A THREAD on timeless quotes by Arthur Schopenhauer:
1/
Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely...
masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
2/
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
3/
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
4/
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
5/
The man of genius requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring about, because of the conflict of her forms with one another.
6/
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
7/
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
8/
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
9/
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
10/
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
11/
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
12/
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time."
They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.
13/
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time.
14/
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
15/
If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.
16/
We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors.
17/
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
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A THREAD on key ideas from the book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" by @harari_yuval:
1/
The best advice I can give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India, or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but...
...they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But 21st century is going to be different. Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never...
... be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.
A THREAD on key ideas from the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman:
1/
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.
2/
It is much easier to strive for perfection when you are never bored.
3/
We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.
A THREAD on key ideas from the book "Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow" by @harari_yuval :
1/
Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.
2/
Religion cannot be equated with superstition, because most people are unlikely to call their cherished beliefs ‘superstitions’.
We always believe in ‘the truth’.
It’s only other people who believe in superstitions.
3/
Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world.
If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions.
A THREAD on key ideas from the book "The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning & Freedom without the 9-to-5" by @TaylorPearsonMe:
1/
As technology and globalization continue to advance, the Middle Class is dying.
2/
The social and technological inventions of the past one hundred years have brought us to the “End of Jobs” while making entrepreneurship safer, more accessible, and more profitable than ever.
3/
We aren’t going through a global recession—we’re transitioning between two distinct economic periods.
A THREAD on key ideas from the book "Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder" by @nntaleb:
1/
Only the autodidacts are free.
2/
We need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.
3/
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.
The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.