“You should write the book you would want to read, not the one you believe you should write.”
-David Ritz
“We are interested in others when they are interested in us.”
-Publius Syrus
“A man generally has two reasons for doing things; one that sounds good, and a real one.”
-JP Morgan
“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”
-Galileo
“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
-Lord Chesterfield
“One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.”
-Socrates
“Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.”
-Venkat Rao
“Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of friends who flatter you.”
-Alvaro Oberon
“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.”
-Douglas Adams
“A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.”
-Thomas Carlyle
“In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn’t complacent, it’s stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That’s not wimpy—it’s powerful and productive.”
-Michael Azerrad
“Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.”
-William Monahan
“People constantly show you who they are. Believe them.”
-Tucker Max
“Death isn’t sad. There’s nothing sad about it. Living a shitty life, that’s sad.”
-Mac Danzig
“If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.”
-Ben Casnocha
“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”
-Charlie Parker
“Facts that challenge basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.”
-Daniel Kahneman
“If frequency with which you cite an education credential does not decrease over the course of your life, you’re not accomplishing very much.”
-Ben Casnocha
“Strong people are harder to kill and more useful in general.”
-Mark Rippetoe
“The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.”
-Thomas Paine
“There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.”
-Scott Berkun
“To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.”
-Eva Zeisel