Bluntness is appealing to busy people.

Art is just money on walls.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “The function of the artist is to make people like life better than before.”

Asked whether he’d ever seen this done, he said, “Yes, the Beatles did it.”

(From Dan Wakefield’s introduction to Vonnegut’s If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?, 2013.)

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

The battles were so ferocious because the stakes were so small.

A game is over when you start to wonder if the game is worth it.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Life is not just about peaks and valleys, about wins and losses. Life is about the journey. You hear that all the time. You’ve got to absorb that. You’ve got to know that. The journey has to become the destination because there is no true destination. There is no endpoint. There is no goal. All rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is not full. Life goes on; accept what life gives you. The sun rises the morning after you win the championship or lose in the first round.

Ray prided himself on his snap judgments. He could look at a person and in ten minutes know who they were, and never need to reconsider his opinion. The men he evaluated he tended to place in one of three bins in his mind: “good guy,” “naive guy,” and “crook.” Sam very obviously was not a good guy.

...we should pass over all biographies of 'the good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.

It's so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don't, you'll need a lot of luck. And you don't want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you're very likely to win without having any unusual luck.

Write your obituary and try to figure out how to live up to it.

Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic.

Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?

Ignorance is a voluntary misfortune.

Instagram wants de-contextualized lifestyle porn. It’s probably the most bland and harmless of the majors, so long as you don’t get addicted to micro-affirmations.

Some things are like that—they strike you as repugnant for instinctive reasons, probably having to do with your culture and the way you were raised. The French word “gauche” comes to mind, but I preferred the Hebrew word “treyf.” Literally, it means not kosher, but I also use it to describe things like cars, bars, strip clubs, guns, dogs, rock-n-roll, and football games. Things that are treyf, you avoid, not because you hate them per se, but because in avoiding them you keep yourself from becoming like the people you hate.

If you don’t understand the basics of a subject, it’s easy to form conclusions that seem logical, but these same conclusions seem silly to those who have a deeper understanding of a subject.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.