Good readers are good thinkers; good thinkers tend to be great readers and in the process learn to be even better thinkers.

If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. — William James.

Because everything depends on everything else, nothing can be understood in isolation.

Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall . . . and so on, and so on. FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The wisest of all, in my opinion, is he who can, if only once a month, call himself a fool – a faculty unheard of nowadays. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Numbers do not just speak for themselves. Until we make sense of them, they are just digits.

In too many arguments people talk past each other because they use the same words to mean different things.

We are too confident that we can spot what drives other people when we often don’t even know what’s driving ourselves.

Knowing your abilities cannot be separated from knowing your limits.

To learn about ourselves we have to observe what we do and say as if from the outside, and ask others who know us to tell us what they see.

Avoid risk and you drift. Chase everything and you crash. Growth lives in the rhythm: small wins, bold shots.

“Art and nothing but art,” said Nietzsche; “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”

The artist so frees himself from personal concerns that to artistic perception it is all one whether we see the sunset from a prison or from a palace.

“What happens next?” is a more approachable question, and proves to be a much more fruitful question, than “Why are things the way they are?” “What happens next?” is an approachable question because we can do experiments to answer it.

Quickness and nimbleness of thought, economy of argument, and imaginative examples are the qualities crucial to good thinking.

Soon you’ll have forgotten everything; soon everyone will have forgotten you. Marcus Aurelius