“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

“In 1834 the naturalist Jean de Charpentier, while walking along a country road with a Swiss woodcutter, got to talking about the rocks on the roadside. The woodcutter matter-of-factly told him that the boulders had come from a zone of granite some distance away, carried by the Grimsel glacier which had extended in the past as far as the town of Bern.

Charpentier was delighted, for he had come to such a view himself; but when he raised the notion at scientific gatherings, it was dismissed.

“In Singapore, repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities. If you do not, you enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as you wish, and - perhaps most important - to make money. A growing number of highly-educated and well-travelled people are willing to hand over several of their freedoms in return for prosperity or security.

“Jambu Dvipa—the ancient name for the Indian subcontinent—literally means ‘the island of the Jamun fruit’.

“Performance should be close to optimal so as not to tempt people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations.

“There is a discipline to your routine brought about by the fundamental loneliness of business travel which would be good to take back to your daily life.

“I get asked every day to invest in private companies. I always ask the same couple questions. How soon till I get my money back, and how much cash can I make from the investment? I never ask what the PE ratio will be, what the Price to Sales ratio will be. Most private investors are the same way. For some reason buyers of stocks have lost sight of the value of companies paying them cash for their investment. In today’s markets, cash isn’t earned by holding a company and collecting dividends. It’s earned by convincing someone to buy your stock from you.

If you really think of it, when a stock doesn’t pay dividends, there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between a share of stock and a baseball card. Put your Mickey Mantle rookie card on your desk, and a share of your favorite non-dividend paying stock next to it, and let it sit there for 20 years. After 20 years you would still just have two pieces of paper sitting on your desk. The difference in value would come from how well they were marketed.

“When Twitter-friends do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of them Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

“Language expands the range of solutions while GUIs usually limit it to the vision of the creator. When you give people a language instead of a GUI, they come up solutions that you didn’t even know were possible.