A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjective intentions, or habits is not open to things as they are. That is why we practice zazen: to clear our mind of what is related to something else.
– Shunryn Suzuki
But however natural old habits feel, they result in otherwise logical companies making irresponsible decisions. In what other business process is a 50-90 percent failure are acceptable? . So what has to change?
– Anthony W. Ulwick
If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it: First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it.
Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it.
– A Technique for Producing Ideas by by James Young
“Designers shouldn’t accept false suggestions from the market. The market never suggests anything good.” So says Michele De Lucchi
It seems that religiously conservative fathers were more likely to send their daughters to school after the revolution than before. With higher female enrollment and literacy came later marriages and a steep reduction in desired family size. It is ironic that the Bush administration’s attitudes toward family planning are in many ways more fundamentalist than Iran’s.
– Jeffrey D. Sachs
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type
– Oscar Wilde
It is difficult to have good communication between parents and children because parents always have their own intentions.
– Shunryu Suzuki
An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.
– Oscar Wilde
Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.
– Shakespeare
And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.2 (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.3)
– Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Human life confronts itself in its entirety through books and culture. In the the short term, the loss in quality is evident, yet this cannot be remedied by restoring the narrow humanism of the classical period. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Collected Reading 