Quotes About Relevance

One symptom that you have bogged down in complexity overload is when you find yourself doggedly applying a method that is clearly irrelevant, at least to any outside observer. It is like the mechanically inept person whose car breaks down—so he puts water in the battery and empties the ashtrays. — P. J. Plauger

you shouldn't be uneasy about any parts of the architecture. It shouldn't contain anything just to please the boss. It shouldn't contain anything that's hard for you to understand. You're the one who'll implement it; if it doesn't make sense to you, how can you implement it?

When you stand up to preach, people are bored and expect you to make it worse.

The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don't care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa.

Love without action is meaningless and action without love is irrelevant.

I love being irreverent. But I hate being irrelevant. I love being irreverent because at the end of the day your actions belie your intentions.

Sometimes when you make good stuff and you love it, it gets outdated sometimes, because you've held on to it so long, you may not like it like you used to.

The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement... To do whatever you do for no reason other than you love it and believe in its importance.

I love being a part of something so many people can relate to and enjoy.

That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.

'9 to 5,' that little song, that little story, just won't ever end. Just like 'I Will Always Love You,' it just keeps comin' back, popping up its head in one way or another.

The music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there.

Now we had to work to make ourselves fit into each other's lives, to maintain our relevance to each other. In college our collective friendship had been at the center of our lives, and now the centrifugal force of time had pushed it out to the perimeter, where it was in danger of spinning off the circle altogether. Thirty . . . shit.

if there is an afterlife, then nothing here mattered, and if there isn't an afterlife, nothing here mattered.

The purpose of life, as far as I can tell… is to find a mode of being that's so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.

we may not exactly be God, but we're not exactly nothing, either.

There will always be people better than you—that's a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who's going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It's, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters. Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It's a cheap trick of the rational mind.

Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.

If you are not communicating about anything that engages other people, then the value of your communication—even the value of your very presence—risks falling to zero.

Osiris's decision to close his eyes when he should have kept them open exacted a brutally heavy price: subjugation to his evil brother, Set. The idea that the state had a malevolent brother was an axiom, we might say, of the Egyptian worldview—no doubt the consequence of a complex, long-standing civilization observing its own flaws—and something that has retained its relevance to the current day.

An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea defines figure against ground. An idea is a personality, not a fact.

Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It's a cheap trick of the rational mind.

Make Yourself Invaluable

Often people think of developments in computation as arising when we make our computers more blazingly fast, so they can compute more stuff , bigger data . It's actually just as important to prune away big parts of the data that aren't relevant to the problem at hand! The fastest computation is the one you don't do.