The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Love without sacrifice is like theft”

“Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears”

“What I learned on my own I still remember”

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

“They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.”

“Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.”

“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”

“A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see”

“Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing”

“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist”

“Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur”

“Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone”

“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.”

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”

“When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.”

“The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds”

“To bankrupt a fool, give him information.”

“What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.”

“The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death”

“The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination”

“Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.”

“Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.”

“You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.”

“I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.”

“true humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing”

“For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations”

“Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending”

“By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!”

“They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.”