My Worldview in 56 Quotes

A sort of personal operating system for my life

I like to collect quotes. I have a decade worth of them sorted into files from different books, articles, movies, music, and other random places. It's a fun way to keep track of what I found cool or what I was “learning” in different periods of my life.

Over the last month, I went through all of these quotes, and I had this idea that the best of them together actually capture a lot of how I see the world. So, I spent some time curating this turbo gigantic list down to just the best stuff, and the result is this post that I want to share with you, which acts as a sort of personal operating system for my life (or a system-level prompt for how I think if I was an AI).

There are 7 sections: inner life, modern culture, conformity and agency, the social world, suffering, time, and mystery. It’s eclectic. It’s not really about technology or what I normally write about, and yet it feels like the most important thing I could publish this summer.

I’ve added some short commentary after each section, but I mostly want to let these quotes stand on their own. Feel free to skim and skip around. I hope you find something here that resonates or makes you think.

Inner Life

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” (John Milton)

“Fear is an illness. If you catch it and you leave it untreated it can consume you.” (Geralt, The Witcher)

“For myself, I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.” (Winston Churchill)

“Life is fucking electric bro. Don’t fall for the doomer shit. That’s for losers and normies scared of their own shadows. Walk around like God sent you and smile at everyone you see. Spread light and abundance. Build things and take chances. This is the best time in history!” (Goldie)

"There's a guy in my head, and all he wants to do is lay in bed all day long, smoke pot, and watch old movies and cartoons. My life is a series of strategems, to avoid, and outwit that guy." (Anthony Bourdain)

“I will have to remember, ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.’” (Rosamund and Benjamin Zander)

“Between stimulus and response there’s a space” (Viktor Frankl)

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to be.” (Carl Jung)

This first section is about the mind and how even though our brains can lead us into chaos sometimes we can be intentional in the face of all inner and outer struggle. Our brain plasticity never stops changing, and this ability to act and choose how we respond is incredibly powerful. No matter how bad someone’s training data is, they always have the ability to switch out that data and tell themselves better stories through how they interpret and assign meaning to different events. Joy is a choice, and as that old Goldie tweet says, life is electric.

Modern Culture

“Our whole culture is based on the lie that it’s possible to be certain about the future.” (Barry Michels)

“The pursuit of data has become a form of substance abuse.” (Edwin Friedman)

“The trouble with market research is people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” (David Ogilvy)

“All models are wrong. Some are useful.” (George Box)

“The map is not the territory.” (Alfred Korzybski)

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” (E.O. Wilson)

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” (John Maynard Keynes)

A lot of modern society is structured around the idea that humans are “rational” actors. This assumption is false for many reasons, and that’s why behavioural economists have been so relevant for the past two decades i.e. they challenge the rigidity of life being this perfectly logical system and introduce us instead to the messier and qualitative aspects of the human condition. The best way to engage in the world knowing that we’re operating faulty machinery (i.e our brains) is to have some humility, be open to new ideas, and be attentive to data but not controlled by it.

Conformity and Agency

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” (Oscar Wilde)

“Rules direct us to average behaviours.” (Rick Rubin)

“I hate quotes. Tell me only what you know.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” (Steve Jobs)

“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.” (Marc Andreesen)

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” (Leonardo da Vinci)

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead)

“I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up.” (Napoleon Bonaparte)

So many people are stuck on the escalator of an average life across their career and their creative pursuits. This is heartbreaking because individuals and groups have radical freedom and agency and power to create things and make change in the world, but we so often miss this because most systems that we’re a part of teach us to conform instead. It’s intoxicating to move against this grain, to think for yourself, to tinker, to have a view, and to do your own things. To do that though, it requires moving away from convention and having the subtle defiance to chase what interests you regardless of other people’s opinions.

The Social World

“Everyday before my kids leave for school, I get them at the door and I’m like Lola, Zahra check this out: As soon as you leave this door, nobody gives a fuck about you. Nobody in the whole world gives a fuck about you. Nobody thinks you’re cute, nobody thinks you’re smart, nobody gives a fuck about your opinion. Nobody on the whole earth outside of this door gives a fuck about you. Nobody. And even some of the people inside the house... a little on the fence.” (Chris Rock)

"I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1 = 5, you're right, have fun." (Keanu Reeves)

“No man is an island.” (John Donne)

“The story of any one of us is the story of us all.” (Fredrick Buechner)

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” (Martin Luther King)

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” (Victor Borge)

“We were together. I forget the rest.” (Walt Whitman)

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Most people don’t really care about you or spend time thinking about you, and while that might seem unsettling initially, there’s a lot of freedom in accepting it and opting to live life on your own terms. That said, individualism has its limits. We need one another. There’s a lot of beauty in interdependence and community and laughter and friendship. Being intentional here makes us better, and it makes everyone around us better too.

Suffering

“I guarantee you that at some point everything is going to go south on you. You're going to say this is it, this is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin” (Mark Watney, The Martian)

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

"The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths." (Elisabeth Kubler Ross)

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.” (Chuck Palahniuk)

“We cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.” (Haruki Muakami)

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." (Cormac McCarthy)

“As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.” (Nelson Mandela)

“No prize fighter can go with high spirits into the strife if he has never been beaten black and blue; the only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattled beneath his opponent’s fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary’s charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.” (Seneca)

Life is hard, and the strugglebus comes for all of us, but even in these moments people are surprisingly resilient, especially if they’re able to find meaning in the chaos. There is also incredible growth downstream of all forms of suffering… but many people get lost inside and never recover from their Big Bad Thing, so they don’t experience that evolution. The shocking truth is that no matter how horrific the things are that we go through, we always have the power to move along and let go, even if there are scars that stick around.

Time

"Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power." (Stewart Brand)

“All we have to do is decide what to do with the time given to us.” (Gandalf)

“There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.” (C.S. Lewis)

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” (Annie Dillard)

“The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.” (Heraclitus)

“A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.” (Leo Tolstoy)

“You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” (Amos Tversky)

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen." (Vladimir Lenin)

The pace of the world is relentless. We’re constantly fighting against information overload and algorithms that want to capture our time, attention, and money. In that environment, it’s important to be intentional: to realize life is short and precious, to choose what to spend that time on, and to commit. There is so much power in showing up, trying, and having basic routines. Most good work happens in small actions done every day that incrementally compound into bigger things, though there is also value in ignoring incrementalism to experiment and/or make use of inflection points where a lot of progress can happen in short periods of time.

Mystery

“Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity.” (Odysseus)

“Most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has entered.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

“The problem with pragmatism, as they say, is that it doesn’t work.” (David Brooks)

“Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” (John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society)

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.” (David Foster Wallace)

“God invented man because he loves stories.” (Hasidic saying)

“The most important thing to keep remembering is that life is not so much to be understood as it is to be lived out; it is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be participated in.” (Tim Hansel)

“Sacred or not it’s all that we got” (Shad)

There is so much beauty and so much mystery in being human. I should almost stop there and let these quotes stand on their own, but what I’ll say is I think we all have some transcendent impulse in us, some divine spark, some pull to direct our lives to an ultimate thing outside ourselves. I’m against nihilism. I find most postmodern thinking both intellectually unsatisfying and experientially false. Instead, I think there’s deep coherence and meaning available to all of us, and while so many of the great eternal questions are harder to pin down with more clarity than that, I tend to think there’s a god somewhere in the midst of it all. Though even if there isn’t… there is a lot of magic to be found together on the road.

I’ll stop there for now. 56 quotes is a lot. The hope in writing and sharing this was to open-source some of how my brain works, and if you read all the way down to the bottom here I hope it was worthwhile. There are other categories of life that I wasn’t able to hit so I might need to do a round 2 at some point in the future, but until then if you have other cool quotes to share or just want to riff on an idea that resonated, feel free to reach out.

-BR