Collection of previously unused quotes from #128

This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #128 (3.4.23 to 4.1.23). There are 14 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1954, sculptor)

"In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things." (AZQuotes.com)

André Breton (1896-1966, poet)

"The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public form entering if one wishes to avoid confusion." (AZQuotes.com)

Fred Brooks (1931-2022, computer scientist)

"Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer and produced with less effort." (No Silver Bullet, 1986)

Marcus Buckingham (1966-now, writer)

"Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear." (The One Thing You Need to Know, 2005)

Albercht Dürer (1471-1528, artist)

"Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art." (AZQuotes.com)

Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931, artist)

"Every part becomes organized into a whole with the other pats. All the parts contribute to the unity of the composition, none of them assuming a dominant place in the whole." (Grundbegriffe de neuen gestaltenden Kunst, 1921-1923)

Adrian Frutiger (1928-2015, typeface designer)

"When it is good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful." (AZQuotes.com)

Antonio Gaudí (1852-1926, architect)

"Originality consists of returning to the origin. Thus, originality means returning, through one's resources, to the simplicity of the early solutions." (AZQuotes.com)

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)

"The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable." (Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967)

Franz Marc (1880-1916, artist)

"Whenever we have seen a crevice in the crust of convention, we have called attention to it, because we have hoped for a force underneath, which will someday come to light." (AZQuotes.com)

Stanley Morison (1889-1967, typeface designer)

"Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that for a new font to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty." (AZQuotes.com)

David Salle (1952-now, artist)

"Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often a time when it looks like anything but." (Interview with John Baldessari, Interview Magazine, 2013)

Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012, artist)

"Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life." (AZQuotes.com)

Julie Taymor (1952-now, director)

"Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist." (Quoted in Oh girl: A Talk with Julie Taymor, 2008)

Collection of previously unused quotes from #129

This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #129 (4.1.23 to 4.23.23). There are 7 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Frank Gehry (1929-2005, architect)

"Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries." (Available Light, Interview with Julie Lazar, PBS, 2015)

Ada Louis Huxtable (1921-2013, architect)

"Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style." (The Tall Building Artistically Rediscovered, 1986)

Joichi Ito (1966-now, entrepreneur)

"Most creative work is a process of passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way." (AZQuotes.com)

Patrick Lencioni (1965-now, writer)

"Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork." (AZQuotes.com)

Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011, computer scientist)

"What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form." (The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System, 1980)

Ken Thompson (1943-now, computer scientist)

"I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read and write."(Quoted in Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson by Cooke, Urban, Hamilton, 1999)

Yohji Yamamoto (1943-now, fashion designer)

"Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy will find your self." (AZQuotes.com)

Collection of previously unused quotes from #130

This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #130 (4.23.23 to 6.4.23). There are 10 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Josef Albers (1888-1976, artist)

"Amateurism is an emptiness and I accept it because it has no preconceived ideas or rules to be applied." (A Conversation with Josef Albers, John Holloway and John Weil, Leonardo, 1970)

Nicholas Carr (1959-now, journalist)

"What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere - that it's open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud." (The Great Unread, 2006)

Vint Cert (1984-now, internet pioneer)

"The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be." (AZQuotes.com)

Hans Haacke (1936-now, artist)

"...museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines. They're both." (Quoted in Portraits by Michael Kimmelman)

Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026, philosopher)

"The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future... The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured." (AZQuotes.com)

Donald Judd (1928-1994, artist)

"The history of art and art's condition at any time are pretty messy. They should stay that way. One can think about them as much as one likes, but they won't become neater; neatness isn't even a very good reason for thinking about them. A lot of things just can't be connected." (Local History, 1964)

Joseph Kosuth (1945-now, artist)

"I go through hundreds of these amassed quotes from my own research and that of my staff, make my choices, and then continually add them in relation to the quotes I have already selected. The surplus meaning that is constructed by using the words of others in conjunction with each other, which is my goal, is a far more delicate operation than it may seem." (Wikiquote.org)

William Morris (1834-1896, textile designer)

"Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement..." (Speech, London, March 10, 1880)

Walter Ong (1912-2003, professor)

"More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness." (Orality and Literacy, 1982)

Edward Ruscha (1937-now, artist)

"I'm interested in glorifying something that we in the world would say doesn't deserve being glorified. Something that's forgotten, focused on as though it were some sort of sacred object." (Quoted in Ed Ruscha's Best Short by Leo Benedictus, 2008)

Collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #131

This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #131 (6.4.23 to 7.28.23). There are 10 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Robert Altman (1925-2006, filmmaker)

"I'll give the same advice I give my children: never take advice from anybody." (AZQuotes.com)

J. G. Ballard (1930-2009, writer)

"If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asked what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work." (Super-Cannes, 2000)

Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870, artist)

"It is really too ridiculous for a reasonably intelligent person to expose himself to this kind of administrative caprice." (Quoted in Frédéric Bazille and Early Impressionism by Marandel, Daulte, et al.)

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940, philosopher)

"The power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command." (One Way Street, 1928)

Jay David Bolter (1951-now, media theorist)

"The openness of such networked devices reflect our growing desire to construct writing in a way that breaks down the traditional distinctions between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopedia and the library." (Writing Space, 2003)

Norbert Bolz (1953-now, media theorist)

"The books written by Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, Douglas Hofstadter, and Niklas Luhmann can be understood as attempts to do justice tot he new media world at a level of technical depiction and what is more: these books are no longer books in the strict sense of the world, but mosaics consisting of quotations and fragments of thought." (Goodreads.com)

Régis Debray (1940-now, philosopher)

"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on the stage wearing the mask of the preceding scene and we tend to lose the meaning of the play." (Révolution dans la révolution? 1967)

Amy Goodman (1957-now, journalist)

"We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media servicing a democratic society." (The Exception to the Rulers, 2004, co-author David Goodman)

Timothy Leary (1920-1996, psychologist)

"When you teach someone how to perform creatively (i.e. associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly." (Changing My Mind, Among Others, 1982)

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990, sociologist)

"A community whose life is not irrigated by art and science, by religion and philosophy, day upon day, is a community that exists half alive." (Faith For Living, 1940)

Collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #132

This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #132 (7.29.23 to 12.9.23). There are 12 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Charles Eisenstein (1967-now, activist)

"We live within a cultural mythology that tells us we are separate beings in competitive relation for power, even for survival. We long to return to a culture of inclusiveness, cooperation and the sharing of gifts." (The Longing for Belonging, 2015)

Jonathan Haidt (1963-now, psychologist)

"You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's mind by utterly refuting their arguments." (The Righteous Mind, 2012)

Donna Haraway (1944-now, professor)

"From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power." (AZQuotes.com)

Robert P. Kolker (film historian)

"Every culture has a dominant ideology... but an ideology is never, everywhere monolithic. It is full of contradictions, perpetually shifting and modifying itself as struggles within the culture continue and as contradictions and conflicts develop." (A Cinema of Loneliness, 1980)

Susanne Langer (1895-1985, philosopher)

"The wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions." (AZQuotes.com)

Kalle Lasn (1942-now, filmmaker)

"I want to live in a world where human beings, not corporate entities, create the future." (AZQuotes.com)

Stanisław Lem (1921-2006, writer)

"The 'well-informed' think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant to even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist's disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties." (His Master's Voice, 1968)

Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998, sociologist)

"Whatever we know about society or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also out knowledge of nature." (The Reality of the Mass Media, 2000)

Alan Moore (1953-now, writer)

"It wouldn't take much - one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting - who knows - we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger than they ever were before." (Interview with Matthew De Abaitua , 1998)

Jussi Parikka (1976-now, media theorist)

"...to be able to remember that media never dies, but remains as toxic waste residue, and also that we should be able to repurpose and reuse solutions in new ways, as circuit bending and hardware hacking practices imply." (The Anthrobscene, 2014)

Harold Pinter (1930-2008, playwright)

"But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other." (Art, Truth and Politics, 2005)

Howard Rheingold (1947-1968, writer)

"Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge." (AZQuotes.com)

Collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #133

This post is a collection of previously unused quotes from notebook #133 (12.9.23 to 12.31.23). There are 18 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Marc Andreessen (1971-now, entrepreneur)

"Innovation doesn't come from the big company. It never has and never will. Innovation is something new that looks crazy at first glance." (AZQuotes.com)

Brian Behlendorf (1973-now, computer programmer)

"I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular person or company..." (Brainyquote.com)

Jakob Böhme (1575-1624, philosopher)

"The perfect state, the summum bonum, is play. In play, life expresses itself in its fullness. God's life is play. Adam fell when his play became serious business." (AZQuotes.com)

Rob Brezsny (astrologer)

"Factual information alone isn't sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation. One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive a mysterious useful omen everyday of your life." (Paranoia is the Antidote for Paranoia, 2005)

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994, philosopher)

"The fact of knowing how to read is knowing what to read." (AZQuotes.com)

David Filo (1966-now, entrepreneur)

"Thousands of people were producing new websites everyday. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it and make it useful." (AZQuotes.com)

Brian Kernighan (1942-now, computer scientist)

"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." (Software Tools, 1976)

Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950, philosopher)

"We see what we see because we miss all the finer details." (AZQuotes.com)

Albertus Magnus (1200-1208, friar)

"Banish, therefore, from the heart the distractions of Earth and turn thine eyes to spiritual joys and thou mayest learn at least to repose in the light of the contemplation of God." (AZQuotes.com)

Matt Mullenweg (1984-now, entrepreneur)

"I am an optimist, and I believe that people are inherently good and that if you give everyone a voice and freedom of expression, the truth and the good will outweigh the bad. So, on the whole, I think the power that online distribution confers is a positive thing for society. Online we can act as the fifth estate." (AZQuotes.com)

Paul Otlet (1868-1944, bibliographer)

"From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate the whole of creation, in whole or certain parts." (AZQuotes.com)

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935, writer)

"The superiority of a dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man." (The Book of Disquiet, 1982 posthumous)

Rob Pike (1956-now, computer programmer)

"Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming." (AZQuotes.com)

Blake Ross (1985, computer programmer)

"The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable." (Wikiquote.org)

Guido van Rossum (1956-now, computer programmer)

"Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered." (AZQuotes.com)

Ivan Sutherland (1938-now, computer scientist)

"It's very satisfying to take a problem we thought difficult and find a simple solution. The best solutions are always simple." (AZQuotes.com)

Andrew Tanenbaum (1944-now, computer programmer)

"Fight features... the only way to make software secure, reliable and fast is to make it small." (Some Notes on the 'Who Wrote Linux' Kerfuffle, 2004)

Kerry Thornley (1938-1998, writer)

"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos." (AZQuotes.com)

List of level 2 vital articles on Wikipedia

This post is a list of the level 2 vital articles on Wikipedia as of June 21st, 2026. There are 100 posts listed below. Source: Wikipedia

    History

1. History
2. Human history*
3. Prehistory
4. Ancient history
5. Post-classical history
6. Early modern period
7. Modern era

    Geography

1. Geography
2. Human settlement
3. Atmosphere of Earth
4. Land
5. Ocean
6. Africa
7. Asia
8. Europe
9. North America
10. Oceania
11. South America

    Arts

1. The arts*
2. Architecture
3. Literature
4. Music
5. Performing arts
6. Visual arts

    Everyday life

1. Clothing
2. Entertainment
3. Game
4. Family
5. Food
6. Home

    Philosophy and religion

1. Knowledge
2. Philosophy*
3. Ethics
4. Logic
5. Religion
6. Deity

    Society and social sciences

1. Communication
2. Language
3. Mass media
4. Writing
5. Culture
6. Folklore
7. Economics
8. Agriculture
9. Business
10. Manufacturing
11. Trade
12. Ethnicity
13. Psychology
14. Emotion
15. Mind
16. Society*
17. Civilization
18. Education
19. Government
20. Law
21. Politics
22. State (polity)
23. War

    Science and medicine

1. Science*
2. Astronomy
3. Solar System
4. Sun
5. Earth*
6. Moon
7. Universe
8. Biology
9. Cell
10. Death
11. Ecology
12. Evolution
13. Reproduction
14. Life*
15. Animal
16. Human*
17. Plant
18. Chemistry
19. Chemical element
20. Fire
21. Water
22. Climate
23. Geology
24. Medicine
25. Disease
26. Physics
27. Electricity
28. Energy
29. Matter
30. Time

    Technology

1. Technology*
2. Computer
3. Engineering
4. Tool
5. Transport

    Mathematics

1. Mathematics*
2. Algebra
3. Arithmetic
4. Geometry
5. Number
6. Statistics

* Level 1 vital article on Wikipedia