“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.
“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

“When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions. Consider the following: ‘Will Mindik be a good leader? She is intelligent and strong…’ An answer quickly came to your mind, and it was yes. You picked the best answer based on the very limited information available, but you jumped the gun. What if the next two adjectives were corrupt and cruel?” —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

“Stereotypes of a Black male misunderstood, and it's still all good.” —The Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy” (1994)

“Reality has a way of asserting itself.” —President Barack Obama (2016)

“I realized that the essence of mountain climbing is to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and that it takes all your concentration. Like so much else, all you have to do is keep one step ahead, but it’s hard to do.”

– Bill Russell (1979)

“Well, yes, you climb as hard as you can by just advancing one inch at a time. That’s the secret of life.”

– Charlie Munger (2023)

“The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message ‘This Too Will Pass.’” – Kim Stanley Robinson

“This is the third time that Warren and I have seen our holdings in Berkshire go down, top tick to bottom tick, by 50%. I think it’s in the nature of long-term shareholding, with the normal vicissitudes and worldly outcomes in markets, that the long-term holder has his quoted value of the stock go down by say 50%. In fact, you can argue that if you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century, you’re not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get.” – Charlie Munger

“A further comforting thought is that since no one knows what the future holds, all of us are entitled to guess about it. We should not forget, though, that an informed guess has an edge over a wild one.” – Thomas Phelps

“But with enough reinforcement, players may even find themselves asking the same question in the real world, where the choices are less clearly defined. In the right context, a game is not just a vehicle for fun, but an exercise in self-determination and confidence. Good games teach us that there are tradeoffs to everything, actions lead to outcomes, and the chance to try again is almost always out there.” – Sid Meier (2020)

“Executives often resist making tradeoffs for fear they will lose some customers. The irony is that unless they make tradeoffs and deliberately choose not to serve all customers and needs, then they are unlikely to do a good job of serving any customers and needs. Clarity about what you don’t do, then, is the best way to succeed at what you do choose to do.” – Joan Magretta (2011)

“I might go on discussing this subject at great length, but after all is said, done, and written, my own book of experiences will best show what these obstacles are, and how I managed to overcome them to some extent.”
– Marshall “Major” Taylor (1928)

“But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you’ve closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you’ve done today.”
– Justice Sonia Sotomayor (2013)

"It's all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there's more growing to be done." - Michelle Obama

“Tomorrow hides inside yesterday.” – Yusef Komunyakaa

“The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and ‘coaching’ their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone, and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.” – Garry Kasparov

“Why shoot the breeze about it when you could be about it?” – Nasir Jones