The Quote Lists

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Winston Churchill

Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs. The ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile, and who love you no matter what.
Anonymous

But art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact–sooner or later, that can only come from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book.
Seth Godin

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
Ben Casanocha

Out of these inefficient tinkerings will come the future.
Kevin Kelly

This is how you discover–you fail your way to an answer.
Anissa Ramirez

If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
Penn Jillette

Never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade.
Merlin Mann

I’m reminded too of friends and acquaintances who mention their artistic aspirations in writing, movies, or music. When they say they want to make movies, write, or record music, I ask to read, see, or hear their work. Very few of them have any to show, or blogs, YouTube shorts, or albums online, and when I express surprise, they seem disconnected from the art they claim they want to make. Which makes me think their ambitions aren’t real ambitions: they’re conversational pieces, or status poses. Or the holders of false artistic ambitions are stuck in antiquity, waiting for someone to give them permission or degrees or deadlines. Whatever the case, I’ve learned to be very skeptical of the people who claim they want to be artists but aren’t actively being artists. Given the proliferation and low cost of the tools necessary to make art, the only thing standing between people and being artists is themselves.
Jake Selinger

As I was not smarter than most people, I was willing to work harder than most. I was prepared to examine conventional wisdom. If everyone thinks one way, it is likely to be wrong. If you can figure out that it is wrong, you are likely to make a lot of money.
Jim Rodgers

Truth is self-created through labor, through the hard, inefficient, unscripted work of the mind, through the indirection of dream and reverie. What matters is what cannot be rendered as code. Google can give you everything but meaning.
Nick Carr

We’re hoping to succeed; we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between.
David Chang

Every time I make a mistake, it is usually because I did not do enough homework.
Jim Rodgers

Nothing so obstinately stands in the way of all sorts of progress as pride of opinion.
J.G. Holland

It don’t cost nothin’ to be nice.
Angelo Dundee

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
Marshall McLuhan

The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.
Frank Herbert

If you trust in yourself and believe in your dreams and follow your star…you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.
Terry Pratchet

It’s not renting a house vs. owning a house, it’s renting a house vs. renting a bunch of money from the bank.
Salman Khan

Where there are consistent returns, it doesn’t mean that the risk is reduced, it means you can’t see the risk.
Mark Cuban

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.
Thomas Watson

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
Nassim Taleb

Instead of being interested in what is NEW, we ought to be interested in what is TRUE.
Jeffrey Pfeffer

If you want to challenge the conventional wisdom, please do! It’ll make the final outcome better. But if you choose to do that, it’s essential that you know more about it than everyone else, not less. Certainly not zero. Be skeptical, but be informed (about everything important, not just this issue, of course). Screaming ignorance gets attention, but it distracts us from the work at hand.
Seth Godin

There’s only one thing you can control in your life–your own effort.
Mark Cuban

It is better to destroy one’s own errors than those of others.
Democritus

And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get there? The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or you don’t.
Mark Cuban

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance–it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin

What scientists have in common is not that they agree on the same theories, or even that they always agree on the same facts, but that they agree on the procedures to be followed in testing theories and establishing facts.
Bruce Gregory

There is one rule that’s very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
Ran Prieur

If you think I support domestic abuse–if you think my not explicitly writing, ad nauseum, ‘NO TOLERANCE’ or ‘IT’S NOT THE VICTIM’S FAULT’ is evidence that I think ‘sometimes the bitch deserves it’–then I can tell you without error that 2012 is going to be way too complicated a year for you to endure, and you are seeing a psychiatrist, and it isn’t helping.  Stop being you.  The world does not have to validate your prejudices.  Take a minute, you may learn from people you disagree with.
The Last Psychiatrist

I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
XKCD

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
Robert A Heinlein

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Laurence J. Peter

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.
Robert Wright

Real perserverance is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.
Robert Strauss

We nobly analyse distant things, and in the present do whatever the hell we want.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Sometimes the mistakes are worth it.
Charles Barkley

Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the high road to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction.”
Brian Tracy

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.”
Joan Didion

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

It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it.”
Sophocles

A sign of wisdom and maturity is when you come to terms with the realization that your decisions cause your rewards and consequences. You are responsible for your life, and your ultimate success depends on the choices you make.”
Denis Waitley

The point is this: the people who make the things don’t really use these things. This is the hypocrisy at the heart of capitalism, and it has been this way since the beginning, but it has never been so nakedly obvious. Consumerism is a carny hustle. A game. Ask yourself why it is that the people who run the game generally don’t play the game. Ask yourself who is really winning the game.
Pastabagel

It’s easy to be famous. It’s hard to have fans.
Bob Lefsetz

The only way behavior changes in science is that certain people die and differently behaving people take their places.
Lynn Margulis

The one universal constant in all of your failed relationships is you.
The Last Psychiatrist

If you find yourself playing a game all day, even Angry Birds, or Poker, or Chess, ask yourself: what might be wrong in my life?
James Altucher

Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimonial to hubris.”
Jeff Pfeffer

Borrow money to buy things that go up in value, but never to get something that decays over time.
Seth Godin

Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly and dumb. Innovation happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.
Carlsons Law

[N]othing is more intoxicating than a victory, and nothing more dangerous. When you attain success, step back. Be cautious. When you gain victory, understand the part played by the particular circumstances of a situation, and never simply repeat the same actions again and again. History is littered with the ruins of victorious empires and the corpses of leaders who could not stop and consolidate their gains.
Robert Greene

How does someone become a caricature of what they do? It’s when they start to lose the sense that the things they’re creating are coming from inside of them, as opposed to outside sources.
Chuck Klosterman

A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
Muhammad Ali

If you’re not questioning authority, you’re a pawn in their game.
Bob Lefsetz

Too many people wait to be inspired and they don’t develop the muscle that powers art. You write over and over again so that when you do get inspired, you can lay it down economically and perfectly, you can get it right.
Bob Lefsetz

The quest for technical best is a form of hiding. You can hide from the marketplace because you’re still practicing your technique. And you can hide from the hard work of real art and real connection because you decide that success lies in being the best technically, at getting a 99 instead of a 98 on an exam. It’s a seductive form of self motivation, the notion that we can push and push and stay inside the lines and through sheer will, become technically perfect and thus in demand. Alas, it’s not going to happen for most of us.
Seth Godin

A woman dissatisfied needs luxuries, but a woman in love will sleep on a board.
Zan Perrion

In my experience, students have been taught to place way too much importance on having the courage to follow their passions and change the world, and not nearly enough importance on having the persistence to first build the needed ability to both find concrete projects that matter and accomplish them.
Cal Newport

Lots of people talk about doing things and relatively few do. When you find someone who does stuff, it’s notable, even if the thing might be something completely useless.
Jake Seliger

The art of good decision making is looking forward to and celebrating the tradeoffs, not pretending they don’t exist.
Seth Godin

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison

Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
Ben Franklin

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.
William Gibson

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.
Frederick Douglass

The entertainment business believes in hype. Maybe that’s because its products are so often close to worthless. You get every media outlet known to man to write about your project, and then you launch it and in most cases nobody cares. Want to grow a project? Only care about the insiders, those who are paying attention. If what you have is good, they’ll spread the word, they’ll make your career.
Bob Lefsetz

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
R. Buckminster Fuller

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
R. Buckminster Fuller

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
Buckminster Fuller

If you’re getting no reaction, you’re not doing it right. That’s the test. Not whether a middle man will sign you, but whether the audience believes in you, wants to hear more.
Bob Lefsetz

The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile.
Corrado Alvaro

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.
Daniel Kahneman

We will either find a way or make one.
Hannibal Barca

Talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness.
Kierkegaard

Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes. That’s honesty. Failure is not necessarily bad. It’s reality.
James Altucher

Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go to any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.
Mark Twain

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses – especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
Leonardo DaVinci

You can only fight the way you practice.
Miyamoto Musashi

See, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it really means to know something. And therefore, I see how it is that they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it—they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know how this stuff is done and they are intimidating people by it.
Richard Feinman

Judge not, lest ye be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you shall be judged, and with measure you use, it shall be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brothers eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?
Matthew 7

There is a negative relationship between precision and accuracy.
Larry Ford

The point of the government’s policy on psychiatry is to treat all patients as having exclusively organic diseases and not socially generated problems; and medications, regardless of cost, are absolutely necessary to maintain this narrative.
The Last Psychiatrist

You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain.
Miyamoto Musashi

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
Miyamoto Musashi

I’m fairly confident that a study comparing 27 idiots to 24 other idiots done by, apparently, idiots, and most likely explicitly done for the mass consumption of more idiots is not a study worth repeating, but you can be sure it will be repeated many, many more times and eventually form the foundation for future research not to mention conventional wisdom for the next 25 years. They don’t really care who or why someone is a psycho, so long as you get the hate pointed in the right general direction.
The Last Psychiatrist

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Anaïs Nin

Writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned.
Joseph Epstein

If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do.”
Kurt Vonnegut.

I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.
Ray Dalio

Anybody who’s made it will tell you, you can make it. Anyone who hasn’t made it will tell you, you can’t.
John Mayer

Don’t say yes. Be yes.
Anne Herbert

I think I became cooler when I stopped trying to be cool.
Amanda Hocking

An invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished, not the world in which it started.
Ray Kurzweil

A project is sustainable if it is cheap enough to be the first of a series continuing indefinitely into the future. A project is unsustainable if it is so expensive that it cannot be repeated without major political battles. A sustainable project marks the beginning of a new era. An unsustainable project marks the end of an old era.
Freeman Dyson

Music is a long sludge through a vast wasteland where no one is paying attention until you build your chops to the point where you become an overnight success. Never equate fame with talent.
Bob Lefsetz

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
Aleister Crowley

Best way to avoid judgment is to become the judge.
Last Psychiatrist

Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because most people do not want to admit they do not have the courage to do anything about it.  Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker, but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.
Michael Rivero

To know ten thousand things, know one well.
Miyamoto Musashi

If you do not control the enemy, the enemy will control you.
Miyamoto Musashi

If you wish to control others you must first control yourself.
Miyamoto Musashi

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky

Nobel awards are merely an honorary award in groupthink, presented to anyone who perpetuates the status quo with little regard for actual merit-based contribution.
Tyler Durden of Zerohedge

Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
Cory Doctorow

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is ‘good.’ Nor is there any way of definitely proving that—for instance—Warwick Deeping is ‘bad.’ Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
George Orwell

Should should should. That’s why [Noam Chomsky’s] so popular with the crowd that has nothing personally at stake. It’s easily to dictate terms when you aren’t accountable.
Pastabagel

Let me do you all a public service and give your minds a fairy-tale enema: There is no such thing as “international law.” There is no universally acknowledged sense of anything save hunger and gravity. There is only one rule: the most powerful make the rules, and every nation has to follow those rules except the most powerful.
Pastabagel

It’s OK boy, everyone makes mistakes–yours was just public and expensive.
Homer Simpson

First off: Reputation, Posterity and Cool are traps. They’ll drain the life from your life. Reputation, Posterity and Cool = Fear.
Patton Oswalt

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.
Hugh Macleod

The idea is to try and give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Richard P. Feynman

You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Ben Goldacre

There is only one way to build confidence and self esteem: Demonstrated performance. That’s it. It’s not me pumping you up and giving you shots. It’s demonstrated performance. In other words, go perform, demonstrate to yourself and everybody else what you are and it builds your self-esteem and confidence. It’s not what I say.
John Calipari

Sherman’s success was rooted in his grasp that the way to success is strategically along the line of least expectation and tactically along the line of least resistance.
B. H. Liddell Hart

I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation–a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it might be true.’
Richard Feynman on economics as a discipline

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
Aristotle

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.
Dave Grossman

Writing teaches writing.
John McPhee

I believe one thing holds it all together. Everything I’ve ever done was with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it.
Ray Bradbury

Evil isn’t done so often by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves.
Reinhold Niebuhr

I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time.
Josh Billings

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools.
Thucydides

I called a friend of mine the other day, “Are you jealous of Mark Cuban?” I asked him. And he said, “of course I am.” Which is good because if he said, “no”, he would’ve been a liar. And if he said, “no, that guy just got lucky,” he would be the worst personality cocktail out there: stupid and mean.
James Altucher

I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction.
Wilbur Wright

Don’t believe everything you think.
Thomas Kida

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Three times platinum,Yeah I broke the record.If you can’t respect that,Tell me–what is you respectin’?
Soulja Boy Tellum

You got to let it all go and do what you love and fuck the rest.
Greg Jackson

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
Seneca

There is only one success: To be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley

On that new shit, niggaz like, “How come?”Niggas want my old shit, then buy my old album.Niggas stuck on stupid, I gotta keep it movin.
Jay Z

Some critters like to hide under rocks. Some humans like to hide under words.
Anne Herbert

Ultimately, every penny of every debt must be paid–if not by the borrower, then by the lender.
C.V. Myers

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces
Sigmund Freud

Now think about how many fantasies and scenarios you’re actively running every day about a million things, and think about how many of those things you’re actually attempting in real life. I know the popsicleogists will say you’re running the scenarios to make yourself feel better, but they are what’s holding you back. Those thoughts, in the absence of any action, have defined you. Just because no one else can see it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Last Psychiatrist

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
Paul Graham

I like to obsess over things that don’t matter because it’s more fun than obsessing over things that do.
Amanda Hocking

What’s so great about work, anyway? Work won’t visit you when you’re old.
Tina Fey

It’s not the voting that’s democracy. It’s the counting.
Tom Stoppard

It’s a narrative that existed long before the nights of Saddam, get rid of the dictator and things will get better. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and if your country has oil in it it usually doesn’t. Oh, he may be a nutjob, but once he’s out– what, exactly? He’s not a lone nutjob. There was an entire government in place there and while they don’t all have voluptuous nurses you can be damn sure they want voluptuous nurses, and if they can’t get that they’ll settle for all your money and your obedience.
The Last Psychiatrist

The sad truth is revolutions start with the disenfranchised, get attributed to the idealism of “students” and “the youth,” and are ultimately resolved by thugs or corporations.
The Last Psychiatrist

If you’re 22 and all of the sudden everyone wants to fuck you, it ruins you. To much success too young an age is not a good thing.
William Goldman

We want our celebrities sexy and wild but the narrative has to include a built in reason why we can’t imitate them, something like divorces and cops and rehabs but definitely not genetics, lack of commitment and social retardation. Your life sucks, but at least you have your health. Enjoy your five ounces of wine a day.
The Last Psychiatrist

Never do anything you don’t want to do. Even if it seems selfish at first, life is too short.
James Altucher

Never listen to anyone who says ‘You can’t do that.’ Those are usually the people who can’t do it.
James Altucher

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
Stewart Brand

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
Martin Luther King, Jr

First we make our habits, then our habits make us.
John C. Noble

It wouldn’t be hard to extinguish Apple from the marketplace, Apple’s products aren’t really that good. Yes, a lot of people buy Apple products. But a lot of people also read The Secret and watch Glee. I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in what the masses think.
Last Psychiatrist

Luck never made a man wise.
Seneca

All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck – who keeps right on going – is the man who is there when the good luck comes – and is ready to receive it.
Robert Collier

Each misfortune you encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrow’s good luck.
Og Mandino

I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.
Henry Ward Beacher

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
Jean Cocteau

Many an opportunity is lost because a man is out looking for four-leaf clovers.
Unknown

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more luck I have.
Thomas Jefferson

To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.
Bruce Lee

Luck is the meeting of preparation and opportunity.
Seneca

When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy.
Lady Annabel Birley

When you meet someone new, you aren’t meeting that person, you’re meeting his agent.
Chris Rock

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all; in which case you fail by default.
J. K. Rowling

I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.
Christopher Hitchens

Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die…Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde

Everyone thinks their opinion matters. Don’t argue with a nobody. A farmer doesn’t bother telling a pig his breath smells like shit.
Shit My Dad Says

Here’s a metaphor. When The Oscars, defying all logic and sanity, choose Sandra Bullock as best actress–a woman who Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare In Love) once used as an example of the kind of actress she didn’t ever want to be (Demolition Man–anyone see the irony?)–the strength of that choice isn’t that her performance in The Blind Side is even good but that I, me, a guy who watches movies, believes that The Oscars are nuts for choosing her: they have tricked me into thinking that their decision has any relevance. I realize it matters to the actors’ future salaries and sales and blah blah, but these annual terrible picks reinforce to me that they should have picked something else. But why should they have? As a reasonably educated person I recognize that people have individual tastes; but that there are some things that make a work of art better or worse; but neither of those things are the purview of The Oscars– they only make me think it’s their domain. In other words, who cares what they think? But while I have no problem dismissing the relevancy of the Super Bowl victor, it still infuriates me that the Oscar goes to X, and that’s because they’ve beat me. I know they don’t have any say about what is good. And yet I’m furious, every single year.
Last Psychiatrist

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.
Helen Keller

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
Helen Keller

Imagine what you look like to another person. Now recall what you looked like in the mirror this morning– that’s really what they see. They are making instantaneous judgments about your personality based on that mirror image. They are hearing your voice like it comes form a recording, not as you hear from your mouth. You’re the only person who experiences yourself as you do.
Last Psychiatrist

Art comes out of failure.
John Baldessari

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer

If you want to get something done, decide when and where you’re going to do it. Otherwise, take it off your list.
Peter Bregman

I am fairly certain that certainty itself creates inaccuracy. The certain don’t want new information in their area of certainty. They tend to avoid new information, missing both small adjustments and the new insight that destroys and recreates that world.
Anne Herbert

I’m more likely to believe the official story if I like the officials. I want to buy what my friends are selling, be it chocolates to support the band or inaccurate stories about how they are living their lives.
Anne Herbert

I make many changes, and reject and try again, until I am satisfied. Only then do I begin the working-out in breadth, length, height and depth in my head.
Beethoven

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration . . . [shining] down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, and bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects . . . All great artists and thinkers [are] great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.
Friedrich Nietzsche

When we say that someone is talented we think we mean that they have some innate predisposition to excel, but in the end, we only apply the term retrospectively, after they have made significant achievements.
Daniel J. Levitin

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
Buckminster Fuller

Here’s the bottom line, and it applies to all speech everywhere: either you permit all kinds of speech, and let the truth battle on its merits; or you permit only one line of speech–and let the truth, if it was suppressed, come up like smoke through cracks. But when you permit some speech and block others–when you create gatekeepers of speech–it creates the impression that the truth is in the permitted speech. Most of the time, it’s not.
The Last Psychiatrist

Someone says something and acts like it’s a story that matters, and you realize that you have a story that matters, too–that you can say it.
Anne Herbert

We have many stories about what a city is, but it goes ahead and is what it is anyway, without reference to our thoughts.
Anne Herbert

Nothing in the news is reported. It is decided.
Last Psychiatrist

Patience is the companion of wisdom.
St. Augustine

If I have made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.
Sir Isaac Newton

He was a lover of truth, not a lover of his own perspective and reputation.
Daniel Dennett on George C Williams

Our thoughts create our reality–where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go.
Peter McWilliams

To believe that an individual is simple, or to believe that a group of people is simple, it helps to know not much about them.
Anne Herbert

A problem with being thorough is that ill-wishers might have time to notice what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and stop you.
Anne Herbert

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
Harold Wilson

The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly.
Thomas Paine

You know how someone’s a loser? When they complain they just haven’t gotten attention.
Bob Lefsetz

I tend to never look at the glass as being half empty or half full. I look to see who is pouring the water.
Mark Cuban

If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.
Mike Tyson

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes

Very few have the ego to behave, while in failure, as just pre-successful.
Nassim Taleb

It is often said that ‘he is wise he who can see things coming.’ Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.
Nassim Taleb

Whenever you hear words like “impossible”, “unthinkable”, or “undoable”, you’ve found a rule. Now break it.
Umair Haque

To those who did not believe: Now suck my dick, and keep on sucking it. I am either white or black. I will never be gray in my life. You treated me as you did. Now keep on sucking dicks. I am grateful to my players and to the Argentinian people. I thank no one but them. The rest, keep on sucking dicks.
Diego Maradona

The man who doesn’t fall, doesn’t stand up.
Fedor Emelianenko

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!
Dean Karnazes

Most people are so worried about looking good that they never do anything great. Most people are so worried about doing something great that they never do anything at all.
Derek Sivers

Many break the mirror that reminds them of their ugliness.
Balthazar Gracian

It is a trick of the worthless to stand forth as opponents of great men, so as to win notoriety by a roundabout way, which they would never do by the straight road of merit.
Balthazar Gracian

It’s not technique that matters, it’s what you have to say.
Les Paul

Next time you fail, think of the decade that Steve Jobs spent in the wilderness. And then think what happened next.
Umair Haque

Never worry about criticism from the misinformed.
Adolph Rupp

Bad behavior and irrational decisions are almost always caused by fear. If you want to change the behavior, address the fear.
Seth Godin

‘What are you afraid of?’ is not just a great line for a movie trailer. It’s a shortcut in understanding what motivates.
Seth Godin

It’s only after you know what you can do, that you can do more than that.
Originally inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

I will never win an Oscar and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, because I make too much money for those old farts in the Academy. Thirdly, and most importantly, because I don’t give a fuck.
Clint Eastwood

Getting a lot of people to hate you is easy–all you have to do it become really successful at doing something you love.
Hugh Macleod

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Anxiety is nothing but repeatedly re-experiencing failure in advance. What a waste.
Seth Godin

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell

People are trying to get kids to act like adults all the time, when adults don’t even act like adults. No one is perfect. I’m just glad life isn’t fair, because we’d all go to hell for what we’ve done.
Otis Hughly

Water doesn’t get bent out of shape about what shape it’s in.
Anne Herbert

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Winston Churchill

You can’t chase the night. When the night is over, the night is over. That’s just the way it is. You just gotta wake up tomorrow and hope for a better day.
Worldwide Wes

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and what is done in love is done well.
Van Gogh

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao Tzu

So many fail because they don’t get started–they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.
W. Clement Stone

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
Mark Twain

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
Seneca

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

Humans are built to be hypocritical, i.e., to give lip service and soft thought to high ideals, while mostly acting to achieve low practical personal ends. We manage this disconnect both by being stupid, and so not noticing our hypocrisy, and by being insincere, and so caring less when we notice.
Robin Hansen

We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned to have the life that is waiting for us.
E.M. Forster

There is no good, there is no bad, there’s just what happened. Dance with it.
Seth Godin

The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.
E.M Gray

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
Aristotle

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Jean-Paul Sartre

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle

If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
Aristotle Onassis

I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Sir Winston Churchill

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
Benjamin Franklin

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
Nietzsche

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Nietzsche

I am not in this world to live up to other people’s expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.
Fritz Perls

In these matters, the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
Pliny the Elder

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.
E. F. Schumacher

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic.
Jean Sibelius

I have learned to use the word ‘impossible’ with the greatest caution.
Wernher von Braun

You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.
Sacha Guitry

There must be more to life than having everything.
Maurice Sendak

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer

You are not superior just because you see the world in an odious light.
Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.
Suzanne Necker

Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable.
Luke Muehlhauser

Fortuitous circumstances constitute the molds that shape the majority of human lives, and the hasty impress of an accident is too often regarded as the relentless decree of all ordaining fate.
Augusta Jane Evans

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
Plutarch

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
Edgar Allan Poe

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.
Fawn M. Brodie

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.
P. J. O’Rourke

Majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But—like other precious, sacred things, such as the home and the family—it’s not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And—since women are a majority of the population—we’d all be married to Mel Gibson.
P. J. O’Rourke

So-called Western Civilization, as practiced in half of Europe, some of Asia and a few parts of North America, is better than anything else available. Western civilization not only provides a bit of life, a pinch of liberty and the occasional pursuance of happiness, it’s also the only thing that’s ever tried to. Our civilization is the first in history to show even the slightest concern for average, undistinguished, none-too-commendable people like us.
P. J. O’Rourke

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O’Rourke

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P. J. O’Rourke

The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things—war and hunger and date rape—liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things. . . . It’s a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don’t have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
P. J. O’Rourke

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
P. J. O’Rourke

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
Camille Paglia

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.
Camille Paglia

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
Camille Paglia

When you judge others, you are revealing your own fears and prejudices.
Unknown

Well done is better than well said.
Ben Franklin

Don’t judge those who try and fail. Judge only those who fail to try.
Unknown

Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time.
Chilton

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
Thomas Jefferson

In the game of life even the 50-yard line seats don’t interest me. I came to play!
Unknown

We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Unknown

Each man has a choice in life: he may approach it as a creator or critic, a lover or hater, a giver or taker.
Unknown

Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.
Unknown

Do for others with no desire of returned favors. We all should plant some trees we’ll never sit under.
Unknown

If you’re doing your best, you won’t have time to worry about failure.
Unknown

Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful, or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.
Hugh Macleod

Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. Ninety percent of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort, and stamina.
Hugh Macleod

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
Japanese proverb

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston Chuchhill

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.
Ernest Hemingway

Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before–it takes something from him.
Louis L’Amour

I don’t think it’s possible to be truly fertile without the conviction that your best work is ahead of you.
David Shenk

I don’t know if the optimists or the pessimists are right. But the optimists are going to get something done.
Craig Venter

I never quit. I just stop showing up. That way, no one is gonna call you a loser.
Kevin Nealon

THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.
L. Ron Hubbard

Sometimes, you see the world more clearly when you’re flat on your back.
Jeff Zucker

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral.
Dante Alighieri

I can’t imagine a more complete and precise answer to the question ‘for what reason…?’ than ‘none’. The fact that you don’t like the answer is your problem, not the universe’s.
Lee Daniel Crocker

People want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses. The reality is actually much more horrifying. The people running the show aren’t evil geniuses. They are just as stupid as the rest of us.
Vaksel

Those who never take risks can only see other people’s failures.
Paulo Coehlo

The warrior of the light knows the silence which precedes an important battle. And this silence seems to say: “things have stopped. Better forget the fight, and enjoy oneself a little.” Inexperienced combatants put down their weapons at that moment, and complain about the boredom.The warrior is attentive to the silence; someplace, something is happening. He knows that destructive earthquakes come without warning. He has walked through forests at night; whenever the animals make no noise at all, danger is near. While the others talk, the warrior practices his swordsmanship and pays attention to the horizon.
Paulo Coehlo

When I go out on the ice, I just think about my skating. I forget it is a competition.
Katarina Witt

We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
Jesse Owens

The first thing is to love your sport. Never do it to please someone else. It has to be yours.
Peggy Fleming

Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
Michael Jordan

I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.
Michael Jordan

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan

The game is my wife. It demands loyalty and responsibility, and it gives me back fulfillment and peace.
Michael Jordan

Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.
Michael Jordan

I play to win, whether during practice or a real game. And I will not let anything get in the way of me and my competitive enthusiasm to win.
Michael Jordan

To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don’t isolate.
Michael Jordan

Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
Michael Jordan

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.
Michael Jordan

I never looked at the consequences of missing a big shot…when you think about the consequences you always think of a negative result.
Michael Jordan

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C.S Lewis

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
Elmore Leonard

Whether or not you write well, write bravely.
Bill Stout

For every stock you buy, there is someone selling you that stock. What is it that you know that they don’t? What is it that they know, that you don’t? Who has the edge? If it’s not you, chances are you are going to lose money on the deal.
Mark Cuban

You must be the change you want to see in the world.
Gandhi

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Gandhi

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Gandhi

If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.
Paul Graham

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hanlon’s Razor

I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!
General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

There’s no such thing as a human who doesn’t commit sin. It’s not like the world is divided into sinners and the innocent. There are only people who can and who cannot atone for their sins.
Ciel

I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
Theodore Roosevelt

Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.
Robert Heinlein

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats.
Howard Aiken, creator of the IBM/Harvard Mark 1 Computer

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
P.C. Hodgell

For every one hundred men you send us,Ten should not even be here.Eighty are nothing but targets.Nine of them are real fighters;We are lucky to have them, they the battle make.Ah, but the one.One of them is a warrior.And he will bring the others back.
Heraclitus

A blessing rejected becomes a curse.
Paulo Coehlo

The next time you make an assumption, see what happens when you do the opposite.
Brian Clark

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anais Nin

People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.
Joseph F. Newton

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.
Epictetus

Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.
Anthony Robbins

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don’t over-analyze your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness.
Leo F. Buscaglia

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Thomas Sowell

The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships.
Anthony Robbins

Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.
Edward Abbey

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.
Richard Feynman

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
A.J. Liebling

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

Small minds talk about people; Average minds talk about events; Truly great minds talk about ideas.
Anonymous

If you are going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk–and to act.
Maxwell Maltz

I don’t know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something–or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it’s just an ego trip.
Roger Zelazny, Prince of Chaos

If a young woman once thinks herself handsome, she never doubts the truth of any man that tells her he is in love with her; for she believes herself charming enough to captivate him, ’tis natural to expect the effects of it.
Moll Flanders

Irrelevance comes from always doing the things you know how to do in the way you’ve always done them.
Tom Peters

Make sure that you spend your time on the things you say are your priorities.
Tom Peters

Leaders’ careers will usually be determined by their handling of one or two critical events that no one could possibly anticipate or plan for.
Tom Peters

Alas for those who turn their eyes from zebras and dream of dragons! If we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
Austerlitz

In both poker and life, you can’t read people any better than they can read themselves. You can, if you’re good, very accurately determine if they think their hand is good, or if they think they know the answer to your legal question. But you can’t be sure if reality differs from their perception.
Matt Maroon

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.
Martin Luther King Jr.

If someone speaks to you, strike up a conversation, however banal: one cannot judge the beauty of a path merely by looking at its entrance.
Paulo Coehlo

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Mark Twain

Man, you’re no smarter than me. You’re just a fancier kind of stupid.
Spider Robinson, Distraction

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, to Napoleon, explaining why his works on celestial mechanics made no mention of God.

You will quickly find that if you are completely and self-deprecatingly truthful about how much you owe other people, the world at large will treat you like you did every bit of the invention yourself and are just being becomingly modest about your innate genius.
Eric S. Raymond

How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln

We need to forget what we think we are, so that we can really become what we are.
Paulo Coehlo

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.
George Orwell

What funding committee will agree to fund a book describing an entire new field that has never before been dreamt of? Committees base their conclusions on a shared understanding of a common body of knowledge. Their members are drawn from an existing society of experts to evaluate the next incremental improvement. What do you do when there are no experts? Who lays claim to expertise in nanomedicine? Who has spent their life in this field which is just being conceived? No one. The committee process breaks down when we move into truly new terrain. It fails us just when failure is most expensive: at the beginnings of new things. Here we must fall back on individuals – individuals who are bold enough to believe in themselves when there are no experts to turn to for help and support. Individuals who are willing to back up their own beliefs with action, who will nurture the truly new and the truly groundbreaking without having to first seek the approval of others. For there are no others! On the far frontiers there are very few, and sometimes there is only one.
Ralph Merkle, afterword to Nanomedicine

Faced with the choice of changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith

I’d rather live with a good question than a bad answer.
Aryeh Frimer

Giving a person a high IQ is kind of like giving a person a million dollars. A few individuals will do something interesting with it, but most will piss it away on trinkets and pointless exercises.
J. Andrew Rogers

Make changes based on your strongest opportunities, not your most convenient ones.
MegaTokyo

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

Behind every story of extraordinary heroism, there is a less exciting and more interesting story about the larger failures that made heroism necessary in the first place.
Black Belt Bayesian

I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
Paul Graham

If you’re paralyzed with fear, it’s a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.
Steven Pressfield

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire

People can’t predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it’s subatomic particles that they cite as “limits of prediction.” They’re ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.
Nassim Taleb

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
Nietzsche

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
José Bergamín

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Edward Gibbon

The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.
Huang Po

Lighthouses are more helpful then churches.
Ben Franklin

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
Christopher Hitchens

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Knowledge is a wonderful thing, but sometimes simply knowing what we don’t know is a form of understanding.
Tyler Cowen

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.
Voltaire

The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Plato

To go too far is as bad as to fall short.
Confucius

Leave your luck while still winning. All the best players do it. A fine retreat is as good as a gallant attack. Bring your exploits under cover when there are enough, or even when there are many of them.
Balthazar Gracian

Soccer is a game invented by European ladies to pass the time while their husbands cooked dinner.
Hank Hill

I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.
William Blake

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
FA Hayek

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
Epictetus

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
Albert Einstein

As I would not be a slave, so I will not be a master.
Abraham Lincoln

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky

My Country, right or wrong” is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.
Shakespeare.

The gods are amused when the busy river condemns the idle clouds.
Rabindranath Tagore

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt

Pain shared is lessened, joy shared, increased.
Spider Robinson

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny…
Isaac Asimov

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.
Hillel

If I am not for myself, who is for me?If I am for myself alone, what am I?If not now, when?
Hillel

Those who would give up a little freedom to get a little security shall soon have neither.
Benjamin Franklin

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let each man march to his own rhythm, however measured, or far away.
Thoreau

Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people’s souls, when we all ought to be worried abut our own souls, and other people’s bellies.
Rabbi Israel Salanter

There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
W. Somerset Maugham

Many whores will go to heaven before the righteous.
Ancient proverb

He is a drink sodden, sex-ridden wreck.
Cicero about Marc Antony

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.
P.J. O’Rourke

The world is mine because I understand it.
Balzac

We must accept truth even if it changes our point of view.
George Sand

Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.
Benjamin Disraeli

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us
Ralph Waldo Emerson

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A thousand years hence, perhaps in less, America may be what Europe is now…. the noblest work of human wisdom, the grand scene of human glory, the fair cause of freedom that rose and fell.
Thomas Paine

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
W.C. Fields

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

People can have the Model T in any colour—so long as it’s black.
Henry Ford

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert Humphrey

Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores people.
Adrian Mitchell

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell, Animal Farm

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.
Bertrand Russell

Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.
Simeon Strunsky

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
Segal’s Law

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
James Feibleman

A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire

All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Sean O’Casey

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Mark Twain

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Kurt Vonnegut

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
Dick Cavett

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
Mark Twain

I am not young enough to know everything.
Oscar Wilde

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
Galileo Galilei

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
Mark Twain

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Alec Bourne

It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
John Andrew Holmes

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain

Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.
Tallulah Bankhead

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it’s safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.
Unknown

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides

The gods too are fond of a joke.
Aristotle

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Lily Tomlin

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli

This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.
Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard P. Feynman

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
Jewish proverb

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not said it.
Cicero

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby

We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
Will Rogers

Imagination is more important than knowledge…
Albert Einstein

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
Al Capone

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain – and most fools do.
Dale Carnegie

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Philip K. Dick

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Baltasar Gracian

If you believe everything you read, better to not read.
Japanese proverb

Obviously crime pays, or there’d be no crime.
G. Gordon Liddy

Art comes out of failure.
John Baldessari

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Henry David Thoreau

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.
Oscar Wilde

A man may conquer a million men in battle but one who conquers himself is, indeed, the greatest of conquerors.
Buddha

Men play the game; women know the score.
Roger Woddis

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.
Victor Hugo

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Thomas Carlyle

A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself.
Jose Marti

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.
Aristotle

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
Confucius

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
Frederick Douglass

Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to live in heaven, I’ll be happy to kill you
Rand Funston

Shoutins’ no manifestatin’ forth of a growin’ mind
Sean O’Casey

One can deny one’s childhood, but not erase it.
Gletkin (Darkness at Noon)

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
Einstein

Future generations will appreciate me more than my own
DaVinci

All great and precious things are lonely.
John Steinbeck

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it allows him to do something his cleverness forbids.
John Steinbeck

Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
H.L. Menken

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
William Blake

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton

The cure, may it not be worse than the disease.
Man of La Mancha

I hate stupidity, especially when it disguises itself as virtue.
Man of La Mancha

Facts are the enemy of truth!
Man of La Mancha

I never speak of the rope in the house of the hanged.
Man of La Mancha

Life is always right.
Le Corbusier

Nothing grows beneath great trees.
Constantine Brancusi

You cain’t hurt a fool.
Cormac McCarthy

Power comes not from power everywhere, but knowing where to put it on.
Norman Maclean

To one familiar with a subject, there is no trouble to find reasons for the opposite idea.
Norman Maclean

Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
Thucydides

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.
Thucydides

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
Socrates

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, it will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly

…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
Sir William Haley

You teach best what you most need to learn.
Richard David Bach

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
Albert Einstein

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.
John Cotton Dana

Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don’t know.
R. Verdi

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Carl Rogers”

An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.
Anonymous

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
Chinese Proverb

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.
Anatole France

The wise does at first what the fool does at last.
Proverbs 10:5

The happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything.
Philippians 4:11,13

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
John Lennon

The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.
Tom Bodett

There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it
Charles F. Kettering

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Chinese proverb

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.
Dale Carnegie

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Galileo Galilei

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
Emmet Fox

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

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
Mark Twain

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.
Henry Ford

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
Milton

An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a complex way. A genius is a man who says a complex thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt

A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.
Lisa Kirk

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain

Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Nietzsche

A book of quotations can never be complete.
Robert M. Hamilton