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Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:53 pm

Title: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:53 pm
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[a selection from N.Taleb, The bed of Procrustes]


Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:53 pm
Never say no twice if you mean it.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:54 pm
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:55 pm
Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:55 pm
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:56 pm
Nothing is more permanent than “temporary” arrangements, deficits, truces, and relationships; and nothing is more temporary than “permanent” ones.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:57 pm
The most painful moments are not those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:58 pm
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 07:59 pm
The test of whether you really liked a book is if you reread it (and how many times); the test of whether you really liked someone’s company is if you are ready to meet him again and again—the rest is spin, or that variety of sentiment now called self-esteem.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:00 pm
It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:02 pm
People reserve standard compliments for those who do not threaten their pride; the others they often praise by calling “arrogant.”
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:03 pm
When she shouts that what you did was unforgivable, she has already started to forgive you.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:04 pm
Being unimaginative is only a problem when you are easily bored.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:05 pm
Friendship that ends was never one; there was at least one sucker in it.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:06 pm
It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:07 pm
You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:08 pm
People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:10 pm
Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules (e.g., avoid debt). People can understand the notion of God, not unexplained rules, interdicts, and categorical heuristics.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:11 pm
One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be “slightly” kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:11 pm
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:12 pm
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name-dropping.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:14 pm
You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:15 pm
Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:16 pm
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:17 pm
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:18 pm
The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:19 pm
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:19 pm
Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:20 pm
You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:21 pm
To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:22 pm
Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:23 pm
You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: Luceo777 on June 01, 2013, 08:23 pm
The less said the less disavowed.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: Luceo777 on June 01, 2013, 08:24 pm
No good deed goes unpunished.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: Luceo777 on June 01, 2013, 08:25 pm
The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:26 pm
Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:27 pm
I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:28 pm
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:29 pm
Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:30 pm
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:30 pm
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:31 pm
In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:33 pm
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:34 pm
Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:35 pm
For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: Lightbulb-breaking on June 01, 2013, 08:40 pm
Ten times a day you must overcome yourself: that makes you good and tired and is opium for the soul.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: TR0N on June 01, 2013, 08:40 pm
Great advice often comes in the form of an insult.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:41 pm
It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:50 pm
You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:52 pm
Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura*.

*"a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it"
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: Lightbulb-breaking on June 01, 2013, 08:53 pm
All that is intransitory is but an image.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:54 pm
For a classicist, a competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:55 pm
Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:55 pm
You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 08:57 pm
Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:00 pm
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:02 pm
With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:03 pm
What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:09 pm
What I learned on my own I still remember.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:12 pm
What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:12 pm
The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:14 pm
Mental clarity is the child of courage, not the other way around.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:18 pm
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:19 pm
If you find any reason why you and someone are friends, you are not friends.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:20 pm
My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:21 pm
We find it to be in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it “national pride.”
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:36 pm
Promising someone good luck as a reward for good deeds sounds like a bribe—perhaps the remnant of an archaic, pre-deontic pre-classical morality.
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:36 pm
You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional worse insult of having to become humble
Title: Re: Aphorisms
Post by: aphxkcd on June 01, 2013, 09:37 pm
Robustness is progress without impatience.