Mohamed Omar

“It was in my twenties that I felt old, that was when time was an abrasive wheel grinding me down. But it was not so much death I feared as insignificance.”
― Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life

“The pretentious flaws of others affirm your own intellectual or aesthetic expertise. Simultaneously, their fakery highlights the contours of your down-to-earth character and virtuous ordinariness. It is your plain speaking that makes you trustworthy. That person’s pretentious use of words hides the fact that they do not have anything of substance to say. Like the unnamed narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters, watching guests arrive at a dinner party and savaging each of them for their artistic and personal failings, only you see the truth of the world—everyone else is putting it on.”
― Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters

“When we want something to be true, when a belief makes us happy—that’s precisely when we should be questioning. Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously greater.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“You can't become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times.
There's life in a nutshell.”
― Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat and Tears