Collection of Quotes, part 3

This is my twenty-second post in the Advent of Writing series.

This is part 3 of my fallback format. I’ve been collecting quotes on my phone since I was 15 or 16. Here I’m sharing a few fun and hopefully interesting ones with you. You can read part part 2 here.

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Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something

Usually attributed to Plato. The key takeaway here is the power of listening. Listen more.

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Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity

By George Carlin. This is probably intended as a criticism against war and armed conflict, but I’ve started to interpret it more generally. There’s a tendency to describe one’s journey as a fight or struggle of some kind. A fight against an institution or a system. But I’ve found life easier when abstaining from framing things this way. Fights are brutal, hard and always have a winner and loser. Difficult things can be enjoyable and life is full of non-zero-sum games. I prefer to play them.

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I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong

Bertrand Russell. Put simply, don’t take yourself too seriously.

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We devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects average opinion to be

John Maynard Keynes. We really have an obsession with the normal distribution. And I don’t know why. Maybe there’s something inherently appealing in it. Or maybe it’s because of education? I think a lot of valuable lessons come from unlearning the normal distribution and understanding how a world works which operates under different distributions.

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If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking

By Haruki Murakami. More generally: be aware of your information diet. And this extends to social media as well. If you read Twitter/X day in and day out, your thinking will be affected by your feed. For better or for worse.