Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The cure to information overload is more information.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with.

The web and physical world is plagued with abundance - people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

I don't really like filling my brain with a lot of stuff.

A full mind is an empty bat.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Sometimes it's better to not read too much, to not listen to everybody.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.

Red lights, green lights, stop and go jive. Headlines, deadlines, jamming your mind.

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is, you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving 'cause you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say, oh, look, a cow? Nobody.

Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

To me, Twitter seems like a way for people to just let the world know about the most mundane bullshit that crosses their mind.