How good is it to remember one's insignificance:
that of a man among billions of men, of an animal amid billions of
animals; and one's abode, the earth, a little grain of sand in
comparison with Sirius and others, and one's life span in comparison
with billions on billions of ages. There is only one significance, you
are a worker. The assignment is inscribed in your reason and heart and
expressed clearly and comprehensibly by the best among the beings
similar to you. The reward for doing the assignment is immediately
within you. But what the significance of the assignment is or of its
completion, that you are not given to know, nor do you need to know it.
It is good enough as it is. What else could you desire?
~Leo Tolstoy
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
~Aldous Huxley
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the
courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity
for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are
often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
~Ernest Hemingway
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
~Ray Bradbury
Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.
~Anatole France
"That's how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existin' technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time's the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn't have anything t'do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It'll be finite, but pretty near eternal. Though if you make it a repeatin' decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem's the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred-meter timber or the equator--doesn't matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, sub-dividin' for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dodgin' it, not for anyone. People have t'die, the body has t'fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin', thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."
~Haruki Murakami,
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
"I'm sure it did. But Grandfather's got oodles of money," said the girl. "Me too. I'm very well-off. I multiplied my inheritance and the life-insurance money I got on the stock market."
She took a key out of her pocket and opened the elevator door. Back into that overgrown vacu-pac elevator.
"Stock market?"
"Sure, Grandfather taught me the tricks. He taught me how to choose among all the information, how to read the market, how to dodge taxes, how to transfer funds to banks overseas, stuff like that. Stocks are a lot of fun. Ever tried?"
"Afraid not," I said. I'd never opened a fixed-term compounded-interest account.
The elevator moved at its requisite impossible ascending-or-descending speed.
"Grandfather says that schools are too inefficient to produce top material. What do you think?" she asked.
"Well, probably so," I answered. "I went to school for many years and I don't believe it made that much difference in my life. I can't speak many languages, can't play any instruments, can't play the stock market, can't ride a horse."
"So why don't you quit school? You could have quit any time you wanted, couldn't you?"
"I guess so," I said. "I could have quit, but I didn't want to. I guess it didn't occur to me to do anything like that. Unlike you, I had a perfectly average, ordinary upbringing. I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything."
"That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's not wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
~Haruki Murakami,
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
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