“When have you ever seen someone who had no doubts who was also correct about anything?”
-Orson Scott Card
“When people give you their stated reason for doing something always assume they are giving you a reason that sounds good, but not the real reason.”
-James Altucher
“The best definition of intelligence is the ability, as circumstances change, to alter one’s behavior appropriately to serve one’s own best interests. Stupidity, then, is the opposite trait.”
-Michael Ghiglieri
“Respect the gods and buddhas, but do not rely on them.”
-Miyamoto Musashi
“When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save some money…but thats a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life…you can change it and mold it, thats maybe the most important thing. To shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it and make your mark upon it. I think thats very important and however you learn that–once you learn it–you’ll want to change life and make it better, because its kinda messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
-Steve Jobs
“Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.”
-Ben Franklin
“To get at the truth of your calling, you have to crack open that false self and see what lies within.”
-Justine Musk
“Infinite patience gets you immediate results.”
-James Altucher
“The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.”
-Orson Scott Card
“Yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but everyone forgets the second half of that quote: the road to heaven is paved with good actions.”
-Tucker Max
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
-C.S. Lewis
“Without a theory the facts are silent.”
-F.A. Hayek
“The only teacher who’s worth anything to you is your enemy.”
-Orson Scott Card
“My path to wisdom began when I stopped pretending to know things I didn’t know. When I explicitly admitted to the limits of my knowledge, stopped building on ambiguity and ignorance, and instead realized that I knew nothing, not even the things I thought I knew.”
-Tucker Max
“If you set your bar at ‘amazing’ it’s awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn’t going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you’ve created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that’s where you are.”
-Seth Godin
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so.”
-Artemus Ward
“Peace is knowing that the maze the mind plays in is not the truth. Peace is knowing that life is. Just is. How we choose to react to it determines our reality.”
-Kamal Ravikant
“Fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul.”
-Paulo Coehlo
“Great careers are getting easier to find and audition for, but harder to keep.”
-Tucker Max
“The only persons who really changed history are those who changed men’s thinking about themselves.”
-Malcolm X
“If most of your courtship attempts have succeeded, you must be a very attractive and charming person who has been aiming too low.”
-Geoffrey Miller
“This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Obstacles are only obstacles if you see them as obstacles. They can also be called opportunities.”
-Tucker Max
“See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training.”
-Miyamoto Mushashi
“Arguing with people is like reading your email at 4 in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It’s just scratching an itch.”
-James Altucher