“There’s a law,” Chuck said, “which I call Rittersdorf’s Third Law of Diminished Returns, which states that proportional to how long you hold a job you imagine that it has progressively less and less importance in the scheme of things.”
Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 4 (p. 47)
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Philip K. Dick 278
American author 1928–1982Related quotes
as quoted by [N. Y. Mayall, Biographical memoir. Volume 41, Memoirs of the National Academy of sciences, National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), National Academy of Sciences, 1970, 179]
Attributed
Commonly misquoted, converted to imperative mood, as "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler".
Walden (1854)
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, Foreword, p. vii.
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
Context: Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.
X, 33
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
“Capitalism is above the law; it's said it don't count 'less it sells.”
Song lyrics, Infidels (1983), Union Sundown
So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free.
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
“There is a sense in which all law is nothing more nor less than a gigantic confidence trick.”
Speech to Devon Magistrates, The Times 12 April 1972.