Sleep has to be, by far, the most underrated aspect of good health. I think sleeping less & working more is glorified. Life is like a marathon; if you run too fast and don't pace yourself, you can burn out, and you probably won't be able to finish strong.
What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong?
Question
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
Money & investment
I started reading poetry in primary school—Victor Hugo, the romantics, and the Parnassians—they were part of the curriculum. In my grandfather’s library there were some anthologies of nineteenth-century poetry. Alfred de Vigny impressed me most; indeed I won a competition by reciting Vigny’s “Moses” with an enthusiasm that touched the examiner. In fact this poem and “La Maison du Berger” are among the most beautiful poems in the French language, unfairly neglected today.
Shusha Guppy, The Paris Review, Issue 131, Summer 1994, 1994 source ↗
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Nithin Kamath
Co-founder and chief executive of Zerodha
Mario Molina
Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995
As I was starting my academic career, it was almost considered to be a negative signal to your career to get involved in politics ... But to me that was a sign you were doing something useful.
Recorded
C&EN profile interview after the Presidential Medal of Freedom, vol. 91 no. 49, Chemical & Engineering News, 9 December 2013
source ↗
Desmond Tutu
Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town; chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Nobel Peace Prize, 1984
Remember that the resentment and the anger leveled at the United States is not leveled against Americans as Americans. It is leveled against a particular policy followed by a particular administration, and change the policy or maybe change the administration, and you will find, I mean, that there is very little anti-Americanism in the world. There is a lot of — I mean, there is a lot of anger at an America that has been arrogant and an America that believe it is good, go it alone. You know, your unilateralism where you went to the United Nations thinking that they would just endorse your view, and when they said no, you said go jump in the lake, and you went and you did your own thing, and you landed in a huge mess. Well, people don’t want to say we told you so, you know, because you realize, I mean, after 9/11, most of the world was deeply — I mean, America was held in the highest. People really felt deeply for you, and I’m sure you all felt loved, and you dissipated it in next to no time. You know, I mean, chop, chop, chop, and it disappeared, but it shows, you know, it isn’t that there is an ingrained hatred of America. There isn’t.
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.
Recorded
His letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in the 1993 annual report, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., February 1994
source ↗
More from Yves Bonnefoy
View profile →I was not much taken by their poems, but I liked Leconte de Lisle’s translation of Homer, especially his Iliad, which brought me the classical world. I have often felt a great difference between myself and the next generation, those who were twenty in 1950, although it is only a few years, because I had read in my grandfather’s library books that were later less accessible. The next generation was reading Michaux, Prévert, Éluard—twentieth-century authors. I’m glad to have read the Greek classics, and French ones too—writers like Racine and Corneille.
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