We choose mania over boredom every time.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good.