Quotes

> What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields . . . I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program.
> 
> For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them… I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?

Ray Bradbury

discipline in their passion.
resilience in their character.
consistency in their lifestyle.

“Obsessiveness just comes from something that you love. If you really love it, you’ll go through fire for it. You’ll go through the ups and downs with it. And you’ll just keep at it because you love it so much.”

\- Kobe

"If you are not enthusiastic about your job, one-third of your life goes to waste." 

—Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA)

Are.na

It may be best for us to appreciate our digital forms of connection for what they are, while recognizing that they are ultimately an inadequate substitute for the more robust forms of membership and belonging that we naturally crave. Ultimately, there will be no technological shortcuts for the time and virtue required to build new and life-giving forms of community. 

> ## To get enthusiasm about anything—people, places, things—dig into it deeper. Dig into it deeper, and you’ll develop enthusiasm. Put this principle to work next time you must do something you don’t want to do. Put this principle to work next time you find yourself becoming bored. Just dig in deeper and you dig up interest.

David Joseph Schwartz, The Magic of Thinking Big

"The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something."
@naval

“My favorite people take their work seriously, but don't take life seriously. They play their game, obsessively, relentlessly. But they never forget exactly that- **that it's all one game.”**

**What is quality anymore?**

One might say the quality of everything has improved – our TV screens have never been more crisp &amp; vivid, our machines never more refined, our roads and highways never more paved.



Yet the same advancements that allowed this evolution are also rewinding it.



Technology, machinery &amp; factories, massive online retailers and now, artificial intelligence, have made a society prioritizing efficiency and accessibility over quality. If you look closely, you can feel it.



We are surrounded by poor quality things, acquired quickly and easily. We can get a fast food meal in minutes. We can furnish our entire home via Amazon next-day delivery. We can find solutions and express our ideas in seconds with the help of ChatGPT.



We are becoming numb and accustomed to low quality, making it hard to recognize what's actually good anymore. That is, if we're even bothering to look.



**But quality is still out there, thanks to the precious few still striving for it:**



The passionate chef who, despite a McDonald's on every corner, is dedicated to making the best gourmet burger in his city.



The master carpenter who knows she's up against IKEA.



The watchmaker who, in a world of Apple watches &amp; other cheap wearables, builds timepieces that outlive us, and even the generations after us.



**Those who search for quality can still find it.**



**And those who experience quality can still appreciate it.**



We know good food by the signs our body gives us after eating it. We know a high-quality chair by the way it feels, the way it smells, the way it ages. We know good design because we can connect to it, understand it, use it.



We know good things innately, because we need them.



**Meaning those who create quality can still find an audience for it.**



Striving for quality – as a consumer or creator – puts us up against a world designed for overconsumption, efficiency, disposability and speed. We must work harder to find it, sacrifice more to get it, and accept risk creating it. Today, making something of quality means not only providing something good to the world, but showing them what it means.



Creating and seeking quality affirms its value. It reminds people of the difference that quality can make. That quality food, furniture, music, design, films, art, writing, products, services, experiences, can be worth the wait and the price.



Quality is still out there, and the quest to create it is a noble and fulfilling one.



// Tobias van Schneider

x.com

The bar is so low if you pursue one thing relentlessly for a decade

A still from <n>Hong Sang-soo</n>'s 2017 film <n>On the Beach at Night Alone</n>, featuring <n>Kim Min-hee</n>.

A page from the book <n>Rework</n> by <n>Jason Fried</n> and <n>David Heinemeier Hansson</n>.

Business writing isn’t about beauty or eloquence. It’s about clarity of thought.

To write is to scale your thinking. And the better you write, the further your ideas spread, which is why good writers make the whole team smarter.

When choosing between two people, hire the better…

Yet it may be, they went on, that there is a zone of silence in the middle of every art. The artists themselves live in it.

— from Walter Sickert: A Conversation, 1934, Woolf

Writer <n>John Cheever</n> at his desk. Photo by <n>Nancy Crampton</n>.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.

— John Cheever, 1982

Generic ambition will give you anxiety. Specific ambition will give you direction.

“No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”  —Carl Jung

“Admit it.
You aren’t like them.
You’re not even close.

You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes.

But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the ‘normal people’ as they go about their automatic existences.

For every time you say club passwords like ‘Have a nice day’ and ‘Weather’s awful today, eh?’ you yearn inside to say forbidden things like ‘Tell me something that makes you cry’ or ‘What do you think deja vu is for?’

Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator.

But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing?

Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger?

Everybody carries a piece of the puzzle.

Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.

Trust your instincts.

Do the unexpected.

Find the others.”

— Timothy Leary (h/t Connor Gross)

A photo from <n>Patti Smith</n>'s book, <n>A Book of Days</n>.

Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful.

“When you're obsessed, rest days take the most effort.”

A quote from <n>Massimo Vignelli</n>'s design manual, <n>The Vignelli Cannon</n>.

Don't be afraid to change everything overnight. Book a flight. Sell your car. Shave your head. Wander through a new city with no phone, and no plan. Eat a five-star meal alone. Ask strangers how they're doing. Follow a black cat down a dark alley. Wear something you've never worn. Act how you've never acted. Remove the programmed filter between idea and execution. Life becomes so much better when you realize, the script you're living on, is made up. So pretend to be someone new, and eventually, you won't have to pretend.

School doesn’t prepare you for the most important skill in the real world, which is making people care. No one is obligated to read your blog or support your new album. Most people ignore it. You’ll likely scroll past this post before finishing it. Want people to care? Make them:

Some things take time. Some things take years before you see how it comes together. But the more you can remember the wholeness of it all, the more you will find that despite your unknowing, the grass, the trees, and the creatures throughout this vast landscape are still growing, and somehow, through it all, it all works together, and you too, are part of that. and it’s okay if it takes time to see this. Wisdom is gathered over years, not minutes. Trust in slowness. Trust in thoroughness. - Morgan Harper Nichols

To be slow is not merely to decrease the pace of life. It’s about taking the time to reconsider our actions and think more deeply and responsibly about how we live.



We want to nourish ourselves on what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness” and live evermore in the moment so that we can inhabit an existence that is “more elastic, more starry, more immortal.” Or in the words of Rachel Carson, the mother of the green movement: “One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’”

<n>Dionysus</n>, a 2016 sculpture by <n>Andrey Ozyumenko</n>.

“Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be... an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call ‘the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of 'life', never abandon the principle of struggle.”

A still from the 2021 film <n>The Worst Person in the World</n>, directed by <n>Joachim Trier</n>.

Turn off the world and create things for it

Everything I know about my light was taught to me by my darkness.

“All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one. … There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letter to niece Sofia Alexandrovna)