dispersed effects play a much larger role in our lives ... we have a problem for which no known institutions provide a reasonably good solution."

- David Friedman, Future Imperfect

"Being around optimistic, motivated, intelligent peers is like intellectual rocket fuel."

- Laura Deming, Advice for Ambitious Teenagers

"In economic terms, inputs and labor “want” to be more productive, to find higher-valued uses. But in terms of actual agency that’s no more true than saying that giraffes “want” to have long necks. The active agent in biological evolution is natural selection; the active agent in economics is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs relentlessly seeking profits search for resources that can be moved, transformed, or combined in ways that can be sold at a profit."

- Michael Munger

"Life colonized the energy gradients: plants put themselves between sun and stone; animals put themselves between plants and decay. Criminals infiltrated casinos like vines on a tree."

- Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

"Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plentitude is a miracle..."

- Ted Chiang, Exhalation