Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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William Faulkner: Experience, observation and imagination
“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.” —William Faulkner.
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Alice Wellington Rollins: Tact
“Tact is not the quality by which you often please, but by which you seldom offend.” — Alice Wellington Rollins.
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Mark Dominus: Long complicated expression
“It’s tempting to write a long complicated expression instead of two or three shorter ones where the intermediate results are stored in variables. But then every time you look at the long expression you have to pause for a moment to remember what is going on.” —Mark Dominus.
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Walter Lippmann: Corrupted and weakened by friends
“Very few established institutions, governments, and constitutions … are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.” —Walter Lippmann.
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John Tukey: Play in everyone’s backyard
“The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.” ―John Tukey.
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Paul Graham: Searching for good books
“There’s a second component of reading that many people don’t realize exists: searching for the good books. There are a huge number of books and only a small percentage of them are really good, so reading means searching. Someone who tries to read but doesn’t understand about the need to search will end up reading…
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Warren Buffett: Potential
‘Most people go through life using up a very, very small part of their potential. You could have a three-hundred-horsepower motor and get three hundred horsepower out of it or you can get a lot less. The people who I see function well are not the ones with the biggest “motors,” but the ones with…
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Sophia Loren: Fountain of youth
“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.” —Sophia Loren.
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Carmen Esposito: Do the work
“There is no formula for success—you just begin and then you continue. I’m often asked how to have a career in stand-up and the answer is confoundingly simple: Do the work. Over and over again, just do the work. After you build the courage to get onstage that first time, it’s all about repetition.” —Cameron…
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Jeremy Irons: Time machines
“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.” —Jeremy Irons.
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Edward Garson: Referential transparency
“Referential transparency is a very desirable property: it implies that functions consistently yield the same results given the same input, irrespective of where and when they are invoked.” —Edward Garson.
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Samuel Johnson: Decent provision
“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” —Samuel Johnson.
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C S Lewis: Compound interest
“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…
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William Carlos Williams: Forgiveness
“What power has love but forgiveness?” —William Carlos Williams.
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Mary Beard: Why people think as they do
“I’m very pleased to think that there are people with whom I agree on some issues and not others. I don’t want a world in which we all agree. I want a world in which people feel that they have the standing and confidence to feel that they can disagree. I’m interested in why people…
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Laurence J Peter: Boy and man
“Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?” —Laurence J. Peter.
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Andy Benoit: Unrecognized simplicities
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”— Andy Benoit.
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Alice Wellington Rollins: Much more fun
“It is so much more fun to be a little richer than you were yesterday, than merely to be rich.” — Alice Wellington Rollins.
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Sarah Blakely: Secret ideas
“I kept my idea a secret from anyone who could not directly help to move it forward. That was my gut instinct at the time, but it’s now one of the best pieces of advice I have to give. Ideas are the most vulnerable at the moment you have them; that’s also the time people…
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Thomas Mitchell: Happiness
“People are always looking for happiness at some future time and in some new thing, or some new set of circumstances, in possession of which they some day expect to find themselves. But the fact is, if happiness is not found now, where we are, and as we are, there is little chance of it…
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H L Mencken: Moral certainty
‘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…
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Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel hopefully
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.” —Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Bryan Lawrence: Disconfirming evidence
“I think I found really what I want to do—analyzing businesses, trying to understand the world, developing conviction, looking for places where the conventional wisdom is wrong. I love living in that world and I enjoy this. And so when something starts to go against us—we bought something and it’s down—I really enjoy that. Distinguishing…
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Stephen Jay Gould: Centrality in the cosmos
“The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.” —Stephen Jay Gould.
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James Earl Jones: Feelings and language
“When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.” —James Earl Jones.
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Leo Tolstoy: No greatness
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.” —Leo Tolstoy.
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Claude Pepper: Next generation
“If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world.” —Claude Pepper.
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Brian Goetz: Good practice
“Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make all fields final unless they need to be mutable.” —Brian Goetz.
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Helen Rowland: Husband and lover
“A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.” —Helen Rowland.
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Robert M Pirsig: Fanatically dedicated
“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or…
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Jean Giraudoux: Study of law
“There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.” —Jean Giraudoux, “Tiger at the Gates”.
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Arthur Koestler: Pate de foie gras
“To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.” —Arthur Koestler.
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Mary Renault: Rightness of a thing
“The rightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes.” —Mary Renault.
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F J Raymond: Income tax refund
“Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.” —F.J. Raymond.
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Sarah Orne Jewett: Harbor
“A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.” —Sarah Orne Jewett.
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Winston Churchill: Exhilarating
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” —Winston Churchill.
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Paul Bourget: Complicity
“There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.” —Paul Bourget.
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Brian Goetz: Thread safety
“It is far easier to design a class to be thread-safe than to retrofit it for thread safety later.” ― Brian Goetz.
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Howard Marks: Skillful analysis and superior insight
“There are few effective rules for investors to follow. Superior investing always comes down to skillful analysis and superior insight, not adherence to formulas and guidelines.” —Howard Marks.
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Lao Tzu: Do everything through being
“The way to use life is to do nothing through acting. The way to use life is to do everything through being.” —Lao Tzu.
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Heine: New character every day
“I will not say that women have no character; rather, they have a new one every day.” —Heine.
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Maurice Maeterlinck: Burn none at all
“The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none…
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Adlai Stevenson: Eggheads unite!
“Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks.” —Adlai Stevenson.
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Rita Dove: Whisper overheard
“For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.” —Rita Dove.
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Warren Buffett: Making sausage and making laws
“Charlie made a very good point there about how managers would do better if they understood investments. I find it absolutely fascinating, and I’ve seen this throughout my life, I’ve seen it close up. I will have friends who are CEOs of companies and they’ll have somebody else handle their money. If you say to…
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William Least Heat-Moon: No yesterdays on the road
“When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” —William Least Heat-Moon.
