Wladimir Besserwisser > Wladimir's Quotes

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“You cannot be a powerful and life-changing presence to some people without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“Rejection exists for a reason — it’s a means to keep people apart who are not good for each other.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“intentions are always speaking ten times louder than your actual words. What are they saying?”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“And ultimately, that’s what women want, a strong, independent, high status male — a “doesn’t take shit from anybody” bad boy — but they want this bad boy to have a depth and a sensitivity that they only open up and show when they’re around her.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“the catch is that everything you say must be as authentic as possible. There’s no shortcut. There are no tricks. You say it because you mean it and mean it because you say it. The more nervous it makes you, the better, because it means you’re being authentic and making yourself vulnerable.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“I see every rejection simply as some form of incompatibility. Whether she thinks I’m a total creep, or she’s crazy about me but we live on different continents, or she’s in a horrible mood when I ask her out, or she thinks I’m cute but has different values and interests than me — whatever the reason, if a woman ever rejects me, it’s because she’s not compatible with me. It may be a permanent incompatibility. It may be a temporary incompatibility. But the point is that if she liked me enough, she’d be willing to work at making it happen with me. And if she doesn’t, then that just means it’s wrong person — or right person, wrong time. And that’s fine.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“Get out there and expose yourself. Open yourself up and find what makes you happy. Yes, that will mean you’ll probably get hurt. But so what? The best things in life don’t come easily.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“Everybody on this planet shares a handful of universal emotional realities: ambition, shame, alienation, loneliness, achievement, regret, hardship, friendship, love, heartbreak. We’ve all experienced it. The facts change, the feelings are the same.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“The first step to being more attractive is to see rejection as a means to eliminate women who won't make you happy from your life. It's a blessing, not a curse.”
― Mark Manson, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

“Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: “It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (Poetics 1459a); “ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh” (Rhetoric 1410b).”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Chomsky's writings are 'classics' in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are general imitators, why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?),”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology—hence the ubiquitous foreign accent.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be.”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Familiarity breeds liking.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow