Books on Sam's Blog

The Count of Monte Cristo

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The book

This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about The Count of Monte Cristo

Quotes

Page 34 - A curse on those who fear wine: it’s because they have evil thoughts and they are afraid that wine will loosen their tongues.

Page 54-55 - God can change the future, He can not alter even an instant of the past.

Page 90 - He looked up with the satisified air of a man who thinks he has made a discovery when he has commented on someone else’s idea.

Page 107 - …in polotics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests.

Page 109 - You people who hold power have only what can be bought for money; we, who are waiting to gain power, have what is given out of devotion.

Page 121 - what can any prisoner have to ask for, apart from his freedom?

Page 132 - To a happy man, a prayer is a monotonous composition, void of meaning, until the day when suffering deciphers the sublime language through which the poor victim addresses God.

Page 154 - Because you have an instinctive horror at the idea of such a crime, to the point where it has never even entered your head, the old man continued. For, in simple and permitted matters, our natural appetites warn us not to exceed the boundaries of what is permissible for us. The tiger, which spills blood in the natural course of things, because this is its state of being, its destiny, needs only for its sense of smell to inform it that a prey is within reach; immediately it leaps towards this prey, falls on it and tears it apart. That is its instinct, which it obeys. But mankind, on the contrary, is repelled by blood. It is not the laws of society that condemn murder, but the laws of nature? Dantes was struck dumb: this was indeed the explanation of what had gone on, without him knowing it, in his mind - or, rather, in his soul: some thoughts come from the head, others from the heart.

Page 161 - unless an evil thought is born in a twisted mind, human nature is repelled by crime. However, civilization has given us needs, vices and artificial appetites which sometimes cause us to repress our good instincts and lead us to wrongdoing.’ Hence the maxim: if you wish to find the guilty party, first discover whose interests the crime serves! Whose interests might be served by your disappearance?'

Page 168 - Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.

Page 339 - In every country where independence takes the place of liberty, the first need felt by any strong mind and powerful constitution is to possess a weapon which can serve both for attack and defense; and which, by making its bearer formidable, will mean that he often inspires dread.

Page 502 - more than once, proved to me that our excessive concern with the welfare of our bodies is almost the only obstacle to the success of any of our plans, when these demand rapid decisions and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, once you have made the sacrifice of your life, you are no longer the equal of other men; or, rather, they are no longer your equal, because whoever has taken such a resolution instantly feels his strength increase ten times and his outlook vastly extended.

Page 552 - What I am saying, Monsieur, is that your eyes are fixed on the social organization of nations, which means that you only see the mechanism and not the sublime worker who operates it. I am saying that you only recognize in front of you and around you those office-holders whose accreditation has been signed by a minister or by the king and that your short-sightedness leads you to ignore those men whom God has set above office-holders, ministers and kings, by giving them a mission to pursue instead of a position to fill.

Page 552 - You know that all human inventions progress from the complex to the simple and that perfection is always simplicity.

Page 727 - With one of those fatuous smiles which had the same effect on Monte Cristo as the pallid moons that inferior painters plant in the sky above their ruins.

Page 766 - ‘His experiments have greatly advanced science, I presume?’ ‘No, but he writes them up in a very fine style.”

Page 850 - When I close my eyes, I can again see everything that I used to see. There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers for ever.

Page 872 - Because, you must understand, my dear friend, one should never be exclusive. When one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac.

Page 952 - Moral wounds have the peculiarity that they are invisible, but do not close: always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain tender and open in the heart.

Page 953 - Truly generous men are always ready to feel compassion when their enemy’s misfortune exceeds the bounds of their hatred.

Page 1121 - There are some situations which men instinctively comprehend but are unable to comment on intellectually. In such cases, the greatest poet is the one who emits the most powerful and the most natural cry. The crowd takes this cry for a complete story, and it is right to be satisfied with that, and still more so to find it sublime when it is truthful.

Page 1242 - There is neither happiness nor misfortune in this world, there is merely the comparison between one state and another, nothing more.

Notes

Amazing story… took me over 3 months to finish, but it was highly worth it. Up there with my favorite books of all time.

The Goal

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The book

This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Quotes

“But after a while, I learned not to waste my time, checking the numbers because the numbers were almost always right. However, if I checked the assumptions, they were almost always wrong.”

Notes

Overall reminded me of Supply Chain class.

I like the process evaluation, it was funny that you can actually draw parallels between manufacturing and software development at large organizations.

Bits of the story were a little cheesy, but I guess that’s to be expected.

Letters to a Young Poet

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The book

This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about Letters to a Young Poet

Quotes

Xix- solitude is not merely a matter of being alone. It is a territory to be entered and occupied.

XX – when doubts arise, simply “school them”: “Instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers”

Page 5 – things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art

Page 13 – allow your verdict, their own quiet untroubled development, which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated

Page 14 – to be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree, which does not hurry the flow of sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow.

Page 22 – but your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you, and leading from it you will find all the paths you need

Page 32 - we know little but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

Page 40 – just as for a long time people were deceived about the movement of the sun, so we are still deceived about the movement of what is to come. The future is fixed, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move around in infinite space.

Page 42: perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.

Notes

I liked it, some went over my head and some of it didn’t.

Oracle Performance

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The book

This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about Optimizing Oracle Performance book written around Oracle Version 9

Quotes

Preface xix- In my experience, diagnosis is where people usually mess up. There are lots of experts out there responding sensibly to poorly collected diagnostic data in poorly specified projects. It is usually easy to solve a problem when it is presented to you correctly. It can be impossible to solve the right problems when you’re focused on the wrong problem

Page 3- The severity of a problem is proportional to the number of people who show up in meetings to talk about it.

Page 11- Amdahl’s law

“the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used”.

Notes

Time Enough for Love

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The book

This will serve to store notes/insights/thoughts about Time Enough for Love

Quotes

8- A society that gets rid of all the trouble makers goes downhill

10- The most sophisticated machine the human mind can build has in it the limitations of the human mind

20- I have no beliefs. Beliefs get on the way of learning

24- never take anybody’s word about whether a gun is loaded

31- If a man is greedy you can cheat him every time

54- progress doesn’t come from early risers. Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things

83- there doesn’t seem to be anything that a government can do to an economy that does not act as positive feedback, or as a break. Or both. Maybe somewhere someday someone will tinker with supply and demand to make it work better instead of letting it go its own cruel way.

113- don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is right more often than an optimist but an optimist has more fun. And neither can stop the march of events.

114- whores perform the same functions as priests but far more thoroughly

129- The trouble with defining in words anything as basic as love is that the definition can’t be understood by anyone who has not experienced it

165- By the law of Supply and Demand a thing has value from where it is as much as from what it is.

229- Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man cray by depriving him of either.

259 - Never underestimate the power of human stupidity

281- as money came in the bank I’ve been burning it. It’s waste paper. As long as we keep account

317- the centuries may not give a man wisdom, but he acquires patience or he doesn’t live through them