Are.na

"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)

"To expect bad men never to do bad things is insensate; it is hoping for the impossible. To tolerate their offences against others, and expect none against yourself, is both irrational and arbitrary."…

" in moments of anger, let the thought always be present that loss of temper is no sign of manliness, but that there is more virility, as well as more natural humanity, in one he shows himself gentle …

“The problem is that the desire to change yourself is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.” — Pema Chödrön

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time

"In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where …

"He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived." Chinese Proverb

You have to act as if it were possible you could radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time. Angela Davis

I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face. — Franz Kafka

"Integrity has no need of rules." (Albert Camus)

"During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think." (…

"Every man has three characters — that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has." (Alphonse Karr)

"It's common for nobody to be happy with their lot, however good, or to be unhappy with their intellect, however bad." (Baltasar Gracián, 'The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence')

"Sophisticated people can hardly understand how vague experience is at bottom, and how truly that vagueness supports whatever clearness is afterwards attained." (George Santayana)

"If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy." (Michael Frayn)

"We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained." (Go…