Yashvini Shukla > Yashvini's Quotes

“I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.”
― Gayle Forman, If I Stay

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”
― Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
― Marie Curie

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters

“Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did?
Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty.
Ms. Wormwood: See me after class, Calvin.
Calvin: [retrospectively] I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.”
― Bill Watterson

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“Because there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.”
― Albert Camus

“Life is a sum of all your choices".

So, what are you doing today?”
― Albert Camus

“After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.”
― Albert Camus

“I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.”
― Albert Camus

“It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.”
― Albert Camus

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“Sometimes the constraints that we live with, and presume are the same for everything, are really only functions of the scale in which we operate.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

“The very idea of penalizing based on propensities is nauseating. To accuse a person of some possible future behavior is to negate the very foundation of justice: that one must have done something before we can hold him accountable for it. After all, thinking bad things is not illegal, doing them is. It is a fundamental tenet of our society that individual responsibility is tied to individual choice of action. [...] Were perfect predictions possible, they would deny human volition, our ability to live our lives freely. Also, ironically, by depriving us of choice they would exculpate us from any responsibility.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

“The IT revolution is evident all around us, but the emphasis has mostly been on the T, the technology. It is time to recast our gaze to focus on the I, the information.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think

“Learning with big data brings three main changes. We can collect feedback data that was impractical or impossible to amass before. We can individualize learning, tailoring it not to a cohort of similar students, but to the individual student’s needs. And we can use probabilistic predictions to optimize what they learn, when they learn, and how they learn.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Learning With Big Data (Kindle Single): The Future of Education—Exploring the Intersection of Big Data and Learning Innovations

“In God we trust—all others bring data,”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it”
― Vaclav Havel

“Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not. ”
― Vaclav Havel

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”
― Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos