I don’t do Twitter or Facebook anymore but I keep an eye on selected tweets. Here are some from Alain de Botton:
- “The dream of the modern individualist: to be famous. The dream of the pre-modern collectivist: to help sustain an institution.
- Society continuously introduces us to new works of art and in the process prevents any one of them from assuming due weight in our minds.
- A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
- Office life would not be possible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
- There should be a special circle in hell reserved for ‘friends’ who from a love of ‘honesty’ report the mean words of others back to us.
- Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
- Most of ‘wisdom’ boils down to the art of not letting things get to you.
- Few architectural works would benefit most cities more than contemporary versions of the Wailing Wall – the name alone is a relief.
- The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.
- Authors write things down so as to have to think of them less.
- Writing opens up the otherwise unusual prospect of being violently disliked by strangers & training oneself not to mind.
- Writers have to go on working despite the increasing likelihood that they have already written their most important book.
- Definition of a present: something you can’t get for yourself. As a child, that meant toys. In adulthood: reassurance, sympathy, forgiveness.
- We cannot help but exaggerate our parents: their goodness, evil, significance…
- To be flattered or insulted? ‘I enjoy your tweets much more than your books…”
And now few tweets from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
- “You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
- Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages.
- If we are good, it is usually more from lack of opportunity for transgression than from intrinsic virtue.
- The things people apologize to us about are almost never those that have upset us.
- The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives.
- Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget them.
- I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
- What they call philosophy, I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; and what they call journalism I call gossip.
- Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.
- Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.
- A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer.
- Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.
- Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands.
- They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
- Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
- In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”
Those are all pretty good, I though so. But note the two quotes I highlighted, amazingly alike. There is something liberating about “the need to write”, it releases you from the ownership of an idea. A written thought becomes the foundation for the building above while it recedes underground (some call it unconscious). Contrast this with people who take copious notes. I think note taking is a tick, the condition comes from the fear that you don’t have the ownership of an idea and you must write it down to remember, to cage the fleeting bird. A writer moves in the opposite directions, his words are born to reveal the internalized expression, to un-cage the rhyme, and like a child it must find its own unattached path.
Further reading: