How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
هر قدمی که برمی‌داری، همان هدفی است که می‌جویی
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
لذایذ دنیا برای انسان آفریده شده اند، نه انسان برای آن ها و آن ها باید به دنبال انسان باشند، نه انسان به دنبال آن ها.
این نکته را هم عرض کنم که گاهی بعضی از افراد بی همت به دلیل اینکه عرضه ندارند، به دلیل اینکه همّ ندارند، به دلیل اینکه مرد نیستند، وقتی آدمی را میبینند که دنبال جمع کردن ثروت میرود، تحقیرش میکنند، به او میخندند، آیات زهد را میخوانند، دم از تقوا و زهد میزنند، میخواهند مغالطه کنند. نه آقا! او که دنبال جمع کردن ثروت میرود، با همان حرص و حالت دنیاپرستی هم میرود، از توی ضعیف‌همت و دون همت گداصفت بالاتر است، از تو با شخصیت تر است. او نسبت به آن مردی که همتش ازین بالاتر است، مذموم است.
چو علم آموختی از حرص آن گه ترس کاندر شب | چو دزدی با چراغ آید گزیده‌تر برد کالا
بیشتر از آنچه می‌خوانید، فکر کنید. اگر به صِرف خواندن عادت کنید، در بین متن‌ها و سطرها محدود می‌شوید. آن‌وقت نوآور نمی‌شوید.
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
خواندن دروازهٔ حیات فکری است؛ می‌تواند ما را به آن هدایت کند، اما برسازندهٔ آن نیست
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
محقق به هیزم و خاکستر توجه دارد، جستارنویس به آتش
For the sake of the roses, we water the thorns
قوم ايرانی، هرگاه در هيچ عرصه‌ای زورش نرسد، به طنز رو می‌آورد و همه چيز را به ريشخند می‌گيرد.
If you want to make a living flower, you don't build it physically, with tweezers, cell by cell. You grow it from the seed
تنها گلی که انسان مستقیماً و تکه به تکه ساخته است گل مصنوعی است
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
I've had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years which reads: Don't think. You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel. And then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.
عقل گوید شش جهت حدست و بیرون راه نیست | عشق گوید راه هست و رفته‌ام من بارها
با برتری علمی و اقتصادی و سیاسی جهان غرب بر کشور ما و کشورهای مشابه ـ و بهمراه صادرات فرنگ که ساخته‌های دست ماشین‌های عظیم‌اند و نیز بعنوان کمک‌های فنی و غیرفنی نفوذ تمدن و هنر جهان مزبور نیز باینگونه کشورها بارمغان آمده است و بارها در همین مجله باین مطلب اشاره گشته ـ شاید هم کار بجائی رسیده است که بقول «تیبورمن» در کتاب «ترس و امید» در ما یکنوع احساس حقارت در برابر آنکه و آنچه غربیست پدید آمده… چنانکه ما از حال همسایگان نزدیک خود که سرنوشتی نظیر ما دارند بی‌اطلاعیم در حالیکه از آخرین دلقک‌بازیهائی که در فلان محله فلان شهر فرنگی میشود آگاه.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Economics is all about how people make choices [and] sociology is about why they don't have any choices to make.
آنچه که ذی‌نفعان غیرمتخصص در یک سیستم میخواهند حاصل شود، بسیار مرتبط‌تر از آن چیزی است که متخصصان غیرذی‌نفع در طلب آن هستند.
Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time.
Those searching for divine need not descend to hell for fuel.
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
If it keeps coming back, it's not a thought, it's a feeling
A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers. Let your standards slip once and you're only two generations away from death.
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
A writer must think that all things have been given to us for a purpose. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
انسان تنها از زمانی موضوع علم قرار گرفته است که فروش اتومبیل از ساخت آن دشوارتر شده است.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.
I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
The product of an idealized design is not an ideal state or system, but an ideal-seeking state or system.
Intellectualism is a common cover up for fear of direct experience.
The first death is in the heart.
خر عیسی گرش به مکه برند | چون بیاید هنوز خر باشد
Loneliness is still time spent with the world.
The time will pass anyway.
An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."