Larry Page on think big

From "In the Plex"

“Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail
completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.” Page
always thought about that. When people proposed a short-term
solution, Page’s instinct was to think long term. There would eventually
be a joke among Googlers that Page “went to the future and came
back to tell us about it.”

Tourist vs Traveler

The difference between travel and tourism is simple. A tourist experiences disconnected sights and sounds and enjoys them without drawing meaning. A traveler roams the earth, digests what he sees and hears, and collects them in a framework of understanding, which he both brings to his travels and deepens with travels. The former is a pleasant interlude in your life. The latter is about life itself.
— George Friedman, STRATFOR Founder & CEO

One of the best poems from an unknown author

前天
我放学回家
锅里有一碗油盐饭。

昨天
我放学回家
锅里没有一碗油盐饭。

今天
我放学回家
炒了一碗油盐饭
放在妈妈的坟前！

Woody Allen on Inspiration

http://thebrowser.com/interviews/woody-allen-on-memory?print

As I said before, I do think we live in a nightmare and I feel the same way that Blanche Dubois feels: I want magic; I don’t want reality. I want the paper lanterns hung over the bare light bulbs, like she did. And if there is any way to escape reality, I’m all for it.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any real way. You can distract yourself. You can go to baseball games and concerts and plays and have sex and get involved in all kinds of endeavours that obsess you, and you can even create problems for yourself, where they don’t exist, to avoid thinking about the bad problems. But, in the end, you’re caught. And reality inevitably disappoints you.
Elia Kazan: A Biography Elia Kazan: A Biography
Finally, let’s flash forward to Richard Schickel’s biography of Elia Kazan. Tell us about it.

I’m a great compartmentaliser. I always feel one has nothing to do with the other. You can watch Triumph of the Will – it’s a magnificent work of art – and you can still hate Leni Riefenstahl because she was a Nazi. You can listen to Wagner’s music – it’s magnificent, and he was a terrible person.
The same thing is true here. I’m not saying Kazan was a terrible person. Those issues were extremely complex and the easiest thing to do was just to remove yourself and self-righteously make criticisms. Some of those criticisms might be very justified when you argue them out, I don’t know. That’s a different argument.
But the films that he did, the plays that he did – his creative work was wonderful. Whatever you think of Kazan politically, it has nothing to do with the fact that the guy was a great director.