“As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried.”
-Ben Horowitz
“Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror — but, by God, you are alive.”
-Joseph Campbell
“You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one.”
-Paulo Coelho
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
-Leo Tolstoy
“Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.”
-Paulo Coelho
“The best way to learn is to do.”
-Paul Halmos
“It isn’t explanations that carry us forward, it’s our desire to go on.”
-Paulo Coelho
“What I’ve learned most clearly from blogs is that the majority of them write about the problems from the outside for a reason—because they are missing the abilities that allow people to move to the inside.”
-Ryan Holiday
“Maybe strength in the 21st century isn’t about dominance. My hunch is that it’s about the very opposite — it’s about the capacity to evoke. It’s about the willingness to serve a bigger purpose than yourself, the capacity to subordinate yourself to a larger goal than your own gain, the ability to spark the enduring bonds of shared values, intrinsic motivation, and mutually committed perseverance. It is, in short, not the power merely to command, subordinate, demean, insult — and then crow about it with impunity. It’s the power to inspire, animate, infuse, spark, evoke — and then connect, link, and collaborate, to be a force multiplier.”
-Umair Haque
“All that is clever eschew. Do not do.”
-Anne Herbert
“This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren’t interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.”
-Philip Pullman
“But you know what I learned from this? Nothing. I learned nothing. It’s just something that happened. Life is crazy.”
-Chuck Klosterman
“Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn.”
-Mike Tyson
“Design is the last great competitive advantage.”
-Seth Godin
“If you want to be seen as courageous by some and hated by others, just say what you really think.”
-Tucker Max
“Seeking advice is addicting and can become a proxy for action.”
-Frank Chimero
“The moment in the account of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis is when they realize they’re naked and try and cover themselves with fig leaves. That seemed to me a perfect allegory of what happened in the 20th century with regard to literary modernism. Literary modernism grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself?…a lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller.”
-Philip Pullman
“I have no idea what I’m doing, and everyone is just making it up as they go along. This about sums up everything I know.”
-Frank Chimero
“Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.”
-Frank Chimero