No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
John Muir on Yosemite. (via)
Tag: quotes
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. […] The minute you start saying something, “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.
Italo Calvino in his short story The Adventure of a Photographer. Also: “the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future.
John Muir on Yosemite. (via)
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. […] The minute you start saying something, “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.
Italo Calvino in his short story The Adventure of a Photographer. Also: “the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”
We are all dying of miscellany.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted from his journals in Between insanity and fat dullness: How I became an Emersonian.
Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.
Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.
Your ancestors set up those trophies, not that you may gaze at them in wonder but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up.
Demosthenes, quoted in Trophies « RyanHoliday.net.
They get one letter from me every couple of years. And basically it says, run this business like it’s the only business that your family can own for the next 100 years. You can’t sell it. But every year don’t measure it by the earnings in the quarter that year. Measure it by whether the moat around that business, what gives it competitive advantage over time has widened or narrowed. If you keep doing that for 100 years, it’s going to work out very well. Then I tell them basically if the reason for doing something is everybody else is doing it, it’s not good enough. If you have to use that as a reason, forget it.
Warren Buffett’s thoughts on building a business work well on a personal scale, too. Build your moat, make it bigger. See also Douglas Adams’ career advice (via):
If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. […] Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix.
He chose a way of death guaranteed to bring down a hailstorm of prying analytical chatter far in excess of anything he had experienced while he was alive. This is the paradoxical allure of suicide: to leave the chattering world behind and yet to stage-manage the exit so that one is talked about in the right way.
Alex Ross on Kurt Cobain. From the obituary that first appeared with slightly different wording in the New Yorker. [$]
It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.
Warren Buffett on habits and being a better person. Ties in with some of my thoughts on a well-balanced life earlier this year. Write it down, check in every so often, re-calibrate as needed.
I have to look them in the eye and decide whether they love the business or they love the money. It’s fine if they love the money, but they have to love the business more. Why do I come in at 7 every morning, can’t wait to get to work? It’s because I get to paint my own painting and I like applause.
Warren Buffett on choosing good managers.
Nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns.
Jorge Luis Borges in an otherwise somewhat disappointing Paris Review interview.
I bet we all in this room live about the same. We eat about the same and sleep about the same. We pretty much drive a car for 10 years. All this stuff doesn’t make it any different. I will watch the Super Bowl on a big screen television just like you. We are living the same life. I have two luxuries: I get to do what I want to do every day and I get to travel a lot faster than you.
There’s always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today’s forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts. It happens over and over and over.
Charlie Munger on business forecasting.
The market knows nothing about my feelings. That is one of the first things you have to learn about a stock. You buy 100 shares of General Motors (GM). Now all of a sudden you have this feeling about GM. It goes down, you may be mad at it. You may say, “Well, if it just goes up for what I paid for it, my life will be wonderful again.” Or if it goes up, you may say how smart you were and how you and GM have this love affair. You have got all these feelings. The stock doesn’t know you own it.
The stock just sits there; it doesn’t care what you paid or the fact that you own it. Any feeling I have about the market is not reciprocated. I mean it is the ultimate cold shoulder we are talking about here.
Warrren Buffett on the emotional void of the stock market.
Avoid evil, particularly if they’re attractive members of the opposite sex.
It suffices that a book be possible for it to exist.
Hang around people who are better than you all the time. You do pick up the behavior of people who are around you. It will make you a better person. Marry upward. That is the person who is going to have the biggest effect on you. A relationship like that over the decades will do nothing but good.
Warren Buffett. And if you can’t find/identify people who are better than you, you’re probably an asshole.
Mark Larson 