#mia

What I learned on my own I still remember ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#discovery #education #intelligence #learning #reading

For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#death #demian #hermann-hesse #death

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#exams #sobriety #career

I will go tell him of Hermia's flight: Then to the wood will he to-morrow night Pursue her; and for this intelligence If I have thanks, it is a dear expense: But herein mean I to enrich my pain, To have his sight thither and back again. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#expense #hermia #pain #pursue #dreams

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in. ↗

— David Brooks

#graduate-school #intellectualism #meritocracy #self-actualization #upper-class

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#education #ideas #intellectualism #life #philosophy

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#education #school #education

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#cancer #death #family #jesse #jodi-picoult

Neglected but Undefeated I stand today living the life I was told I would never live all because my faith grew. ↗

— Jonathan Anthony Burkett

#bestseller #book #christ #faith #inspirational-life

There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn't say what I nearly said, because the good professor's phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: 'I hope you don't mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.' The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I'm glad I didn't say, 'What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?' because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#edward-said #friends #friendship #insecurity #leukemia