---
id:
aliases: []
title: Favorite Quotes
tags:
  - authorship/original
  - destiny/fleeting
  - status/draft
  - topic/writing
  - type/encyclopedia-entry
---
# Favorite Quotes

## About Tools

> [!quote] John Culkin, commonly attributed to Marshall McLuhan
> We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.

> [!quote] _[[thoreau_1854_walden|Walden]]_, Henry David Thoreau
> Men have become the tools of their tools.

> [!quote] Jeff Duntemann
> A good tool improves the way you work.
> A great tool improves the way you think.

> [!quote] Alan Watts
> We are sick with a fascination
> for the useful tools of names and numbers,
> of symbols, signs, conceptions, and ideas.

> [!quote] Paul Arden
> If you get stuck, draw with a different pen.
> Change your tools; it may free your thinking.

## About Incentives

> [!quote] Charlie Munger
> Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

> [!cite] Goodhart's Law
> When a measure becomes a target,
> it ceases to be a good measure.

## About Process Optimization

### "Sharpen the Axe"

Frequently misattributed to Abraham Lincoln is some variation of:

> [!quote]
> Give me six hours to chop down a tree
> and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

For the legitimate origin of the quote see [[reverend-william-h-alexander]].

I think when people use some version of the quote in real life
it's usually to justify second definition [yak shaving](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving)
(at least that's usually when I use it).

> [!quote] Ecclesiastes 10:10, King James Version
> If the iron be blunt,
> and he do not whet the edge,
> then must he put to more strength:
> but wisdom _is_ profitable to direct.

I like the story because it's well known
and easily interpreted as an [optimization problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_problem).

## About Learning

> [!quote] [[hubbard_2020_failure#Why It's Hard To Know What Works]]
> The placebo effect might not be as persistent
> if it were easier to learn from our experience...
> But learning is not a given in any environment.

## About Originality

> [!quote] Brian Eno, _A Year With Swollen Appendices_, p. 67
> A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking
> that nobody else has ever bothered with it.

## About Hypocrisy

> [!quote] Luke 6:42, King James Version
> Either how canst thou say to thy brother,
> Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye,
> when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
> Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye,
> and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.