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Leonardo Da Vinci: You who live on dreams
“But you who live on dreams, you are better pleased with the sophistical reasoning and frauds of talkers about great and uncertain matters than those who speak of certain and natural matters, not of such lofty nature.” —Leonardo Da Vinci, The Codex on the Flight of Birds.
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Dr. Martin Schwarzschild: Space program
“The idea of man leaving this earth and flying to another celestial body and landing there and stepping out and walking over that body has a fascination and a driving force that can get the country to a level of energy, ambition, and will that I do not see in any other undertaking. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we…
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Margaret H Sanger: Free
“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” —Margaret H. Sanger.
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Eleanor Roosevelt: Wise enough
“Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?” —Eleanor Roosevelt.
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Han Kang: Made of glass
“Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.Before, we used to have…
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Ethel Kennedy: Most grief is unnameable
“Most grief is unnameable; it knows no words, no boundaries, no time.” —Ethel Kennedy.
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Jerry Seinfeld: Focus
“All this hand wringing worry and concern over how are people viewing me — someone said something bad about me, and you get so upset about it — is wasted time and energy. Your only focus should be on getting better at what you’re doing. Focus on what you are doing. Get better at what…
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Lin Yutang: Small men, big shadows
“When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.” —Lin Yutang.
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Estée Lauder: Good luck
“In every life there is a moment—an event or a realization—that changes that life irrevocably. If the change is to be a happy one, one must be able to recognize the moment and seize it without delay. Rose Kennedy once told me that good luck is something you make and bad luck is something you…
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Ratan Tata: Work-life integration
“I don’t believe in work-life balance. I believe in work-life integration. Make your work and life meaningful and fulfilling, and they will complement each other.” —Ratan Tata.
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Ashley Montagu: Love and intelligence
“Without love, intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence, love is not enough.” —Ashley Montagu.
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John W Gardner: Only stand out of my light
‘When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: “Only stand out of my light.” Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of…
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Rich Hickey: Simplicity
“What matters for simplicity is that there’s not interleaving.” —Rich Hickey.
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Dorothy L Sayers: Principle
“It’s getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody.” —Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night.
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Shane Parrish: Protecting ourselves
‘We tell ourselves we don’t speak the truth because we don’t want to hurt others, but it’s far more likely that we don’t want to bear the consequences of our choices. We tell a white lie to a friend that we’re “busy” the night they ask us to do something when we don’t feel like…
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Chuck Close: Inspiration is for amateurs
“The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are…
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Rutherford B Hayes: Who serves the country best
“He serves his party best who serves the country best.” —Rutherford B. Hayes.
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Charlie Munger: Strong interest
“In my whole life I’ve never been good at something I wasn’t very interested in. It just doesn’t work. There’s no substitute for strong interest.” — Charlie Munger.
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Thomas Wolfe: Pinnacle of success
“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.” —Thomas Wolfe.
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Glennon Doyle: Disappoint as many people as it takes
“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”— Glennon Doyle.
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J A Karr: Love he does not feel
“One expresses well the love he does not feel.” —J.A. Karr.
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Jimmy Carter: Strong nation
“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.” —Jimmy Carter.
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Maggie Smith: What writers want me to be
“An actor is somebody who communicates someone else’s words and emotions to an audience. It’s not me. It’s what writers want me to be.” —Maggie Smith.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates: Frame flipping
“Racism tends to attract attention when it’s flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping — positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry; they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want…
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Maggie Smith: It just gets different
“People say it gets better but it doesn’t. It just gets different, that’s all.” —Maggie Smith.
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Miguel de Cervantes: Offspring of the mind
“No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.” —Miguel de Cervantes.
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Maggie Smith: How I picture it
“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go.Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.Inside…
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Otis Port: Washing ashtray
“Programmers regard themselves as artists. As such, they consider keeping accurate records of their handiwork on par with washing ashtray.” — Otis Port.
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Aretha Franklin: On just one thing
“You cannot define a person on just one thing. You can’t just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done because one thing didn’t come off the way you thought it should come off.” — Aretha Franklin.
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T S Eliot: World of fugitives
“In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.” —T.S. Eliot.
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Charlie Munger: Reliability
“Reliability is essential for progress in life.” — Charlie Munger.
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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…
