Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind.
And
Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.
From https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king
Progress over perfection.
From Dense Discovery Newsletter 2026
If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing. - Brian Eno
From Dense Discovery Newsletter 2024
Modern luxury is the ability to think clearly, sleep deeply, move slowly, and live quietly in a world designed to prevent all four. - Justin Welsh
From Dense Discovery Newsletter 2024
It always seems impossible until it’s done. - Nelson Mandela
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. - Epictetus
It’s incorrect to say we eat food because we need the energy it contains. The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all. - From Roger Penroses’s book The Emporer’s New Mind (via Ted Chiang’s Exhalation). Exhalation
The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty. - James Clear (via Dense Discovery newsletter)
Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist. - Kenneth Boulding
Sometimes you don’t know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory. - Gunnar Freyr (via Dense Discovery newsletter)
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. - _Clay Shirky (via Dense Discovery newsleetter)
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. - Heraclitus
You’ll worry less about what people think of you when you realise how seldom they do. - David Foster Wallace
No gods, no masters. - Anarchist slogan
If you aren’t feeling like an imposter, then you’re likely stuck in your comfort zone. - Random guy in YouTube comments (regarding Imposter syndrome)
The universe is not only weirder than we understand. It is weirder than we are capable of understanding. - Albert Einstein