The main difference between Mediterraneans and nonMeds: Farniente (doing nothing) is active for a Med. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor — and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Heuristic: when picking a restaurant in an unfamiliar city, don't look at the menu, look at the clients.