On the one hand, we feel that “everything is moving so fast”—as one philosopher puts it, “Speed is the god of our era”—but often we also simultaneously feel trapped in our social structure and life pattern, imprisoned, deprived of meaningful choice.

That we simplify our judgments in the cause of triage, the management of information overload, is understandable, but the resulting impulsiveness leaves us unable to count, or even to acknowledge, the costs of our simplifications. We thereby become uncharitable to our ancestors—and to ourselves, whom we are depriving of one of the most vital traits

When we speak our thought, we want more than agreement, we want addition: we want our friend to develop that thought, or to push back at it, if ever so gently.

we all need better strategies for making decisions, because the defaults we have inherited have costs that we are rarely aware of—and

Temporal bandwidth needs to be extended in both directions. Better to look five thousand years forward and five thousand years backward rather than strain to see only the future, which, being nonexistent, cannot resist us. The past, by contrast, tells of what we need to know but would never think to look for.

Nobody thinks about everything; nobody can think about everything; our cognitive limitations are such that there will always be a great many topics that we will take no real thought over, but will simply believe what the people around us, for the most part, believe.

I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness.

That is, a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to believe.

Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.