About Me
Who is writing all this, and why.
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Snapshot
Marty Beard is a technology leader, husband and father. He grew up in the Bay Area and attended the University of California, Berkeley. At Cal he studied rhetoric and history, thus beginning a lifelong passion for literature, particularly philosophy. After graduating from Cal, Marty began a career in management consulting, then attended graduate school at Georgetown University. He has worked…
Words to Live By
One evening I saw a red sunset, its rays falling on the trunks and foliage of pines growing among a tumble of rocks, coloring the trunks and foliage with orange fire. It was superb.
— Vincent van Gogh
Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation . . .
— Albert Einstein
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.
— Thomas Wolfe
I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself — that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
We read to know we are not alone.
— C.S. Lewis
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
— Albert Camus
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
— Simone Weil
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
— Walt Whitman
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The process: sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the flow of the narrative on track — requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.
— Haruki Murakami
Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe