What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Most, if not every, opportunity in life begins with a conversation. Want more opportunities? Actively pursue more conversations with more people.
“Rage, rage, rage, world,
and break;
I stand here and sing
in secure peace!”
Tobe, tobe, tobe Welt, und springe;
Ich steh hier und singe in gar sich’rer Ruh!
– From the Bach Cantata “Jesu Meine Freude”
If you know photographers, the joke is it’s the finest form of delayed adolescence ever invented.
– Rick Smolan, EG Conference 2007
I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
- Find a subject you care about
- Do not ramble, though
- Keep it simple
- Have guts to cut
- Sound like yourself
- Say what you mean
- Pity the readers
— Kurt Vonnegut, “Palm Sunday”
It is not love in the abstract that counts. Men have loved a cause as they have loved a woman. They have loved the brotherhood, the workers, the poor, the oppressed – but they have not loved man; they have not loved the least of these. They have not loved “personally.” It is hard to love. It is the hardest thing in the world, naturally speaking. Have you ever read Tolstoy’s Resurrection? He tells of political prisoners in a long prison train, enduring chains and persecution for the love of their brothers, ignoring those same brothers on the long trek to Siberia. It is never the brothers right next to us, but the brothers in the abstract that are easy to love.
— Dorothy Day, “Meditations”
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
— Albert Einstein
This also is theft, not to share one’s possessions. Perhaps this statement seems surprising to you, but do not be surprised… just as an official of the imperial treasury, if he neglects to distribute where he is ordered, but spends instead for his own indolence, pays the penalty and is put to death, so also the rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor. He is directed to distribute it to his fellow servants who are in want. So if he spends more on himself than his needs require, he will pay the harshest penalty hereafter. For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his fellow servants… I beg you to remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.
— John Chrysostom (347 – 407)
Great ideas, it is said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations a faint flutter of wings; the gentle stirring of life and hope.
— Albert Camus
That bread which you keep belongs to the hungry; that coat which you preserve in your wardrobe, to the naked; those shoes which are rotting in your possession, to the shoeless; that gold which you have hidden in the ground, to the needy. Wherefore, as often as you were able to help others, and refused, so often did you do them wrong.
— Basil of Caesarea (329 – 379)