
Variant: Life is more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.
Source: Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge
Variant: Life is more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.
“Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”
Source: Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer
“There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved.”
“There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts”
Quantum explanations http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/ (April 2008), part of his Quantum Physics Sequence http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/.
Context: There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.
The Zookeeper's Wife (2008)
Context: I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.
Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961), p.8
The New York Times (26 November 1978)
Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in — the one that we think is reality.
ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05