A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile

I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.

Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

I remind myself of Einstein's remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up