“Words are not just descriptive. Words are generative.”
-Jason Silva
The words you choose matter. Language generates. Your words create your world. Below are some of my favorite words.
Hall of Fame Quotes:
“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
Emily Dickinson
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus
“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul. You are always being lured away by foolish distractions. Seek solitude.”
Eugene Delacroix
“What is the meaning of life? A simple question, one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
Virginia Woolf
“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
Franz Kafka
“We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. What is real is you! You, your friends, your associations, your highs, your hopes, your plans, your fears. You must reclaim your mind, get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
Terence McKenna
“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
Charles Bukowski
"Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead."
World of Tomorrow short film
“You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.”
Steve Jobs
“A friend is someone with whom I may be sincere.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
Franz Kafka
“Your world is a living expression of how you are using—and have used—your mind.”
Earl Nightingale
“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
Carl Jung
"The more you love your decisions, the less you need others to love them."
Hussein Nishah
"Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever they saw one or two persons applauding?"
Arthur Schopenhauer
"Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them, and their value will never be known. Improve them, and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life."
Emerson
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
Emerson
Favorite Practical Quotes
“Make the most of the best and the least of the worse.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Commitment, drive, grit, determination, perseverance, indomitable will. You must have these qualities in order to win.”
Michael Dell
“Every time you feel like making fun of a stranger, you get a chance to fix one of your insecurities.”
The Orange Book
"Ignoring what goes on in other peoples' souls -- no one ever came to grief that way."
Marcus Aurelius
"It takes energy to make energy.”
Laird Hamilton
“Over a long timeline, the bottleneck is usually attention, not ability."
James Clear
“Magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
Raymond Teller
“You become what you behold.”
William Blake
“Following-through is the only thing that separates dreamers from people that accomplish great things.”
Gene Hayden
“Clarity through action, not thought”.
Shane Parrish
"Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all future days to come depends on what you do today."
Ernest Hemingway
“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”
Anthony Trollope
“Your life is defined by what you're willing to struggle for.”
Mark Manson
"However little television you watch, watch less."
David McCullough
“I don’t like discord and I am fearless in rooting it out and solving it. If anyone’s having a problem, I’m gonna walk right up to them and ask them: ‘Is there a problem?’ I feel like if you break the human struggle down, the one word is confront. I kind of approach everything that way.”
Jerry Seinfeld
Reading
“The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero.”
Charlie Munger
“You will be the same person in five years as you are today, except for the people you meet and the books you read."
John Wooden
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print."
Barbara Tuchman
“In a culture which has all the peculiar complexities and difficulties of the one currently developing around us, there is nothing more profoundly healing than the act of solitary reading, provided that what is being read is indeed permanent, deep, and lasting work.”
Harold Bloom
“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”
Marcel Proust
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
“It seems to me that in all countries, almost in all social classes, at all ages, there are always going to be real readers, people who have something solitary in their souls, people who won't feel that they are themselves unless they are alone with a book.”
Harold Bloom
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
Virginia Woolf
"All our education should be directed to the accumulation of the cultural heritage of our ancestors, the best thinkers of the world."
Leo Tolstoy
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”
Ezra Pound
“Nonfiction conveys information. Fiction conveys emotion.”
Sol Stein
“Read non-fiction to raise your floor. Read fiction to raise your ceiling.”
Eric Stromberg
“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
H.L. Mencken
“A good book is an event in my life.”
Stendhal
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
Carl Sagan
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
W. Somerset Maugham
“I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
Wisława Szymborska
“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
David Quammen
Being Present
“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.” (notes)
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“We now live in a world where we’re connected to everything except ourselves.”
Zat Rana
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
Henry David Thoreau
"As awareness of your thoughts increases, the opportunity to choose how you experience this moment also increases."
Thomas Sterner
“There is no past and no future; no one has ever entered those two imaginary kingdoms. There is only the present.”
Leo Tolstoy
"If we are judging the experience as this or that, we are not fully present because a portion of our consciousness is taken up in the judgement process."
Thomas Sterner
“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.”
Rolf Dobelli
Time
“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
Seneca
“To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”
Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."
Susan Sontag
“You can do so much in ten minutes’ time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity."
Men’s Health magazine (h/t James Clear)
“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.”
Shakespeare (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Time brings odd mutations.”
Joan Didion
"The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose."
Arnold Bennett
“The supply of time is truly a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours.”
Arnold Bennett
“Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”
Seneca
“The days are long but the decades are short.”
Sam Altman
“It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.”
Yoshida Kenko
“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”
Albert Einstein
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
Virginia Woolf
“The Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
C.S. Lewis
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.”
Victor Hugo
“Everyday is a bank account, and time is our currency. No one is rich, no one is poor, we've got 24 hours each.”
Christopher Rice
“If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents. Value what you know & start charging for it.”
Kim Garst
“Time wasted is existence; used is life.”
Edward Young
“We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until tomorrow. Keep going day in and day out. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.”
Arnold Bennett
24 Hour News Cycle / Politics
“Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.”
Emerson
“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created."
Sir Roger Scruton
Uncertainty
“It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons.”
John Keats
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
Richard Feynman
“We come to the arena uncalled, to seek our fortune and hazard disgrace. That’s the game, those are the rules.”
Walter Hill
Money
“Money doesn't buy happiness, but everyone is much happier when they don't have to worry about money.”
The Orange Book
“Financial freedom isn’t about money, it’s about attention. The less you have to think about money, the more free you actually are.”
Lawrence Yeo
“Wealth is also the freedom to learn what you love at your own pace.”
"You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve."
Elon Musk
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
Charles Dickens
“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”
Paul Samuelson
“Rich people have money. Wealthy people have time.”
Shane Parrish
“Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.”
Zig Ziglar
“It's not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for. “
Robert Kiyosaki
“The habit of saving is itself an education; it fosters every virtue, teaches self-denial, cultivates the sense of order, trains to forethought, and so broadens the mind.”
T.T. Munger
Playing the Long Game
“When we play the short game, small things take on excessive importance. When we play the long game, small things cease to matter as much. May we play the long game.”
Eric Peng
"The long view picks at the lock of mediocrity."
Sam Hinkie
"Don't fear moving slowly. Fear standing still."
Chinese proverb
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”
Zig Ziglar
Beating Procrastination
“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand—and melting like a snowflake.”
Francis Bacon
“During a very busy life I have often been asked, “How did you manage to do it all?” The answer is very simple. It is because I did everything promptly.”
Richard Tangye
“Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.”
Harry A. Hopf
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”
Sydney Harris
“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
William James
“He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.”
Victor Hugo
“Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the ‘someday I'll' philosophy.”
Denis Waitley
“Your Life Is Happening Right Now: Don't let procrastination take over your life. Be brave and take risks. Your life is happening right now.”
Roy T. Bennett
“The really happy people are those who have broken the chains of procrastination, those who find satisfaction in doing the job at hand. They’re full of eagerness, zest, productivity. You can be, too.”
Norman Vincent Peale
“There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks.”
David Lloyd George
“Procrastination is not Laziness”, I tell him. “It is fear. Call it by its right name, and forgive yourself.”
Julia Cameron
“Begin to weave and God will give you the thread.”
German Proverb
“My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, ‘Just wait.”
Judy Tenuta
What a Time to Be Alive
“Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton — all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now.”
James Clear
"The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."
Tom Stoppard
Pleasure as a double-edged sword
“Every up costs you a future down. Every down wins you a future up.”
Technology
”Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
Alfred North Whitehead
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke
“Technology is enabling great gains in convenience and diversity. What is being lost is a sense of magnificence.”
Tyler Cowen
“Dealing with reality through a screen of representation serves to make the world innocuous to a fragile ego and the self more pliable to the choice architecture presented by whatever functionary of psychological adjustment is in charge.”
Matthew Crawford
Perceiving The World
"Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works... We’re all biased to our own personal history.”
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
George Bernard Shaw
“Each of us sees in others what we carry in our own hearts.”
Anthony Robbins
“Be careful of how you interpret the world; it is like that.”
Erich Heller
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Where an ordinary person sees a battle, an extraordinary person sees a cooperation.”
Alan Watts
“We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves,' the universe 'peoples.'"
Alan Watts
“Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.”
Albert Einstein
“Take stock of those around you and you will … hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”
Ernest Becker
Quotes I’m pondering without necessarily endorsing
“What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable, and he is easily tempted to embody it in a concrete form – a church, a country, a social system, a leader – so that he may realize it with less effort and serve it with more profit. Yet the attempt to externalize the kingdom of heaven in a temporal shape must end in disaster. It cannot be created by charters or constitutions nor established by arms. Those who seek for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.”
ADHD
“Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you.”
Nietzsche
Sense of Wonder
“It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.”
Albert Einstein
"I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
Richard Feynman
“Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.”
Shirley Jackson
“In the insatiable hunger for mystification and understanding, conflict and resolution, challenge and adaptation, explodes the wonder of everything that is human.”
On Meeting People
“When you meet someone you want to keep in your life, you will know it. Conversations will flow, time together will be effortless.”
"We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken."
Dostoevsky
Our Interior Lives
“In a culture saturated with technologies for appropriating our attention, our interior mental lives are laid bare as a resource to be harvested by others.”
Matthew Crawford
“Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself.”
Ryan Holiday
"The task of making order victorious over chaos or randomness -- if you take this seriously, you will look upon it as warfare."
Alan Watts
“You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.”
Adlai Stevenson
Via Negativa
“The first step in crafting the life you want is to get rid of everything you don’t.”
Joshua Becker
“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
Lin Yutang
“Effectiveness begins with elimination. Choose your ignorances as carefully as your interests.”
@TheStoicEmperor
“They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).”
Nassim Taleb
“Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant.”
Nassim Taleb
“Reducing friction is easier than adding force.”
Shane Parrish
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
William James
“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.”
Shane Parrish
“Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker
Saying No
“Never say no twice if you mean it.”
Nassim Taleb
“Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.”
Josh Billings
“Saying no is its own leadership capability. It is not just a peripheral skill. As with any ability, we start with limited experience.”
Shane Parrish
“Pleasure becomes secondary when your life is filled with purpose.”
Carlos Del Valle
Amor Fati
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.”
Teddy Roosevelt
“Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“On this moment hangs eternity.”
Sundial inscription
“Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
“Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it cannot tell.”
Emerson
“Momentary disappointments can be seen in the light of eternity.”
Lorna Colbert
The Human Condition
“What is the meaning of life? … A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
Virginia Woolf
"Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”
Michael De Montaigne
“No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task.”
Paul Gauguin
Friendship
“A friend is someone with whom I may be sincere.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.”
John O’Donohue
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What, you too? I thought I was the only one!’”
C.S. Lewis
"You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else."
Cheryl Strayed
“False friendship is the worst. Avoid it at all costs. If you’re honest and straightforward and mean well, it should show in your eyes. It should be unmistakable.”
Marcus Aurelius
“I must be myself…I will not hide my tastes and aversions…If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Listening is difficult because it involves suppressing your ego long enough to consider what is being said before you respond.”
Shane Parrish
“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”
Victor Borge
“Gossip is a currency of the weak to form associations and solace via ridicule of the stronger/richer/influential.”
Kunal Shah
Creativity
"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will."
Charles Baudelaire
“Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous I don't know."
Wislawa Szymborska
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
Maya Angelou
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
Albert Einstein
“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
Henry Van Dyke
“Creativity banishes recurring thoughts.”
Ben Hardy
“If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.”
Marina Abramović
“The creative adult is the child who survived.”
Julian F. Fleron
"Talent is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot see."
Irvin Yalom
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think.”
Bertrand Russell
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
Steve Jobs
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Emerson
Curiosity
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, or the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
Albert Einstein
“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”
E.E. Cummings
“The difference between people is the difference in the questions they ask consistently.”
Anthony Robbins
Living Authentically
“Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.”
Carl Jung
“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
Carl Sagan
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”
Carl Jung
Death
“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?"
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
Vladimir Nabokov
Figuring Out Life
“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E.B. White
"The goal of adulthood is to let go of the other possible existences and to make the best of the one. A successful adult is one who understands that it doesn't matter which life you ultimately pick, only that you live it well."
Chris Ballas
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”
Jospeh Campbell
“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
William James
Information Age
“The more information that’s out there, the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn’t what’s scarce; it’s the willingness to do something with it.”
Tyler Cowen
Following Your Obsessions
"Focus on your obsessions. If you're not obsessed, if you don't have that excitement, you're not going to be better than mediocre in any field.”
Tim Ferris
Creating a Better Self
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”
C.S. Lewis
“One thing that is really beautiful about moving forward intensely in your future is that, simultaneously, you change your memory about the past. The past, regardless of what it has been — great or disappointing — will change in meaning as you make new decisions in your future. Your future is flexible. Your past is also flexible. What you have is now. You get to decide what you’re going to do. You get to decide how you’re going to live.”
Ben Hardy
“If you don't like where you are, change it. You're not a tree.”
Jim Rohn
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“Every person is average because every person has an average. The only way to get better is to live above your average and create a better average.”
Michael Bernoff
“Robustness is progress without impatience.”
Nassim Taleb
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Wayne Dyer
“You make or break your life before 8am.”
Ben Hardy
"Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become."
Jim Rohn
“The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.”
Charlie Munger
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
Heractilus
“Sometimes success is 3% brains and 97% not getting distracted by the internet.”
Shane Parrish
“There are only three requirements for success. First, decide exactly what it is you want in life. Second, determine the price that you are going to have to pay to get the things you want. And third, and this is most important, resolve to pay that price.”
H.L. Hunt
Habits
“The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”
Mary Oliver
"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
Samuel Johnson
“You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear
“Your habitat informs your habits.”
Evan Dellinger
“You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle/Shaquille O’Neal
Learning
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
Plutarch
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"Intelligent individuals learn from everything and everyone; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers."
Socrates
"Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."
Herbert Gerjuoy
“Every new mind is a new classification.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time."
Charlie Munger
Ideas
"If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas."
Linus Pauling
Writing
"If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. You are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself."
Ray Bradbury
"Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago."
C.S. Lewis
"Most of the people who know what they’re talking about don’t write. Writing is hard, it’s time consuming, it’s agonizing. You can’t take a magic pill and suddenly wake up as a compelling writer—you just have to spend years and years doing it. It’s a craft."
Nathan Baschez
“You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of cliches in your writing.”
Nassim Taleb
“Until you've written hundreds of thousands of words, you have no clue what you will enjoy writing about or what other people will enjoy reading from you.”
Mark Manson
“Informal writing is the athletic clothing of ideas.”
Paul Graham
"A great detail feels particular in a way that argues for its truth."
Mary Karr, The Art Of Memoir
“Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation.”
Paul Graham
“If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend.”
Paul Graham
“To read is to inhale. To write is to exhale. So breathe.”
Glennon Doyle
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
E.L. Doctorow
“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”
Anne Lamont
Work
“The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop your gift. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”
David Viscott
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Thomas Edison
“Pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.”
Maya Angelou
Risk
“Fortune sides with him who dares.”
Virgil
Finding Happiness
“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.”
Charlie Munger
“We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learned to bear its ills without being overcome by them.”
Juvenal
“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it comes and sits softly on your shoulder.”
J. Richard Lessor
“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“It’s difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it’s impossible to find it anywhere else.”
Seneca
“You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. Money. Fame. Even respect. Piles and piles of it will never make a person feel content. Having enough comes from the inside.”
Ryan Holiday
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”
Immanuel Kant
“Living for fame and recognition is like chasing the wind.”
“History relates no instance in which a conqueror has been surfeited with conquests.”
Stefan Zweig
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
Epictetus
“What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?”
Adam Smith
“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
Naval Ravikant
“Good feelings widen the lens through which you see the world.”
Winifred Gallagher
Overcoming Fear
“Fear of responsibility is a catastrophic bottleneck. Since all progress in a system can only happen at the tightest bottleneck, you’ll never be able to be more productive or successful than you DARE to be. Todo apps and lifehacks can’t save you here.”
“You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.”
Nassim Taleb
“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
Goethe
"One sure guarantee of a mediocre life is a life lived in fear."
Jack Nagel
“We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are.”
Steven Pressfield
"What people resist is not change per se, but loss."
Ronald A. Heifetz
Gratitude
“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
Jean-Paul Satre
“You are in an unusual situation. There are at least a billion people on Earth at this moment who would consider their prayers answered if they could trade places with you…To have your health, even just sort of, to have friends, even only a few, to have hobbies or interests and the freedom to pursue them, to have spent this day free from some terrifying encounter with chaos, is to be lucky.”
Sam Harris
"I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time, so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either."
John Roberts (Chief Justice, SCOTUS)
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
Seneca
“Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Albert Einstein
Paying Attention
“Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time we truly pay attention, we destroy evil in ourselves.”
Simone Weil
Language
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
Gustave Flaubert
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.”
Julian Jaynes
“Analogy, although it is not infallible, is yet that telescope of the mind by which it is marvelously assisted in the discovery of both physical and moral truth.”
Charles Caleb Colton
“Your language reflects your inner landscape.”
Josh Cinquemani
“For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion.”
John-Paul Satre
“A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”
Céline Sciamma
Wine
“Wine to me is passion. It is family and friends. It is warmth of heart and generosity of spirit. Wine is art. It is culture. It is the essence of civilization and the art of living.”
Robert Mondavi
Music
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Nietzsche
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
William Shakespeare
“Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.”
Nick Cave
Focus
“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
Charles Bukowski
“What seizes your imagination will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekend, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.”
Fr. Pedro Aruppe
“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground.”
William James
“Focus is the IQ of the 21st century.”
Cal Newport
“In a world of infinite distraction, focus is the only path to freedom.”
Jack Butcher
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”
Bruce Lee
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
Henry David Thoreau
Growth
“Be careful what you wish for, not because you'll get it but because you'll be turned into the thing that can get it. It's not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it's a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.”
Jed McKenna
Taking Action
“Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Emerson
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.”
Amelia Earhart
"Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.”
Walter Anderson
“I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.”
Sam Altman
“Action precedes inspiration.”
Ben Hardy
"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."
George S. Patton
"Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.”
Tim Ferris
“The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on action alone.”
Bhagavad Gita
"Your behavior reflects your actual purposes."
Ronald A. Heifetz
“Life often presents new doors to walk through. These include ideas, relationships, jobs, and crafts. Don’t obsess over choosing the perfect door. It doesn’t exist. Instead, walk though the ones that energetically pull you in, see where they take you, and iterate from there.”
Steve Schlafman
“Getting an idea should be like sitting on a pin; it should make you jump up and do something.”
E.L. Simpson
"Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now."
Epictetus
Living a Rich Life
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.”
Jan Morris
"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."
Joan Didion
“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The purpose of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
Jack London
“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.”
C.S. Lewis
“Most men die at twenty or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and loved when they were alive.”
Romain Rolland
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Our lives exist in individual moments. It is up to us to make sure those moments are vital, interconnected, and grand.”
Jason Silva
Love
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Leadership
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”
Andy Benoit
Courage
“Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.”
Albert Camus
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Anais Nin
“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
John Wayne
"Courage is the ultimate cure for procrastination."
“Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed.”
Abraham Lincoln
Mind Benders
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”
Chögyam Trungpa
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
Albert Camus
Contemporary Society
“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
James Gleick
“Underneath everything you do is a sweet, innocent being doing its best to cope with the confusing world it’s been thrust into. When you understand every action, of yourself and others, as the touchingly naive response of an innocent child to a world gone incomprehensibly wrong, you will see glory in every person. You will realize that we each possess a divine and radiant beauty.”
Tiago Forte
“If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.”
Elise Boulding
“Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.”
Nassim Taleb
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde
“The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.”
Paul Graham
“Don’t talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.”
Nassim Taleb
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
GK Chesterton
Comedy
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
Tara Ploughman
“Laughter is the sound of comprehension.”
Tom Stopper
“It’s okay not to hurt feelings of various tribes and groups. However, it’s not good for comedy. Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks. Comedy is the lecherous little elf whispering into the king’s ear, always telling the truth about human behavior.”
Mel Brooks
“Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink.”
Paul Graham
“There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.”
Goethe
“Wit closes the coffin on an emotion.”
Nietzsche
Failure
“It's not the situation, but whether we react (negative) or respond (positive) to the situation that's important.”
Zig Ziglar
“Don't find fault. Find a remedy.”
Henry Ford
“Failure is success in progress.”
Albert Einstein
“Let’s plunge ourselves into the roar of time, the whirl of accident; may pain and pleasure, success and failure, shift as they will – it’s only action that can make a man.”
Goethe
“The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.”
Aristotle
“You can know a person’s character by how they respond to you when you make a genuine mistake.”
Nassim Taleb
Success
“My formula for success is rise early, work late and strike oil.”
JP Getty
“Success is not obtained overnight. It comes in installments; you get a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow until the whole package is given out. The day you procrastinate, you lose that day's success.”
Israelmore Ayivor
Not Worrying What Others Think
“We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”
Emerson
“In our insufferable age of self-obsession we mistake indifference for hate.”
Ayishat Akanbi
"Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever they saw one or two persons applauding?"
Arthur Schopenhauer
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Social proof is a flame to the human mind moth, and it leaves a fire trail of destruction across the path of enough.”
Will Jelbert
“The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.”
Nassim Taleb
"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
Toni Morrison
“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rare commodity."
Robert F. Kennedy
“There’s power in looking silly and not caring that you do.”
Amy Poehler
"He who truly thinks for himself is like a monarch, in that he recognizes no one over him."
Arthur Schopenhauer
“The power men have to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The man whose sole concern with the world is that it shall admire him is not likely to achieve his object."
Bertrand Russell
“God, grant me the confidence of a mediocre consultant.”
Zak Kukoff
“The more you use your mind, the less minding power you have.”
Gary Keller
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
Nietzsche
Trees
“A tree is a subterranean organism usually commensating with soil, bacteria, and fungi, with photosynthetic parts above the ground.”
-Unknown botany professor (h/t)
Nietzsche
“Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any single realized joy could be.”