Favorite Quotes

“It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.”
— Deng Xiaoping

“If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”
— Bob Dylan

“What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically.”
— Ayn Rand

“Philosophy needs to be brought up to the realm of actual living. I say intentionally brought up to it, not down.”
— Ayn Rand

“If you love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”
— Samuel Adams

“It’s not hard to make decisions once you know what your values are”
— Roy E. Disney

“Your income is directly related to your philosophy, and not at all the economy.”
— Jim Rohn

“If you want to build a ship, don’t assign tasks; rather, teach others to long for the endless immensity of the sea”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Without a mission, existing is difficult; doing, impossible.”
“Si on ne s’estime pas investi d’une mission, exister est difficile; agir, impossible.”
— Emil Cioran

“La sensibilité de l’homme aux petites choses et l’insensibilité pour les grandes choses, marque d’un étrange renversement.”
“Man’s sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.”
— Blaise Pascal

“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
— Winston Churchill

“God laughs at those who deplore the effects of which causes they cherish”
— Bossuet

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it. ”
— John Stuart Mill

“This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”
— Whil Shipley

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
Charles Eames

“Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.”
— Benjamin Franklin

“May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.”
— James Joseph Sylvester

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change.”
— Leon Megginson

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— Georges Bernard Shaw

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”
— Cecile Beaton

“Leadership is the ability to hide your panic from others.”
— Lao Tzu

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
— Winston Churchill

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
— Winston Churchill

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”
— Jan Van De Snepscheut

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
– Isaac Asimov

“Life is one damn thing after another.”
Elbert Hubbard

“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses, long before I dance under those lights.”
— Muhammad Ali

“It ain’t about how hard you hit – it’s about how hard you get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”
— Muhammad Ali

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”
— Muhammad Ali

“20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
— Mark Twain

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
— Mark Twain

“I’ve lived a long life and seen a lot of hard times, most of which never happened.”
— Mark Twain

“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
— Seneca

“You’re not entitled to take a view until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view.”
— Charlie Munger

“I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”
— Charlie Munger

“The way to have an interesting life is to stay on the steep part of the learning curve.”
— Nolan Bushnell

“Some people learn by reading. Some others by observing. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
— Will Rogers

“It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.”
— Thomas Sowell

“Que de choses il faut ignorer pour agir !”
“How many things one must ignore in order to act!”
— Paul Valéry

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
— E. O. Wilson

“Escaping from mimesis is something only geniuses and saints can do.”
— René Girard

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
— Margaret Thatcher

“Every system is designed perfectly to get the result it gets.”
— W. Edgar Demmings

“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
— Niccolo Machiavelli

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”
— John Quincy Adams

“If you just set out to be liked, you will be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and would achieve nothing.”
— Margaret Thatcher

“Widespread fear is your friend; Personal fear is your enemy.”
– Warren Buffet

“Doing is one of the best forms of thinking.”
– Tom Chi

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. ”
– John Gall

“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.”
– Robert McAfee Brown

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
– Steve Jobs

“Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how unclear your thinking is.”
—Stephen Wilbers

“That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.”
– George Boole, quoted in Iverson’s Turing Award Lecture

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
— Charles Kingsley

“As all these results were obtained, not by any heroic method, but by patient and detailed reasoning, I began to think it probable that philosophy had erred in adopting heroic remedies for intellectual difficulties, and that solutions were to be found merely by greater care and accuracy. This view I have come to hold more and more strongly as time went on, and it has led me to doubt whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and possessed of a method of its own, is anything more than an unfortunate legacy from theology.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Logical Atomism”

“Constantly fortified with the new blood of immigrants who saw America as a place where anything was possible, the nation had adopted an ethos that elevated problem solving to the status of religion.”
— John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road

“Don’t fear moving slowly. Fear standing still.”
— Chinese proverb

“If video games have taught me one thing, it’s that if you’re meeting enemies, you’re going the right way.”

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
— Epictetus

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
— Epictetus

“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet, you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled — have you no shame in that?”
— Epictetus

“Frail and fragile surely and like children’s toys are the so-called power and wealth of humankind. Suddenly they stream in, abruptly they fall apart, in no place or person do they stand on fixed or stable roots.”
— Valerius Maximus

“Wisdom lies not in regretting the inevitable but in adapting oneself to the altered condition of things,”
— Nick Kirby

“If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.”
— Miguel de Unamuno

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
— Ira Glass

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”
— Savielly Tartakower

“To understand is to know what to do.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do.”
— Claude Shannon

“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”
— Picasso

“You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright