The commonplace book

Beautiful is what we see, more beautiful is what we know, most beautiful is what we don’t.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

I may not be a lot, but I’m all I have.

The lucky should look after the unlucky, everything else is just debate on how to do this.

The only reason you should look into your neighbour's bowl is to make sure they have enough to eat

The dead outnumber us 14:1, ignoring them is at our own peril.

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Wherever manners are gentle, there is commerce and wherever is commerce, manners are gentle.

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children; one of these is hope, the other, wings.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.

Isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?

Sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, we find ourselves.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.

Some cause happiness wherever they go, some whenever they go.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Evolutionary biology can’t tell us the right thing to do. All it can tell us is why the right thing might be harder or easier to do.

Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV.

Caste will one day become a symbol of ethnicity rather than hierarchy.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

State is the monopoliser of legitimate violence.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so they have made me.

What a loss to spend that much time with someone, only to find out that they’re a stranger.

If there is any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.

We are held hostage by our brain chemistry, by the dice roll of our birth conditions, by the constraints of our history.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.