Piero Scaruffi quotes (selected by his readers):
  • "The average person only exists in the imagination of the average person"
  • "If you store it on your device, you don’t 'know' it"
  • "It's not you who read the poem, it's the poem that reads you"
  • "The book is interested in the reader as much as the reader is interested in the book"
  • "We don't build buildings, we build ruins"
  • "Life is a catalog of monsters, inner monsters"
  • "To say that something is new, you first have to learn all the things that are old"
  • "We are too busy dying to understand what living means."
  • "It is important to learn from our mistakes but also from our successes."
  • "The only certain knowledge about the future that humans can easily access is the one that humans deny: that they will be dead forever."
  • "Life is a stories-generating machine"
  • "What we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it"
  • "The ones who do not wander are the ones who are truly lost"
  • "The role of a great artist is not to depict beauty but to invent a whole new concept of beauty".
  • "The only immortal things are the things that don't exist"
  • "We are in this world for only a brief moment and we take ourselves way too seriously"
  • "The past is not any more certain than the future"
  • "Truth is in everything, even in lies"
  • "Are we becoming post-human, or pre-human?"
  • "We frequently think of technology as dehumanizing us. Does technology instead humanize us?"
  • "The fact that so many Facebook users think that their comments are funny and smart tells you how far Facebook users still are from becoming funny and smart."
  • "There is always something to learn from history if you are not afraid of what it teaches you."
  • "No matter how long you walk, you are always in the same place, but you are never the one who started walking."
  • "A very clear question is already an answer"
  • "The greatest invention of all time: the question mark"
  • "Some problems have no solution, should have no solution, and are not problems"
  • "I was wise in my childhood. Then i grew up and started believing in fairy tales."
  • "There are no coincidences in history"
  • "The purpose of sleeping is to wake up. (The purpose of waking up is unknown)"
  • "God speaks clearly only when he (she?) shuts up."
  • "Common sense is increasingly uncommon"
  • "We understand what we don't know. We don't even know what we understand."
  • "A fiction is not a lie"
  • "Science makes the invisible visible, art makes the visible invisible"
  • "The real failure is when you stop trying"
  • "Humankind is rapidly becoming a footnote in the history of technology "
  • "It is time to stop pretending that it is time to stop pretending: pretending is the only thing we do, and we do it well."
  • "Life progresses one funeral at a time"
  • "Technology is the way of dealing with the world so that we don't have to deal with it"
  • "'Is' is"
  • "Nothing causes anything, but everything causes nothing."
  • "The most overlooked invention in the history of humankind is the equal sign."
  • "Most of the 'profound truths' in history have, sooner or later, been proven to be false"
  • "We are secretely spying while being secretely spied on"
  • "When the impossible happens, everybody has a very simple explanation for why it was inevitable".
  • "Art is a meaning generator"
  • "God is a geek who made a lot of money with his invention and now only occasionally cares about the business plan"
  • "A good book is a book that tells me something about myself that i didn't know, and there are an infinite number of such books"
  • "Our lives are parables of parables of parables of parables of..."
  • "Are we the toilet or the plunger?"
  • "You were born to just buy things you don't need and can't afford, and get as sick as possible for as long as possible."
  • "Hunters should only be allowed to hunt hunters"
  • "Asking the wrong questions is more important than providing the right answers"
  • "We speak about death even when we don't"
  • "We are fragile opinions surrounded by hostile facts."
  • "Ideas are born in light and out of light, but they grow in darkness, feeding on darkness."
  • "Progress is progress for the ones who make it and sell it, but not for the ones who never asked for it and are now forced to accept it and buy it"
  • "The most difficult part of finding a solution is to accept that there is a problem"
  • "The most difficult part of a problem is always to understand what the problem is"
  • "The history of human civilization can be rewritten as the history of making humans dumber and then inventing smarter tools for dumber humans"
  • "The history of science is, by definition, a chronological record of past mistakes"
  • "To be or not to be"? should be rephrased as two complementary questions: "Is it possible to be?" and "Is it possible not to be?"
  • "You are located not where you are but what you are."
  • "If an animal spread plastic garbage all over the planet, we would certainly exterminate it. "
  • "Luckily, Nature is much more exciting than Science makes it look like; and luckily Science is much more exciting than Nature makes it look like."
  • "Games play people"
  • "You are not what you do but what you allow others to do to you"
  • "The history of the world in a nutshell: the luxuries of the previous generation become the necessities of the new generation."
  • "We never fully wake up."
  • "Poetry is the art of turning the obvious into the mysterious. "
  • "A helmet is not a replacement for a brain"
  • "Gods are software, and, like all software, they have bugs."
  • "Is what I learn from there worth what I forget about here?"
  • "You are a grammatical construct: do not misspell yourself."
  • "Like a word in a sentence, the company that you keep determines what you are: a verb, a noun, an adjective, an article, ..., or a punctuation mark. "
  • "We have more money to spend in our spare time but not more time in which to spend it therefore time is increasingly more valuable than money"
  • "Philosophy is the art of saying something incredibly stupid and making it sound incredibly intelligent."
  • "The irony of the human condition is that there are no answers: each answer is, in reality, a new question. "
  • "Science is often an excuse for not thinking"
  • "It is rational not to be rational. It would be irrational to be rational. Only very irrational people are rational."
  • "The way we teach morality to children, by reward and punishment, is not very moral"
  • "Each of us is the product of all the mistakes made by previous generations" ."
  • "We say hello more often than we say goodbye, but we say goodbye much better than we say hello."
  • "Question answers instead of answering questions."
  • "Public opinion is public ignorance."
  • "I wish i could tell you what to do but what to do is not to let people tell you what to do."
  • "Complexity is a simple concept to understand, and simplicity is a very complex concept."
  • "Becoming mature adults is about practicing deceit to the point that we don't remember what we are deceiving ourselves about"
  • "The universe is a pointless distraction"
  • "No matter how far you walk the distance remains the same."
  • "The "I" watches the "me" live, and the "me" watches the "I" die."
  • "Someone should invent a new science to study imaginary problems. And the real problems caused by their solutions."
  • "Real beings dream unreal worlds. Do unreal beings dream the real world?"
  • "Death is a mystery only for those who are alive."
  • "The law of entropy leads us to fight against our fate instead of accepting it, and that's the history of humankind"
  • "The history of the human race is a history of increasing dependence of society on a new technology with unpredictable side effects that end up requiring the creation of, and the increasing dependence on, a new technology"
  • "Anybody who claims to understand science does not understand science"
  • "Humans want to build machines that think like humans while machines are already building humans who think like machines"
  • "It is the pursuit of happiness that makes people unhappy."
  • "Marriage is the art of having two people work together to solve problems that, alone, neither would have."
  • "The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation."
  • "As we live, we talk less and less about the things we really care about because we learn that that is not what life is about"
  • "Ideology is a study of causes, not of effects."
  • "Good can only triumph over Evil by employing extreme evil, thereby fulfilling the mission of Evil"
  • "Life was obviously invented by a dead person"
  • "It's not about where you are but about who's around you."
  • "The present always feels premature even though the future is often overdue"
  • "The only thing that is worse than not finding the solution to a problem is to find the right solution to the wrong problem"
  • "Only by mourning our impotence can we assert our power"
  • "It is cool to behave differently only when everybody else is behaving that way."
  • "Loneliness is a cancer only if you let it grow. Taken in small doses, it is the most powerful medicine, the only one that can resurrect you."
  • "The choice is not between being philosopher or not being philosophers, it's about being good or bad philosophers"
  • "Let us not pretend otherwise: we are surrounded"
  • "We are swimming in the lake in which future generations will drown"
  • "I am both the hiker and the trail"
  • "Most difficult is making sense of other people because they are trying to make sense of me, so the sense changes all the time"
  • "Fear of the world created the gods that created the world that we fear"
  • "Certainty is a by-product of confusion"
  • "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a marketing commercial to sell ducks"
  • "You are a question that is never asked"
  • "One of the most difficult (and consequential) things in life is figuring out whether a question is stupid or not"
  • "You are the people with whom you surround yourself. Make sure you want to be them".
  • "Question everything because everything questions you"
  • "Human civilization is the story of turning the impossible into the inevitable"
  • "If the question is me, the answer is you"
  • "Machines must be understood not programmed"
  • "We are not what we are. Now the question is: are we what we are not?"
  • "It is very difficult to resist the temptation to think that the future will be exactly like the past even though the future has never been like the past"
  • "If i am stupid, i am not intelligent enough to realize it".
  • "Beauty is everywhere. Unfortunately, we are nowhere."
  • "Thinking about nothing makes it something. Thinking about something makes it nothing"
  • "High-tech has become the discipline of complicating simple things"
  • "It is cool to behave different only when everybody else is behaving that way"
  • "Only when the tide recedes do you find out who's been swimming naked" (Warren Buffet). "We're all naked" (piero)
  • "The world is divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The problem is deciding which is which."
  • "Physics is an illusion. What it reveals is the structure of our brain, not the structure of the universe."
  • "What we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it"
  • "A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts" (Paul Valery) "A man is infinitely more complicated than his actions" (piero)
  • "The success of most high-tech projects depends not on making smarter technology but on making dumber users"
  • "Since we came to this world we only heard lies. But it's the lies that make it interesting. The truth would devastate us"
  • "Computer science is becoming the discipline of turning your life into somebody else's business opportunity"
  • "The living beings that have the longest life expectancy are those that have no brain: trees and bacteria"
  • "The most powerful knowledge is the knowledge that induces people to radically change their concept of what knowledge is"
  • "A man is infinitely more complicated than his actions; a woman is infinitely more complicated than her words" (apocryphal)
  • "The only reason that things get occasionally done is that we misunderstand each other all the time"
  • "Destiny is what you don't understand until it happens."
  • Principles of Covariant Wisdom
  • "Fundamentally, communism was a blessing to capitalism because it created so much poverty for capitalists to exploit."
  • "Success in solving a set of problems inevitably creates a new set of problems, and a system that is incapable of solving the new set of problems."
  • "We are not training machines to become like humans but humans to become like machines."
  • "The severity of a problem increases exponentially with the time it takes to realize that the severity of a problem increases exponentially with the time it takes to realize that the severity of a problem increases exponentially with the time it takes..."
  • "The only way to know what i know is to know what i don't know"
  • "We keep changing the question but the answer remains the same" (Translated into Spanish by N. Senada: "Seguimos cambiando las preguntas pero la respuesta sigue siendo la misma")
  • "The world is simpler than the brain that conceives it"
  • "A comedian is someone who tells the truth. Truth is the set of all jokes told by all comedians in the world."
  • "The next time you say forever think of never"
  • "Each of us is a lifelong project to build a coherent theory on top of a blatant contrdiction"
  • "History is the impossible becoming inevitable."
  • "The part is the sum of its wholes."
  • "Knowledge is overrated, truth is underrated."
  • "Philosophy is the art of turning solutions into problems"
  • "We think we know where we live, but we only live where we know."
  • "We are what we find, not what we search for."
  • "Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the mind of the thinker."
  • "Great civilizations are those that do NOT learn from the mistakes of past civilizations"
  • "Very few things are inevitable in life, not even life itself."
  • "Intelligence is not about knowing the answers but about asking the questions"
  • "Bureaucracy is often a problem, rarely a solution."
  • "The best books are those you don't want to finish reading because you hate the idea that they will end"
  • "Nature is a poet that never uses the word 'I'""
  • "What we are today is a special case of what we will be tomorrow"
  • "Thankfully we cannot understand the universe"
  • "The glitch is the rhythm"
  • "Demagogy leads to bigger disasters than the ones it promised to prevent."
  • "Life is about finding solutions to solvable problems. What is more interesting is finding solutions to unsolvable problems."
  • "We always underestimate the ingenuity of idiots"
  • "If you disagree with yourself, you are always right."
  • "If we thought more highly of ourselves, we would not watch bad films and read bad books just because they are publicized "
  • "A revolution is started by people who don't have what they want and hijacked by people who don't want what they have"
  • "What is one expected to expect?"
  • "The first step to finding a solution is to admit that there is a problem"
  • "A scientist is someone who learns more and more about less and less, and ultimately knows everything about nothing. A philosopher is someone who learns less and less about more and more, and ultimately knows nothing about everything"
  • "I see everything everywhere"
  • "Am I myself?"
  • "There is a limit to human intelligence, but there is no limit to human stupidity"
  • "Life is not a journey, it is a destination"
  • "There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world"
  • "Life is a question in the form of an answer"
  • "The more familiar I get with the universe, the less familiar I feel with myself"
  • "Aging is a voyage of the mind through its body as it learns how many organs have to work in order to keep it alive."
  • "People tend to talk about what people tend to talk about"
  • "Any prolonged aesthetic theory eventually becomes a distraction rather than an attraction."
  • "Cogito. Ergo I am feasible."
  • "I do not think thoughts, thoughts think me."
  • "Most books are about aspects of human knowledge. Few people write books about human ignorance, despite the fact that there would be much more to write about."
  • "If you can't always get what you want, may you always want what you get"
  • "Questions are more important than answers"
  • "We are not Nature's only experiment, but we may be one of the few that will fail"
  • "Every point in the universe is a solution to an equation"
  • "In the age of globalization, we are all illiterate"
  • "A fundamental property of life is the ability to predict the future."
  • "The thinker is created by thought"
  • "It only make sense to write/ of what one knows nothing of" (from the poem "Synthesis")
  • "Most of political history is a story of very stupid individuals doing very stupid things that are sold to future generations as heroic "
  • "What we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it"
  • "I do not envy God"
  • Check out also my Mottos of the Afterlife
  • Check out also my Principles of Covariant Wisdom
  • Check out also my tweets

Search the website to find out where they were used:

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