Some combination of genetics and the environment make us who we are, with our specific place in the world, and with unique perspective on the world, directed by an internal representation of the world. This internal representation is sometimes referred to as a world view, and the mechanics of its formation and evolution have been of profound interest to me. There is no doubt that people that you encounter, books that you read, your cultural context - all influence your world view, some more than others; and perhaps an introspective list of the more profound of such influences is useful to catalog:
Quotes
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
― Archimedes
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
“I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery”
“Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem”
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
Discourses
Authors
Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov, Bertrand Russell, H G Wells, Ramesh Menon, Roald Dahl, Jared Diamond, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Milan Kundera, John Steinbeck, Friedrich Nietzsche
Literature
Kon-Tiki, The Mahabharata, Meditations, The US Declaration of Independence, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
These contemporaries
George Chandy, Paul Graham, Sal Khan, Elon Musk, Devi Shetty, Thomas Sowell, Shanti Raghavan
These teachers
Dr. E Vijayan Nair, Dr. M P Chandrashekharan, Rita Paulraj, Heather Bradley
These technologists
Werner Vogels, Andrej Karpathy, Martin Fowler, Bjarne Stroustrup
Others
- Justice Thottathil Radhakrishnan