Stand up when a lady walks in the room and hold her chair out. If you are a lady, don’t try to be a man to fit in. We are base and vulgar creatures. Your job is to elevate us and make us better versions of ourselves.

Watch how people treat others, especially how they treat waitresses, bell hops, sales clerks, etc. If they are dismissive, and it is obvious that they don’t really “see” that person, you don’t want to do business with them.

“There is a myriad of ways to take a simple problem and make it seem complex. Only a handful of ways to take a complex problem and make it seem simple.”

-Jack Crenshaw (Crenshaw's First Law)

Art of Computer Simulation & Modeling

“Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a "correct" one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.”
 –George Box

A Mother's Passing

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There, she is gone!” There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout; “Here she comes!” And that is dying.
-from I Am Standing Upon The Seashore by Henry Van Dyke

Good advice: redefine what you do until it works.
 -Naval Ravikant

"What remains puzzling is why God decided to create a temporal universe, and a material dimension, subject to space and time, in which to put the souls of his creatures to the test of life. The answer may be infinitely complex or infinitely simple. What we can be sure of is that the truth of life lies in the spirit not the flesh."
-Paul Johnson

"Human beings, we may be assured, will generally exercise power when they can get it; and they will exercise it most undoubtedly, in popular governments, under pretences of public safety or high public interest. It may be very possible that good intentions do really sometimes exist when constitutional restraints are disregarded. There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters."
-Daniel Webster

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
-Herbert Spencer

Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn't be noticed - nationality did not really exist, only humanity.  But in the camps one learns:  if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive.  If you are part of universal humanity - too bad for you.
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
- Max Ehrmann

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
-Mark Twain

"May we enter constructively into your process of creation."
-David Freeman, from a prayer

Science is not about finding the truth at all, but about finding better ways of being wrong. The best scientific theory is not the one that reveals the truth — that is impossible. It is the one that explains what we already know about the world in the simplest way possible, and that makes useful predictions about the future.
-Adam Perkins

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
-generally attributed to Mark Twain, but questionable

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.
-Henry Steele Commanger, The Nature and the Study of History

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
T. S. Eliot

"Everyone dies in a foreign country."
-old saying

From an evolutionary perspective it is not the most intelligent who survive, but the least deluded.
-kakistocracyblog

Make something good that survives you, that's the job.
-James Lileks

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
-Leonard Cohen

"You can't rollerskate in a buffalo herd."
-Roger Miller song

"A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today"
-Robert E. Lee

A student said to his master, "You teach me fighting, but you talk about peace. How do you reconcile the two?" The master replied, "It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war."

There is no doubt about precisely when folks began racing each other in automobiles. It was the day they built the second automobile.
-Richard Petty

"All news is persuasion, and it is presented for that purpose even if the presenters don't think of it that way."
-Scott Adams

"Your life really does flash before your eyes when you die, a study suggests - with the parts of the brain that store memories last to be affected as other functions fail."
-Laura Donnelly, U.K. The Telegraph

"Growth and comfort never coexist."
- Ginni Rometty

The heart is devious above all else;
    it is perverse—
    who can understand it?
I the Lord test the mind
    and search the heart,
to give to all according to their ways,
    according to the fruit of their doings.

Jeremiah 17.9-10

It is the weakness of the modern age that we stupidly think that feelings should be our primary guide to truth, rather than reason and rationality.

-Donald Sensing

All human institutions since the dawn of prehistory or earlier had always been designed to prevent change--all of them: family, government, church, army. Change has always been a catastrophic threat to human security.
-Peter R. Drucker

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

A doctor told me I had six months to live. I went to his funeral.
-Keith Richards

Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.
-Plato

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.
-Donald D. Hoffman

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs."
-Sir William Osler

Let everyone else call your idea crazy. Just keep going."
-Phil Knight

When you’re going through Hell, make damn sure you keep on going.
– Old Folk Aphorism

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting.
-T.H. White

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.
-Jim Harrison

“I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
- Benjamin Franklin

We always ask where the time went. We never ask where it’s coming from.
-James Lileks

Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience,you will be headed in the right direction. In short, it is your responsibility, men and women of the class of 2010, not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being.

-Justice Antonin Scalia’s commencement address at Langley High School, in Virginia, where his granddaughter was graduating in June of 2010.

Perceived truth is more powerful than truth itself.
- Michel Fortin

Major losses leave a hole in the soul. The sediments of time layer evenly over everything, but the depression in the ground remains for your lifetime.
-Dr. Joy Bliss

"Do you know that all great spurts in...progress came just after some unorthodox ideas or exotic impressions had penetrated into a closed system?"
-Anatol Rapoport

"It's often safer to be in chains than to be free."
-Franz Kafka

Building Things

Start small, roll something out, see what works and what doesn't, then iterate, experiment, and scale until you finally arrive at what you wanted to build.

Most of the good things in this world were created by people whose names we don't even know. They were created by "happy families" of ordinary working stiffs trying to pass the strait gate of truth and not by ambitious politicians each convinced in his megalomanic way that he already had the truth or worse, that it did not exist.

-Richard Fernandez

Not all who wander are lost.
-J.R. Tolkien

Career Advice

If you boil it all the way down to hard-core career advice, it’s this: You better learn to play offense. Create value from things of less value.