By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, “Providence”.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Free trade is not a principle; it is an expedient.
~ Benjamin Disraeli
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Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man’s life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Death is impossible to understand; that someone with whom I shared a moment yesterday, who was vivid and alive, is now in a box and being lowered into the ground forever is not a fact that the brain can comprehend. And to see such grief, over and over, makes it impossible to view death as frivolous or an occasion for jubilation.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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Happiness happens by chance, and is not a law or the logical consequences of actions.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness.
~ John Steinbeck
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France is a picture already painted. America still has to be painted. Maybe that’s why I feel freer there. But when I work in America, it’s like shouting in a forest. There’s no echo.
~ Marc Chagall
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The best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. This is not a new idea, but it will be newly feasible as AI grows more powerful, because there will be dramatically more wealth to go around. The two dominant sources of wealth will be: (1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and (2) land, which has a fixed supply.
~ Sam Altman
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A lot of people think packing a suitcase is something you learn through practice, like singing or praying.
~ Herta Müller
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A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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