A LIBRARY OF LIFE HACKS · SOURCES SHOWN
Popular advice, famous quotes and ideas, traced back to where they came from, then turned into something you can use. We share what we found, show the research, and you decide what to make of it.
BACKGROUND · REMBRANDT, ARISTOTLE WITH A BUST OF HOMER, 1653 · THE MET, OPEN ACCESS
THE NOISE WE SORT THROUGH
Three articles, each with every point looked into, its source, and our reading. Open any of them and make up your own mind.
SERIES · WHO SAID IT
Fifteen famous lines checked. Six belong to somebody else, two are genuine, and six are real but trimmed or misquoted, including three well-known lines from film and fiction. One is an origin story with no source.
SERIES · REAL OR MYTH
Fourteen popular claims, checked one at a time. Nine are myths, three are partly true, one cannot be settled, and one holds up.
PHILOSOPHY · WITH THE PASSAGES
Eight common fears, each with the passage a Stoic wrote about it: book and section, in a translation you can read free, so you can check it in context.
ABOUT HACKS VITAE
There is a lot of noise out there: advice, quotes and "facts" repeated so often they start to feel true. We go back to the sources, sort what holds up from what doesn't, and show you the research, then turn what holds up into something useful: habits, systems, workflows and ideas you can act on. You make up your own mind.
More about us →HOW WE WORK
VISUAL GUIDE
THE LIBRARY · 7 SECTIONS
NEWEST
TODAY'S LINE
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
MARCUS AURELIUS · 2.1
118 articles, each with its sources listed. Spotted something off? hacksvitae@gmail.com
Articles, quotes and what we uncovered, rolling past like a teleprompter. Hover a column to hold it; every box can be shared.
ARTICLES · NEWEST 18
HISTORY & WAR · 9 MIN
Chess Life Lessons, Checked: 19 Claims About the Rules, the History and the Famous QuotesThe chess inside the life lessons is often half right. A pawn can become a queen, rook, bishop or knight, not only a queen, and the knight's move is fixed by the rules; what makes it awkward is that it cannot be blocked.
TOOLS & TECH · 15 MIN
How Cybersecurity Is Built: The Layers, the Tools and Who Does What, in Plain WordsSecurity is built in layers, so one failure is not the end. NIST's glossary describes layering different technologies so that attacks missed by one are caught by another.
TOOLS & TECH · 19 MIN
Website Security Crash Course: The Terms, the Common Mistakes and a Checklist, in Plain WordsMany website attacks are automated. Scripts look for known holes in plugins and try passwords on any site they can reach, so being small does not keep you out of the way.
TOOLS & TECH · 5 MIN
AI Design Tools and Component Libraries, Checked: 7 Tools, Their Licences and Their TrapsMost of the seven are built for AI coding agents: skill files, DESIGN.md style sheets and a browser controller that tell an assistant how to design or test a page.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Buddha Quotes, Checked: What the Early Texts Say and What They Don'tSeveral of the most shared "Buddha quotes" are not in the early Buddhist texts, including "The mind is everything". The "hot coal" image for anger comes from the Visuddhimagga, a Buddhist treatise written many centuries later, though the early texts do teach that anger harms the angry person first.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 6 MIN
Confucius Quotes, Checked: What the Analects Say and What They Don'tConfucius did not write the Analects. It is a collection of his sayings put together by later hands, and scholars disagree about how early.
MINDSET & DISCIPLINE · 6 MIN
Deciding Under Uncertainty: 7 Famous Decision Tools and Where They Come FromExpected utility is not expected money. The theory says to choose the act with the highest expected utility, and it has known puzzles, such as the St. Petersburg game first published by Bernoulli.
TOOLS & TECH · 20 MIN
Cybersecurity Crash Course: Everything You Need to Know, in Plain WordsMost attacks are not personal. They try every address, every leaked password and every unpatched device, so you only have to be reachable, not interesting.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Epicurus: What He Actually Taught About Pleasure, Death and the GodsEpicurus did say pleasure is the goal of life, but he defined it as "the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul", not feasting.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Existentialism, Checked: What Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus Actually WroteExistentialism was never a school the famous names all joined. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of the major figures, only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly called themselves existentialists; Camus denied it, and Kierkegaard died long before the word existed.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Diogenes and the Cynics: The Famous Stories, CheckedAlmost everything we know about Diogenes comes from anecdotes written down centuries after he died, mostly by Diogenes Laertius. None of his own writings survive, if he wrote any.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Famous Latin Phrases, Checked: 15 Sayings and Where They Really Come From"Et tu, Brute?" is Shakespeare's line. Suetonius and Cassius Dio say he died without a word, and report a Greek phrase, "you too, child?", only as something some people wrote; Plutarch has him cry out, but to Casca, not to Brutus.
TOOLS & TECH · 5 MIN
Google Flow Explained, and Whether Those "Product Ad Commands" Are RealFlow is Google's AI filmmaking tool, launched on 20 May 2025. It now runs on Veo 3.1 and Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 for video and Nano Banana models for images.
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Laozi and the Tao Te Ching: 9 Popular Claims, CheckedNobody knows for certain who Laozi was, or whether he existed. Even the earliest biography, written around 100 BC, hedges with "some say".
PHILOSOPHY & MEANING · 8 MIN
Machiavelli: What The Prince Actually Says, and 8 Claims Checked"The ends justify the means" is not in The Prince. The nearest passage says that people judge rulers by the outcome and tells a prince to rely on that: advice about how the crowd judges, not a moral rule.
MINDSET & DISCIPLINE · 1 MIN
Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says52 thinking tools on one page, each with a verdict and a source: 11 true, 30 partly true, 7 disputed, 2 unverified and 2 myths.
MINDSET & DISCIPLINE · 10 MIN
Mental Models, Checked: 15 Thinking Tools and Where They Really Come From"Mental models" means two different things. In psychology it goes back to Kenneth Craik (1943) and Philip Johnson-Laird (1983); the self-help sense, a "latticework of models", is Charlie Munger's, from a 1994 talk.
HISTORY & WAR · 11 MIN
Mental Models from History: 12 Sayings Checked Against the SourcesSeveral famous stories are not in the sources the way they are told. Cortés wrote that he had his ships beached, not burned; Caesar's own account of the civil war does not mention the Rubicon; and the sword of Damocles is about the tyrant's fear, not Damocles's danger.
QUOTES · IN THE TEXT, AND CHECKED
IN THE TEXT
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 2.1
FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
IN THE TEXT
“It is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 4.3
FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
IN THE TEXT
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, "I have been harmed." Take away the complaint, "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken away.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 4.7
FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
IN THE TEXT
“Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 4.17
FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
IN THE TEXT
“Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 4.49
FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
IN THE TEXT
“Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 5.16
FROM · Design Styles Explained: 12 Movements and Where Their Names Come From
IN THE TEXT
“The mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act …”MARCUS AURELIUS · 5.20
FROM · Design Styles Explained: 12 Movements and Where Their Names Come From
IN THE TEXT
“The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like [the wrong-doer].”MARCUS AURELIUS · 6.6
FROM · Did They Really Say That? Part 2: Einstein, Roosevelt, Ford and the Films
IN THE TEXT
“Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 7.59
FROM · Did They Really Say That? Part 2: Einstein, Roosevelt, Ford and the Films
IN THE TEXT
“The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.”MARCUS AURELIUS · 7.69
FROM · Did They Really Say That? Part 2: Einstein, Roosevelt, Ford and the Films
WHAT WE UNCOVERED
Partly true "Charlie Munger invented mental models"
In psychology the idea goes back to Kenneth Craik (1943), who proposed that the mind builds "small-scale models" of reality, and to Philip Johnson-Laird's Mental Models (1983).FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
Partly true Occam's razor
The idea is Ockham's; the famous wording is not.FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
Disputed The Dunning-Kruger effect
Kruger and Dunning (1999) found that people in the bottom quarter on their tests "grossly overestimated their test performance and ability".FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
31%
of breaches began with an exploited vulnerability, now the most common way in.VERIZON DBIR · 2026
Disputed Growth mindset
Reviews disagree on how much interventions help: a 2019 national experiment found gains for lower-achieving students, while one 2023 meta-analysis found the effect "nonsignificant …FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
Myth Buridan's ass: "Buridan wrote it"
The example "is nowhere to be found in Buridan's writings".FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
Partly true Falsifiability: "one counter-example kills a theory"
Popper's line between science and non-science, not a verdict on worth.FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
28
Stoic lines, each matched word for word to a named translation, with book and section.HACKS VITAE · SEP 2026
Partly true Crossing the Rubicon: "a snap point of no return"
Caesar did cross, but his own Civil War does not mention the river, and Plutarch's scene is one of long hesitation, crossing at last "as if abandoning calculation".FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
Disputed The Thucydides trap: "Thucydides' own idea"
The phrase is Graham Allison's; the case count is his team's own; and he adds "War, however, is not inevitable." A 2025 classics article reads Thucydides as hinting at self-fulfill…FROM · Mental Models Cheat Sheet: 52 Thinking Tools, Where They Come From and What the Original Says
Partly true Framing: the same choice described as gains or losses changes decisions
Held up, at about half the original size.FROM · Cognitive Biases, Checked: 14 Famous Findings and Whether They Held Up
$20.877B
reported lost to internet crime in 2025, from 1,008,597 complaints.FBI IC3 · 2026 REPORT
Partly true Facial feedback: holding a pen in your teeth to force a smile makes cartoons funnier
The pen study did not replicate; a small effect of facial feedback seems real.FROM · Cognitive Biases, Checked: 14 Famous Findings and Whether They Held Up
Myth Lincoln failed at almost everything he tried before he became president
The famous list is from the 20th century.FROM · Comeback Stories from History, Checked Against the Record
Partly true Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination
We could not find the quotation; the setbacks are real.FROM · Comeback Stories, Part 2: Sanders, Jordan, Disney, Beethoven and Jobs
62%
of breaches involved what the report calls a human element.VERIZON DBIR · 2026
Partly true Brutalism is called that because it looks brutal
The name has more than one origin story. Tate traces it to Le Corbusier's béton brut, French for raw concrete, with a deliberate pun on "brutal"; his Unité d'Habitation in Marseill…FROM · Design Styles Explained: 12 Movements and Where Their Names Come From
Partly true Glassmorphism is a brand-new style
The name is new; the look is not. The name is credited to the designer Michał Malewicz, and the style became popular after Apple's macOS Big Sur update in 2020.FROM · Design Styles Explained: 12 Movements and Where Their Names Come From
