Ian > Ian's Quotes

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“If you're really a mean person you're going to come back as a fly and eat poop.”
― Kurt Cobain

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.”
― Nietzsche

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. ”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame;
how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage”
― Fredrich Nietzsche

“A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Remember that you are a Black Swan.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly predict the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry's computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions!”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify.”
― Christopher Ryan, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality