Are.na

from the artists way

“we correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”” ~julia cameron

"Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore les…

"I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game." — JG Ballard

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” —Jay Alto

"A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of…

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." (Werner Heisenberg)

”The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest o…

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. –Oscar Wilde

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything th…

"With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder 'control,' and when they make a wasteland, they call it 'peace.'" (Tacitus)

“Waiting is not a passage of time to be traversed but a condition of our being … an opportunity to encounter those aspects of life deeply, perhaps neurotically, hidden in our busyness. In waiting, in …

"The no-talent has as much right to produce works as the artist has, and not only because he has a surprising way of shifting from one category to the other but also because men have an inalienable ri…

Plotting over a cup of tea

"I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying ment…

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently" — David Graeber

”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” (Hunter S. Thompson)

Bret Victor

I'm figuring this out as I go. One's ability to articulate an idea always lags behind the understanding of the idea, and the understanding of an idea often lags behind the embodiment in which it is fi…

Equal shares

"Now, in oligarchies the masses make revolution under the idea that they are unjustly treated, because, as I said before, they are equals, and have not an equal share, and in democracies the notables …

“The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s tot…

Gall's Law

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have…

"Do not envy people that have money, comforts, fame and power, but rather those who live with virtue, reason and piety." -St. Paisios the Athonite

“Traditional colonial power seeks unilateral power and domination over colonized people. It declares control of the social, economic, and political spheres by reordering and reinventing social order i…

"As a twig is bent the tree inclines." (Virgil)

"You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance." (Franklin P. Jones)

"There are some who reduce everything to a skirmish; bandits of social intercourse, they want to triumph in everything they do. They don't know how to go about things peacefully." (Baltasar Gracián)

"There is much of mankind that a man can only learn from himself." (Walter Bagehot)

"'The individual' is an idea like other ideas." (Harold Rosenberg)

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

"I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like butter and sugar, not even at Cambridge." (Virginia Woolf)

"No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings." (William Blake)

"The must universal quality is diversity." (Michel de Montaigne, 'On the resemblance of children to their fathers', Essays)

"The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases." (Carl Jung)

"Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled." (Goncourt Brothers)