Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

I feel like I leave every single project feeling like I didn't quite do as good as I wanted to do on it, and I have to just look forward to the next one to try and do better. Because you never quite hit the heights you have in your head for what you're going to do. But you learn something each time, which is important.

Winston Churchill used to say that we, Americans, try every other option before we finally do the right thing. After everything else is exhausted we eventually do the right thing and I think that's true for Congress as well. And it's important for Americans to remember that politics has always been messy.

So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it's a waste of time.

Being able to allow people to be who they are without trying to change them is important.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

Telling what you feel, trying to talk about what's important to you, does not make you weaker.

There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words. Your thought, even a bad one, while it is with you, is always more profound, but in words it is more ridiculous and dishonorable.

The most important thing that each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbor's eyes.

It's important to keep challenging myself and try to come up with some new face every now and again.

whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.

Every now and then you'll say something that didn't quite work. But the important thing is, as a comic, you try to learn why it didn't. And then you adjust and figure out how to either make it work or just abandon it because it's just not funny.

In terms of trying to improve as an actor, for me it's always important to return to the stage. After doing a piece of theater for a prolonged period, I can think I must have surely improved in some way as an actor - you must be fitter than you were prior to doing it. For me, theater is very, very important in keeping things fresh and dangerous.

Simplicity is the outward sign and symbol of depth of thought.

Don't always try to be popular. It isn't possible for everyone to like you. It's far more important for you to like yourself. And when you respect yourself, strangely, you get more respect than when you court it from others.

Definitely, there's a lot of trouble you come up against when you're acting and directing, about your performance. Sometimes it's hard to be objective about it. I will tend to get two takes and walk away. I don't belabor it, and it's important to me to have someone who says, "You know what? You should get another one, and maybe you should try it like that".

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.

Fear is something that can really hold us all back from different things in life. It's important to notice what your fears are and try to conquer them.

Now that I've got kids, it's become really important for me on the health front to try to buy as much organic produce as possible.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

Mine is studying script and being very academic and trying to be important.

When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.

I love the construction process and it is always important because we try to experiment and do something new, so the builders are not copying any technique from other projects. Everything is innovative and so I need to be there and be attentive to make sure everything is running smoothly.

It's important for me to try my hand at philanthropy because I want to leave behind a record of someone who did more than just gobble up stuff for themselves. I realized that a life lived for yourself is not much of a life.