Thursday, April 15, 2010

Misleading Notes to Myself

Markets are like wives: they tell you what you need to know, but you don't always like what you hear.

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There are many fine and worthwhile things beyond the comprehension of individually articulated reason. Beyond the mind of any one man there are the minds of all.

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Creativity does not begin with logically solving a problem; it begins with an inspired solution.

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Life has two parts. The first is finding what you love and learning how to love it. The second is learning how to let it go.

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Who does not hope for a life after death? Only those who believe that love is never misunderstood in this one.

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Entrepreneurs are the deviants hiding in the closets at business schools.

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Rast's Law: Every successful business eventually turns into the department of motor vehicles. Then it dies the death that it deserves.

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When one animal meets another, it has one of only four instinctive reactions: kill it, cooperate with it, ignore it, or flee it. Consider it a measure of human progress that we are at least more likely to oppose those we meet than we are to kill them.

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Much to the dismay of all sorcerers and an uncomfortably large number of scientists, human invention is not formulaic.

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One life always depends upon the lives of others. You may obtain what you need from others by force, fraud, aid, or trade, but if you successfully use force or fraud, you will create the social condition where you must constantly seek a more clever fraud or a more effective force when you aim to improve your standard of living. In other words, you will enter into an arms race of force and fraud with other self-serving bullies and liars, a pact of social suicide.

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Art is religion without divinity. Religion is art with the divine. Why do people go to museums? For the same reasons people used to go to church.

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Three things you should acquire in an education, regardless of major:
1. The ability to think logically.
2. The ability to present your ideas well, in writing and orally.
3. The ability to calculate.

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Even our most beautiful words are poor clothes for God. We are like dogs barking at the moon, inspired by what we see and very proud of the sounds we make.

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Although we would not choose it, it is our struggle that makes us most fully what we are.

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We make a serious mistake when we try to turn one kind of knowledge into another. Prices are like words: they are not scientific constants and cannot be managed as you would manage temperature, melting points, or atomic weights.

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Accounting is more language than math. Contrary to what many people expect of accounting, it does not offer us a world of unchanging facts. It offers us a reliable but only temporary and largely metaphorical way of describing reality.

Friday, April 2, 2010

You Belong on Bull Street

One man has many beginnings
One of mine is here
My parents married at the manse of Centennial ARP.

They were not doctrinaire
They were in love.

Love does not worry about the institutes of the Christian religion
Love reconciles all contradictions
At least until the lovers learn
That love is the greatest contradiction of them all.

Reasonable people aren’t supposed to contradict themselves.
Good luck with that.

At one end of Bull Street
There stands a public university
At the other, a lunatic asylum
And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference
Or know which way love comes from
Or know which way it might go.