1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  3. Abo, Akinori 9
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  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
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  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. boredom 9
  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
  97. doors 7
  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
  99. drawing 23
  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  101. Duany, Andres 18
  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
  108. ending 14
  109. engineering 11
  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
  115. experience 14
  116. farming 8
  117. fashion 11
  118. features 25
  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
  127. fun 7
  128. function 31
  129. games 13
  130. gardens 26
  131. Garfield, Emily 4
  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
  133. geography 8
  134. geometry 18
  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  137. goodness 12
  138. Graham, Paul 37
  139. graphics 13
  140. Greene, Erick 6
  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
  143. Harford, Tim 4
  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
  147. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
  152. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  154. home 15
  155. Hoy, Amy 4
  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
  157. html 11
  158. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  159. humanity 16
  160. humor 6
  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
  167. industry 9
  168. information 42
  169. infrastructure 17
  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
  200. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  202. Krishna, Golden 10
  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
  204. language 20
  205. learning 30
  206. life 59
  207. light 31
  208. loneliness 12
  209. love 26
  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
  245. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  246. nature 51
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
  251. novelty 11
  252. objects 16
  253. order 10
  254. ornament 9
  255. Orwell, George 7
  256. Ott, Matthias 4
  257. ownership 6
  258. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  259. Palmer, John 8
  260. patterns 11
  261. Patton, James L. 9
  262. Pawson, John 21
  263. perception 22
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  299. Reveal, James L. 4
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  320. Simms, Matthew 19
  321. Simon, Paul 6
  322. simplicity 14
  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
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  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
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  328. Smith, Rach 4
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  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
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  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
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  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
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  362. touch 8
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  365. truth 15
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Life

Close
  • Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

    A Book by Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin
    lawrenceweschler.com
    1. ​​Sonorisms I​​
    2. ​​More than just a machine that runs along​​
    3. ​​Nobody was doing anything​​
    4. ​​NYLA​​
    5. ​​Aggressively Zen​​
    1. ​​The Small Group​​
    2. ​​Infinite varieties of contexts​​
    3. ​​Your only language is vision​​
    4. ​​To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees​​
    5. ​​Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art​​
    6. ​​The Finish Fetish Artists​​
    7. ​​Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface​​
    • art
    • life
    • craft
    • seeing
  • Your life adds up

    Weber's German word for a vocation, Beruf, contains two resonances: the gradual accumulation of knowledge and skills and the ever-stronger conviction that one was meant to do this one particular thing in one's life.

    An English locution roughly conveys what he meant: your life 'adds up'.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​All in & with the flow​​
    2. ​​The saddest designer​​
    3. ​​I've designed it that way​​
    • work
    • life
  • To form an integrated human milieu

    EVEN IF, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and leisure — the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.

    Guy Debord, Situationist Theses on Traffic
    • work
    • life
  • Man hideth not

    For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Confucius said that "man hideth not." Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal.

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    • life
  • You find reasons to keep living

    Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.

    Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke
    1. ​​Prometheus​​
    • suffering
    • hope
    • life
  • To prove it in purity

    The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect.

    "I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler

    Smiljan Radić, Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot
    • creativity
    • life
    • obsession
    • passion
  • The experiment of living

    How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

    Henry David Thoreau, Walden
    • life
    • adolescence
    • experiments
  • If I had The Sads

    Image from melanie-richards.com on 2020-05-01 at 9.22.14 AM.png

    Back before COVID-19 hit the global scene, I thought it would be pleasant to have a list of the good things in life. This list wouldn’t be an exhaustive account of all the checked boxes on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but rather would document small pleasures which evoke some kind of clear and specific emotional response. If I had The Sads, I could pull up this list and sink down into the sensory details of, say, that strong hit of pine scent you randomly get on a hiking trail.

    Now that we’re all in the thick of this pandemic, this new tiny side project—Good Things—has offered me a peaceful little portal to things I miss. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found that reading my personal list of good things can be comforting as I help protect my community by sheltering in place.

    Melanie Richards, Good Things
    melanie-richards.com
    1. ​​Five Nice Things​​
    • happiness
    • life
    • goodness
    • collections
  • In terms which must be altered

    [Life] frequently sets its problems in terms which must be altered if the problem is to be solved at all.

    Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
    1. ​​Unfolding​​
    2. ​​Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design​​
    • life
  • Violence to the very structure of our being

    If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.

    Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
    • creativity
    • work
    • life
    • material
  • We must cultivate our garden

    ‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.

    ‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’

    Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’

    Voltaire, Candide
    www.theschooloflife.com
    • life
    • gardens
  • The second half of your life

    Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.

    There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.

    There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.

    Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself
    • life

    Text selected for overall meaning, but minimally edited.

  • To deprecate beauty itself

    One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, Washi
    • paper
    • writing
    • beauty
    • life
  • Fire, the animating spirit

    We can easily imagine from our own experience why fire might be used as a symbol of the life of a house and the family that lives there. The fire was certainly the most lifelike element of the house: it consumed food and left behind waste; it could grow and move seemingly by its own will; and it could exhaust itself and die. And most important it was warm, one of the most fundamental qualities that we associate with our own lives. When the fire dies, its remains become cold, just as the body becomes cold when a person dies. Drawing a parallel to the concept of the soul that animates the physical body of the person, the fire, then, is the animating spirit for the body of the house.

    Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture
    1. ​​Howl's Moving Castle​​
    2. ​​The boiler room​​
    • fire
    • life
  • In the walls and mosses

    If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    1. ​​From body to body​​
    • life
  • People who force nature force themselves

    People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.

    To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    • life
  • 70. Grave Sites

    Problem

    No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.

    Solution

    Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    • death
    • life
  • I went to the woods

    I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

    Henry David Thoreau, Walden
    • life
    • nature
    • truth
  • I won't get

    If I don't ask, I won't get.

    Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding
    • life
    • goals
  • What does wisdom counsel?

    We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.

    Alain de Botton, On Love
    • life
    • wisdom
  • The quality without a name

    There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

    There are words we use to describe this quality:

    alive
    whole
    comfortable
    free
    exact
    egoless
    eternal

    But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    1. ​​No words to describe​​
    • beauty
    • life
    • meaning
    • spirit
  • All the things we want to do

    This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.

    Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City
    1. ​​Rage rooms​​
    • urbanism
    • life
  • A blue glow

    The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

    Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
    • i
    • creativity
    • thinking
    • life
  • Already memories

    He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

    Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
    • life
    • time

    Cities & Memory 2

  • The inferno of the living

    The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

    Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
    • life

    Hidden Cities 5

  • There, with a dash on the beach

    How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

    Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
    • life
  • A regular wind-up toy world this is

    A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world.

    Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women
    • life
  • This is how I lived

    Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    • life
    • teaching
  • Any life

    Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same.

    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
    • life
  • Wanting for nothing

    Some day, will you be satisfied and want for nothing, yearning for nothing, and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, to cater to your pleasures?

    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
    • life
  • The most precious thing we ever have

    In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.

    And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • life
  • Patterns of life

    If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

    Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.

    There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen.

    When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • life
  • The old unity

    The most fundamental splits in contemporary life occur because of the break-up of the old unity of design, production and enjoyment.

    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer
    • life
  • I can't remember

    Benjamin: It's like there's this whole life I had, but I can't remember what it was.

    David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    • time
    • memory
    • life
  • The complexity and the gray

    One thing I assume of age is weariness.
    Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
    Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.

    But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.

    Rian Johnson, Knives Out
    • truth
    • life
    • age
    • decisions
  • The life-giving continuum

    In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.

    In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.

    Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    • life
    • production
  • What's wrong?

    Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • anxiety
    • life
  • More by accident

    In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • life
    • questions
    • happiness
  • A Pattern Language

    A Book by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Its place in the web of nature​​
    2. ​​9. Scattered Work​​
    3. ​​21. Four-Story Limit​​
    4. ​​51. Green Streets​​
    5. ​​53. Main Gateways​​
    1. ​​Deliberate acts​​
    2. ​​patternsof.design​​
    3. ​​125 Best Architecture Books​​
    4. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    5. ​​The design systems between us​​
    6. ​​Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • life
    • construction
  • This is Water

    A Speech by David Foster Wallace
    www.youtube.com
    1. ​​Everybody worships​​
    1. ​​No words to describe​​
    • life
    • attention
    • society
  • Narcissus and Goldmund

    A Novel by Herman Hesse
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Duality​​
    2. ​​Fear of death​​
    3. ​​Pain and joy​​
    4. ​​Suddenly the letter has a tail​​
    5. ​​All that is beautiful and lovely​​
    • religion
    • love
    • life
  • The Architecture of Happiness

    A Book by Alain de Botton
    www.alaindebotton.com
    1. ​​A few millimeters apart​​
    2. ​​Tragic colors​​
    3. ​​Classical absurdity​​
    4. ​​Ideas of a good life​​
    5. ​​The people we love​​
    • architecture
    • happiness
    • life
  • Thoreau 2.0

    A Talk by Maciej Cegłowski
    idlewords.com
    1. ​​Walden​​
    • life
    • nature
    • literature
  • I've designed it that way

    A Quote by Townes Van Zandt
    genius.com

    I don't envision a very long life for myself.
    Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?

    I've designed it that way.

    1. ​​Your life adds up​​
    • death
    • work
    • design
    • art
    • melancholy
    • life
  • Philosophy of life and gardening

    A Website by Steve Richards
    steverichards.notion.site

    I enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.

    Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning

    • gardens
    • philosophy
    • life
  • Good Things

    A Website by Melanie Richards
    goodthings.melanie-richards.com
    1. ​​If I had The Sads​​
    1. ​​Thanks Doc​​
    • beauty
    • life
    • happiness
    • microsites
    • collections

    A personal compilation of good sensory things in life.

  • Celebrating Steve

    A Video by Steve Jobs
    www.youtube.com
    Screenshot of www.youtube.com on 2021-10-09 at 9.13.58 AM.png

    When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

    • life
    • innovation

    "To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Steve’s passing, this short film is a celebration of his life and his extraordinary vision."

  • Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka

    A Building
    www.rdloftsmitaka.com
    Image from www.rdloftsmitaka.com on 2021-04-30 at 12.18.22 PM.jpeg

    The “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller),” built by architects/artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, are the first residential units designed “not to die.”

    • architecture
    • life
    • health
    • destiny
  • People I'd like to meet

    A Fragment by Rafael Conde
    rafa.design
    Screenshot of rafa.design on 2020-10-26 at 8.58.28 AM.png

    I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my heroes, but I still have a long way to go.
    This is a list of people I'd like to high five IRL.

    • socializing
    • goals
    • life
    • collections

    Rafael Conde maintains a simple bucket list all the people he wants to meet in his lifetime. This would be a useful practice even if it was just for himself, but it's made even more interesting that Conde makes the list public, so that people who are on it might reach out.

  • Which Books You Truly Love

    An Essay by Salman Rushdie
    www.nytimes.com

    I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.

    • reading
    • love
    • identity
    • life
  • Truisms

    An Artwork by Jenny Holzer
    www.moma.org
    Image from www.moma.org on 2020-12-22 at 3.00.58 PM.jpeg

    Holzer began creating these works in 1977, when she was a student in an independent study program. She hand-typed numerous "one liners," or Truisms, which she has likened, partly in jest, to a "Jenny Holzer's Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought." She typeset the sentences in alphabetical order and printed them inexpensively, using commercial printing processes. She then distributed the sheets at random and pasted them up as posters around the city. Her Truisms eventually adorned a variety of formats, including T-shirts and baseball caps.

    1. ​​Design Leadership Truisms​​
    • truth
    • wisdom
    • life
  • The Cycle of Emotions

    An Article by Jessica Fan
    www.jessicafan.ca
    Image from www.jessicafan.ca on 2020-12-08 at 9.52.52 AM.jpeg

    When we do not cultivate our Pillars, they grow weak and our Platform of Radiance becomes unstable, causing us to fall into one of the four Pits of Suffering below.

    Each Pillar has a corresponding Pit of Suffering:

    • Love > Attachment
    • Compassion > Sentimentality
    • Joy > Elation
    • Equanimity > Apathy
    • emotion
    • life
    • happiness
  • Life as Protest

    A Fragment by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com

    I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.

    • life
    • work
    • society
  • What doesn't seem like work?

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com

    The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.

    So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?

    • work
    • interest
    • life
  • We must try to live

    A Quote
    www.goodreads.com

    The wind is rising!
    ...We must try to live.

    — Paul Valéry

    1. ​​The Wind Rises​​
    • life
    • wind
  • How to do what you love

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com
    1. ​​To do something well you have to like it​​
    2. ​​Wow, that's pretty cool​​
    3. ​​Prestige is just fossilized inspiration​​
    4. ​​Always produce​​
    • work
    • life
  • To supersede the span of individual life

    A Quote

    Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.

    — Gotthard Booth

    • time
    • life
    • happiness
    • wisdom
  • All in & with the flow

    An Article by Buster Benson
    busterbenson.com
    Image from busterbenson.com on 2020-05-01 at 10.18.28 AM.png
    1. ​​Your life adds up​​
    • visualization
    • time
    • life

    I love this method of visualizing a person's major life events. Chunks are years and smaller boxes are weeks. If nothing major happened, then the box is blank, or you might see portions of a year when there have been flurries of activity.

    Helps one to see how their life adds up.

  • Meaningness

    A Website by David Chapman
    meaningness.com

    The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.

    People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.”

    • meaning
    • life

See also:
  1. work
  2. happiness
  3. time
  4. wisdom
  5. beauty
  6. creativity
  7. collections
  8. truth
  9. architecture
  10. goals
  11. meaning
  12. urbanism
  13. love
  14. art
  15. society
  16. nature
  17. death
  18. gardens
  19. teaching
  20. spirit
  21. i
  22. thinking
  23. goodness
  24. visualization
  25. memory
  26. age
  27. decisions
  28. production
  29. anxiety
  30. questions
  31. construction
  32. microsites
  33. religion
  34. craft
  35. seeing
  36. attention
  37. literature
  38. adolescence
  39. experiments
  40. fire
  41. wind
  42. interest
  43. socializing
  44. emotion
  45. paper
  46. writing
  47. health
  48. destiny
  49. reading
  50. identity
  51. material
  52. obsession
  53. passion
  54. suffering
  55. hope
  56. innovation
  57. philosophy
  58. design
  59. melancholy
  1. Christopher Alexander
  2. David Foster Wallace
  3. Marcus Aurelius
  4. Richard Sennett
  5. Alain de Botton
  6. Italo Calvino
  7. Melanie Richards
  8. Murray Silverstein
  9. Sara Ishikawa
  10. Henry David Thoreau
  11. Paul Graham
  12. Dorothy Sayers
  13. Richard Saul Wurman
  14. Haruki Murakami
  15. Virginia Woolf
  16. Nicholson Baker
  17. C. Wright Mills
  18. Buster Benson
  19. David Fincher
  20. Rian Johnson
  21. Herman Hesse
  22. Lawrence Wechler
  23. Robert Irwin
  24. Maciej Cegłowski
  25. David Chapman
  26. Geoff Manaugh
  27. Bill Mollison
  28. Lisa Heschong
  29. Rafael Conde
  30. Craig Mod
  31. Jessica Fan
  32. Jenny Holzer
  33. Yanagi Sōetsu
  34. Salman Rushdie
  35. Peter F. Drucker
  36. Voltaire
  37. Smiljan Radić
  38. Hayao Miyazaki
  39. Steve Jobs
  40. Okakura Kakuzō
  41. Guy Debord
  42. Steve Richards
  43. Townes Van Zandt