Excerpts

From Maxim 3, “Cultivate a few choice eccentricities”:

“Cultivating a few eccentricities is practically a requirement for an intellectual. Fortunately, notable role models are everywhere. Despite having parsed some of the universe’s most complex secrets, Einstein reportedly never learned to drive, claiming it was too complicated. On top of that, he disdained socks. Legend has it that the French essayist and poet Gérard de Nerval walked around town with a lobster on a leash—which is actually quite inspired, when you consider how few pets also make good eating.”

From Maxim 13, “Know the basics of chess”:

“Chess masters think dozens of potential moves ahead, formulating strategy to not only parry your next attack but the attack after that and the attack after that. Meanwhile you sit there and sweat, faint smoke dribbling from your ears as your brain grinds toward computational meltdown, anxious only to avoid a truly humiliating defeat.”

From Maxim 74, “Cultivate Rivalries with other intellectuals”:

“Nikola Tesla versus Thomas Edison. Sigmund Freud battling it out with Carl Jung. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz at each other’s throats. The New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, doing their best to shut down every religious scholar on the planet. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader. A bitter rivalry is good for the mind, as it drives opponents to sharpen their arguments to a fine rhetorical point, while serving as great entertainment for outside observers.”