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Tom Brady: Double the pleasure and divide the pain
“Things happen in life that you don’t want to happen—whether you lose a game, things don’t go well at work, or something happens with your child. There are many moments in our personal and professional lives that don’t go the way we want. How do you deal with them? Do you handle them with class…
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Steve Jobs: Don’t settle
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to…
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Paul Graham: Two theories
“If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.” —Paul Graham.
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Kate Sheppard: All that separates
“All that separates, whether of race, class, creed, or sex, is inhuman, and must be overcome.” —Kate Sheppard.
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Amrish Puri: Destination
“Son, you are an actor of theater, you are an actor of stage. You will go to the world of film. And if you become a film actor, then don’t become a film. Don’t go to late-night parties. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t smoke cigarettes. Cigarettes and all these things destroy an actor a lot. Be…
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Franklin Adams: Conviction based on experience
“The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.” —Franklin Adams.
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Groucho Marx: If I had a horse
“I’d horsewhip you if I had a horse.” —Groucho Marx.
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Luther Burbank: Jungle of weeds
“If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weeds.” —Luther Burbank.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Inordinate courage
“It takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations—scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
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Sigmund Freud: Vulnerable
“We are never so vulnerable as when we love.” —Sigmund Freud.
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William Beveridge: Happiness of the common bank
“The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man.” —William Beveridge.
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Napoleon: Ten people
“Ten people who yell make more noise than ten thousand who keep silent.” —Napoleon.
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Julia Cameron: Seeds of love
“When I listen to love, I am listening to my true nature. When I express love, I am expressing my true nature. All of us love. All of us do it more and more perfectly. The past has brought us both ashes and diamonds. In the present we find the flowers of what we’ve planted…
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Nietzsche: Happiness
“The only happiness lies in reason; all the rest of the world is dismal. The highest reason, however, I see in the work of the artist, and he may experience it as such. Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and thinking: all the rest of the world is slow, gradual and stupid. Whoever could feel the course of a light ray…
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William Goldwin: Mind with mind
“If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.” —William Godwin.
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James Dyson: Misfit
“I have been a misfit throughout my professional life, and that seems to have worked to my advantage. Misfits are not born or made; they make themselves. And a stubborn opinionated child, desperate to be different and to be right, encounters only smaller refractions of the problems he will always experience. And he carries the…
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Leonardo da Vinci: Mastery of oneself
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over…
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Toni Morrison: Beauty
“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling…
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Michel de Montaigne: Rub and polish
“It is good to rub and polish your mind against that of others.” —Michel de Montaigne.
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Will Rogers: Things will get better
“Things will get better despite our efforts to improve them.” —Will Rogers.
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Victor Hugo: Men hate those to whom they have to lie
“Men hate those to whom they have to lie.” —Victor Hugo.
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Patrick Volkerding: Slackware
“Besides, I think Slackware sounds better than ‘Microsoft,’ don’t you?” —Patrick Volkerding.
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Frederick P Brooks: Intramodular structure
“The programmer’s primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules’ data structures.” —Frederick P. Brooks.
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Leo Durocher: Show me
“Show me a good loser in professional sports and I’ll show you an idiot. Show me a good sportsman and I’ll show you a player I’m looking to trade.” —Leo Durocher.
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David Foster Wallace: Voting
“There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard’s vote.” —David Foster Wallace.
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Margaret Halsey: Crucial disadvantage
“The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o’clock.” —Margaret Halsey.
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Ansel Adams: Horrifying
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” —Ansel Adams.
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John Heywood: Old fool
“There is no fool to the old fool.” —John Heywood.
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Constantin Brancusi: Inhabited sculpture
“Architecture is inhabited sculpture.” —Constantin Brancusi.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: Two hours
“Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Nikos Kazantzakis: True teachers
“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.” —Nikos Kazantzakis.
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Dorothy Canfield Fisher: Reflection
“If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.” —Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
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Joan Didion: Self-respect
“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.” —Joan Didion.
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Sylvester McNutt III: Overthinking
“Overthinking is the biggest waste of human energy. Trust yourself, make a decision, and gain more experience. There is no such thing as perfect. You cannot think your way into perfection, just take action.” —Sylvester McNutt III.
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Schopenhauer: Art of not reading
“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for…
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Steve Maguire: Impossible conditions
“Use assertions to detect impossible conditions.” —Steve Maguire.
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A Gide: Start again
“Tout choses sont dites deja, mais comme personne n’ecoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” —A. Gide. “All things have already been said, but since no one listens, one must always start again.” —A. Gide.
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Larry Wall: If someone stinks
“If someone stinks, view it as a reason to help them, not a reason to avoid them.” —Larry Wall.
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Larry Wall: Generalization
“Sometimes we choose the generalization. Sometimes we don’t.” —Larry Wall.
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S Morganstern: Accidents that mean something
“A girl and a boy bump into each other — surely an accident. A girl and a boy bump and her handkerchief drops — surely another accident. But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid — *that had to mean something*.” —S. Morganstern.
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Garrison Keillor: Not everything in nature has a function
“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.” —Garrison Keillor.
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Gerry Conway: Against the greater force
“So do the noble fall. For they are ever caught in a trap of their own making. A trap — walled by duty, and locked by reality. Against the greater force they must fall — for, against that force they fight because of duty, because of obligations. And when the noble fall, the base remain.…
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H L Mencken: Mathematics
“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.” —H.L. Mencken.
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Emo Philips: Who was telling me this
“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.” —Emo Phillips.
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Will Ahmed: Success
“Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.” —Will Ahmed.
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Michael Pollan: Schizoid
“There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig — an animal easily as intelligent as a dog — that becomes the…
