Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
― Ira Glass
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
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
–Eleanor Roosevelt
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
-Carl Jung
Confronting individual darkness is the solution to collective evil.
-Carl Jung
A person can do what they will, but not will what they will
-Arthur Schopenhaur
No matter where you go, there you are.
-Jon Kabat-Zinn
Everything you can imagine is real.
-Pablo Picasso
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
– Isaac Asimov
Let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.
– Alan Watts
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
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
– Richard Feynman
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
– Richard Feynman in his conclusion to his report on Challenger accident
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s
– Joseph Campbell
Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.
– Gordon Graham
It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important.
– Richard Hamming
The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.
– Alain de Botton
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
– Dumbledore in Chamber of Secrets
Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Winning takes care of everything.
– Tiger Woods
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
– Tom Robbins
I think “destiny” is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.
– Jodie Foster
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.
– Charlie Munger
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
– Dylan Thomas
God, grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
– Reinhold Niebuhr
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
– Socrates
The days are long but the decades are short.
– Sam Altman
What a man can be, he must be.
– Abraham Maslow
We never desire passionately what we desire by reason alone.
– David Hume
Action expresses priorities.
– Mahatma Gandhi
There is nothing that the busy man is less busy with than living; there is nothing harder to learn.
– Seneca
Go make a ruckus.
– Seth Godin
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
– Annie Dillard
The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
– Richard Feynman
We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.
– Archilochus
NOW is the envy of all of the dead.
– Don Hertzfeldt
The highest reach of civilization is a seamless web of deserved trust among all parties concerned.
– Charlie Munger
Hating things is the laziest form of self expression.
– Unknown
Two things are necessary for great achievement: a plan and not quite enough time.
– Leonard Bernstein
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
– Anais Nin
You are here to cross the swamp, not fight all the alligators.
– Rosamund Zander
Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.
– Stephen Covey
The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you.
– Paul Graham
I am a shark, the ground is my ocean, and most people can’t even swim.
– Rickson Gracie
Easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life.
– Jerzy Gregorek
There is no passion to be found in living a life less than you are capable of.
– Nelson Mandela
No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.
– Nietzsche
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation, can that which is indestructible be found in us.
– Pema Chodron
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
– Peter Drucker
My ambition is handicapped by laziness.
– Charles Bukowski
That which hinders your task, is your task.
– Sanford Meisner
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
– Zen Quote
People will carry a heavy load, if they get to pick the goddamn load.
– Jordan Peterson
Character is fate.
– Heraclitus
If you are not all that you can be, you will suffer more than you have to, and so will the people around you.
– Jordan Peterson
No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.
– John Adams
He, who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.
– Viktor Frankl
Good risks are those that you will both regret not taking and won’t regret if they backfire.
– Jeff Bezos
It is better to be asked why there is no statue in your name than why there is one.
– Cato
Whenever there is any doubt, there’s no doubt.
– Sam in Ronin
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.
– Heraclitus
What should I say to that man? He is on his own path. He is not worried about tomorrow. He does not mind if there are obstacles. He would walk past them. He doesn’t need solutions. He has no behavior, no pattern, no identity. What do I predict? It does not matter even if I do, there is no way to know it would turn out to be true for him. He does not need the future. He does not care about it. He is the creator of his own will. The maker of his own life.
– Herman Hesse
No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.
– Socrates
He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
– Hunter Thompson
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The definition of a strong constitution: the ability to remain good-natured and of good humor despite embracing an astringent worldview and unforgiving discussions following thereof which frightens weaker souls. Understand that the corrupt and vile nature of the world exists yet look at good, pure parts of the world and maintain an innocent outlook.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
You don’t know someone until you know what they want.
– Brad Pitt
You get what you incent.
– Unknown
Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
– Richard Hamming
The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.
– Scott Adams
Be the change that you wish to see in the world
– Mahatma Gandhi
Despite all the difficulties, all the frustrations, there is a joy, not necessarily in actual achievement, for you can’t always achieve great things, but in trying to achieve, in doing something as well as you can and better than others think you can.
– JRD Tata
To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
– Lao Tzu
If you put enough smart people together in one space, good things happen.
– Erik Hersman
When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they have got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humour.
– John Lennon
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
– Charles Caleb Colton
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned.
– Leonardo da Vinci
Four aspects of decadence – stagnation (technological and economic mediocrity), sterility (declining birth rates), sclerosis (institutional failure), repetition (cultural exhaustion).
– Ross Douthat
It is a paradox of our time that the path to radical progress begins with moderation. Extreme optimism and fatalistic pessimism may seem to be stark opposites, but they both end in apathy. If things were sure to improve or bound to collapse, then our actions would not matter one way or the other. Not only do our actions matter, I believe they matter eternally. If we do not find a way to take the narrow and moderate path, then we may find out that stagnation and decadence were all that kept immoderate men from stumbling into the apocalypse
– Peter Thiel
Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.
– Charlie Munger
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think the supreme position among the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope. There is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
– Sir Arthur Eddington
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
– Richard Feynman
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
– Carl Sagan
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
– Carl Sagan
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
– Anne Lamott
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
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
– Jack London
All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically.
– Steven Weinberg
Having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another. Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. a person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential as if a job title and salary are the sole measures of human worth. You will be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you are doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out and I guarantee you will hear about them. To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it is still allowed, and I think you will be happier for the trouble.
– Bill Watterson
You don’t have to do anything. Everything you are doing, you are choosing to do.
– Unknown
The standard pace is for chumps.
– Derek Sivers
The moral arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
To believe in something and not to live it is dishonest.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.
– William Ernest Henley
Because you are alive, everything is possible.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
– Sun Tzu
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
– George Bernard Shaw
When you reach the end of the rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.
– Franklin Roosevelt
The sage battles his own ego. The fool battles everyone else’s.
– Sufi proverb
A people that values it’s privileges above its principles soon loses both.
– Dwight Eisenhower
The strongest man is the one who forgets the most.
– Juan Ramon Jimenez
Nothing happens to the wise man contrary to his expectation.
– Seneca
You never ever “really” know what’s going on with another person’s life and it almost never hurts to ask.
– Jim O’Shaughnessy
Being a good startup founder is being relentlessly resourceful.
– Paul Graham
Strength is the willingness to bear the burden of knowing darkness but without succumbing to it. Humility is fully admitting ignorance so as to be completely open to learning the truth.
– Type Theory guy
Two golden rules of information design – show the data, show the comparisons.
– Bret Victor
To understand is to know what to do.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
The cowards never started and the weak died along the way – that leaves us.
– Phil Knight
Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.
– Peter Drucker
Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.
– Pericles
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
– Henry David Thoreau
I want what all men want. I just want it more.
– Achilles in Troy
The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.
– Achilles in Troy
Trust your nature. everything is included.
– Mircea
A change of perception is worth 80 IQ points.
– Alan Kay
What you do is who you are.
– Ben Horowitz
Dare to be naive.
– Buckminister Fuller
There is much more value to be found in understanding how people behave in reality than how they should behave in theory.
– Rory Sutherland
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
– Alan Watts
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
– William Butler
We often betray people not because we are machiavellian, but because we are weak.
– Unknown
Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.
– Marvin Minsky
A man is but a collection of the moments that broke him, and the times he decided they wouldn’t.
– Unknown
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Without passion and urge, there is a gradual oozing out of hope and vitality, a settling down on lower levels of existence, a slow merging into non-existence.
– Jawaharlal Nehru
No wind favors he who has no destined port.
– Montaigne
Learned we may be with another man’s learning; we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
– Montaigne
John is a man of focus, commitment, sheer will…
– Viggo about John Wick
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
– Alfred North Whitehead
Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
– H L Mencken
It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.
– Henry David Thoreau
It is easier to macro bullshit than it is to micro bullshit.
– Nassim Taleb
The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
– Paul Kedrosky
If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of the community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.
– Michael Meade
I tried being reasonable, I didn’t like it.
– Clint Eastwood
What we compress, expands.
– Unknown
You can get rid of the ignorance, but you can’t get rid of the knowledge.
– Unknown
We shape our tools, thereafter the tools shape us.
– Marshall McLuhan
Knowledge is good if it has sprung from necessity.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul.
– In a Reddit forum
Having a well-calibrated understanding of your future regret is the key to understanding all forms of risk.
– Daniel Kahneman
We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.
– GK Chesterton
Emergencies have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
– Friedrich Hayek
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
– Matthew 7:13
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
– James Baldwin
Greatness is consistency. Unheroic days can make for heroic decades.
– James Clear
Praise specifically, criticize generally.
– Warren Buffet
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
– Sherlock Holmes
People who can’t laugh at themselves will always be outwitted by people who can.
– TK Coleman
The path from good to evil goes through bogus.
– Paul Graham
There is something behind things, something deeply hidden!
– Alan Kay
Darwinian processes don’t optimize; they just fit to the environment presented; if environment is weak, you will turn out weak.
– Alan Kay
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.
– Charles Darwin
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own, but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The obstacle is the path.
– Zen Proverb
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom.
– Viktor Frankl
A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.
– Horace Mann
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands and then work outward from there.
– Robert Pirsig
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
– Mahatma Gandhi
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
– Charles Kettering
Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.
– GH Hardy
I don’t mind what happens.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.
– Lao Tzu
A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose.
– Chinese Proverb
All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently, those people deserve to be punished.
– Marshall Rosenberg
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure’.
– HL Mencken
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
– Heraclitus
Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.
– Arthur Koestler
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
– Robert Pirsig
We are deeply social and deeply instinctual animals, so much that our well-being depends on many things we do that are hard to explain in an intellectual way. That is why you do well to follow your heart and your passion. Bare reason is likely to lead you astray. None of us are smart and wise enough to figure it out intellectually.
– Bill Thurston
Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.
– Haruki Murakami
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
– Robin Jones Gunn
Fun was my prime business criteria.
– Richard Branson
Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he doesn’t possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.
– Hadrian
Don’t cooperate with misery.
– Tom Robbins
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
– Albert Einstein
It’s all because of doing things by halves, saying things by halves, being good by halves, that the world is in the mess it’s in today. Do things properly by God! One good knock for each nail and you’ll win through! God hates a half-devil ten times more than an archdevil.
– Zorba the Greek
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
– Naguib Mahfouz
He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.
– Elbert Hubbard
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else and never for its own sake.
– Bertrand Russell
The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.
– Thomas Kuhn
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
– Steve Jobs