"We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious."
-- Austerlitz

"In both poker and life, you can't read people any better than they can read themselves. You can, if you’re good, very accurately determine if they think their hand is good, or if they think they know the answer to your legal question. But you can't be sure if reality differs from their perception."
-- Matt Maroon

"We should not complain about impermanence, because without impermanence, nothing is possible."
-- Thich Nhat Hanh

"I've never been happy. I have a few memories, early in life, and it sounds dramatic to say, but when I reflect on my life, the best I've ever had were brief periods when things were simply less painful."
-- [Anonymous]

Q: What are the "intuitive and metaphyscal arts"?
A: The gods alone know. Probably the old tired con-acts of fortune-telling and putting the hex on your neighbor's goat, glossed up with gibberish borrowed from pop science tracts in the last two centuries.
-- The Aleph Anti-FAQ

"If you build a snazzy alife sim ... you'd be a kind of bridging `first cause', and might even have the power to intervene in their lives - even obliterate their entire experienced cosmos - but that wouldn't make you a god in any interesting sense. Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on."
-- Damien Broderick

"NORMAL is a setting on a washing-machine."
-- Nikolai Kingsley