Religion isnt so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What counts is not what people say about you, it is how much energy they spend saying it.

Montaigne also detected the agency problem, or why the last thing a doctor needs is for you to be healthy: “No doctor derives pleasure from the health of his friends, wrote the ancient Greek satirist, no soldier from the peace of his city, etc.” (Nul médecin ne prent plaisir à la santé de ses amis mesmes, dit l’ancien Comique Grec, ny soldat à la paix de sa ville: ainsi du reste.)

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.