“It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.”
-A.N. Whitehead
“That’s like asking me ‘if a frog was a number, would it be divisible?'”
-Tyler Burge
“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in — no matter how prestigious it may be. (in fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push).”
-Mark Edmundson
“You should bleed [when you’re writing your thesis]”
-Mark Halpern
“One of the paradoxes of advice seems to be that those most likely to be asked for it are least likely to have taken anyone else’s”
-Agnes Callard
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
-A. Smith
“[She’s] not so pretty so as to be morally deformed by it”
-Jonathan Franzen
“No, he is not tactful; yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?”
-E.M. Forster
“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”
-Spinoza
“Pretty girls don’t know the things that I know”
-Ella Yelich-O’Connor
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool”
-Richard Feynman
“It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful”
-Paul Graham
“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally”
-J.M. Keynes
“Compared to what?”
-any economist
