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Mary Kay Ash: Make me feel important
“It’s so simple, yet makes such a difference. Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’” — Mary Kay Ash.
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Nikola Tesla: Forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” —Nikola Tesla.
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David Ogilvy: Big ideas
“I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. I am supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career as a copywriter I have not had more than 20, if that. Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in…
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June Jordan: Life and death
“I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death.” —June Jordan.
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Mortimer Adler: Reading levels
“Think of these levels as reading to entertain, reading to inform, reading to understand, and reading to master. When you learned to read in elementary school, you were taught to read for entertainment. If you made it to high school and college, you learned to read to inform. This is where most people stop. But…
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Jean de la Fontaine: Flatterers
“Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.” —Jean de la Fontaine.
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James J Kilpatrick: Sheerest hokum
“Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced…
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Nancy Farmer: Give him water and sunshine
“People’s souls are like gardens. You can’t turn your back on someone because his garden’s full of weeds. You have to give him water and lots of sunshine.” —Nancy Farmer.
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Lao Tse: Tranquility
“The Way takes no action, but leaves nothing undone. When you accept this The world will flourish, In harmony with nature. Nature does not possess desire; Without desire, the heart becomes quiet; In this manner the whole world is made tranquil.” —Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching.
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Seth Klarman: We deal in probabilities
“We don’t deal in absolutes. We deal in probabilities.” —Seth Klarman.
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Bill Watterson: Hard to be religious
“It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.” —Bill Watterson.
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Gail Godwin: Good teaching
“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths good theatre.” —Gail Godwin.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne: Unaccustomed earth
“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer.
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Mike Johnson: Chewing gum
“Pasting code from the internet into production code is like chewing gum found in the street.” —Mike Johnson.
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Franz Kafka: I don’t eat you any more
“Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.” —Franz Kafka, novelist (3 Jul 1883-1924) [while admiring fish in an aquarium].
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Edgar Friedenberg: Romance
“Romance, like alcohol, should be enjoyed, but should not be allowed to become necessary.” —Edgar Friedenberg.
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Marwan Makhoul: Warplanes must be silent
“In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent.” —Marwan Makhoul, poet.
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Bob Robotti: Selecting stocks
“The next decade is going to belong to stock pickers. I don’t care if that’s technology companies, growth companies, industrials, financials—all of those have reasons to pick stocks and not the index. And the indexes will not outperform selecting stocks. And the ability to identify, do research, select companies that are well positioned and have…
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Walter Summers: We don’t go with girls that do
“We don’t smoke and we don’t chew, and we don’t go with girls that do.” —Walter Summers.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Form of imitation
“To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.” —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher.
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Jonathan Swift: Falsehood flies
“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men…
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Robert Orben: No place to put it all
“There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all.” —Robert Orben.
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Kent Nerburn: No inherent value
“We must always remember that possessions have no inherent value. They become what we make them. If they increase our capacity to give, they become something good. If they increase our focus on ourselves and become standards by which we measure other people, they become something bad.” — Kent Nerburn.
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Jean Jacques Rousseau: What wisdom?
“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and author.
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Jerry Seinfeld: Simpler, pure moments
“People are always trying to add more stuff to life. Reduce it to simpler, pure moments.” — Jerry Seinfeld.
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Helen Adams Keller: Test of democracy
“The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.” —Helen Adams Keller, lecturer and author.
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D J Hicks: Paranoids
“Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It’s easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you’d be paranoid too.” —D. J. Hicks.
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Pearl S Buck: Necessity to create
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.…
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Publius Terentius Afer (Terence): Disposition of women
“I know the disposition of women: when you will, they won’t; when you won’t, they set their hearts upon you of their own inclination.” —Publius Terentius Afer (Terence).
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Anonymous: Programming languages
“Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.” —Anonymous.
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Norman Cousins: Early warning system
“History is a vast early warning system.” —Norman Cousins, editor and author.
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C S Lewis: Tyranny
‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own…
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Epicetus: Education
“To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.” —Epictetus.
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Rainer Rilke: Wonderful living side by side
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.” —Rainer Rilke.
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Jean-Paul Sartre: Details of victory
“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.” —Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher.
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Thomas Jefferson: Stand like a rock
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” —Thomas Jefferson.
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Seth Klarman: We work really hard
“We work really hard never to get confused with what we know from what we think or hope or wish.” —Seth Klarman.
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Blaise Pascal: Religious conviction
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” —Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician.
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Paul Van Doren: One big idea
“My entire life, I never had one big idea. I like to think I woke up one day and figured out how to make the world’s best canvas-and-rubber, waffle-soled deck shoes, how to distribute said shoes, and thus create the first vertically integrated tennis shoe company in the world; but the fact of it is,…
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Roger Ebert: Idea of the Holocaust
“The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is…
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Neil Gaiman: Because you are successful
“The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby.” — Neil Gaiman.
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Igor Stravinsky: Silence
“Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.” —Igor Stravinsky, composer.
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Raymond Chandler: Marriage
“Never forget that a marriage is in one way very much like a newspaper. It has to be made fresh every damn day of every damn year.” —Raymond Chandler, Letter to Neil Morgan, 18th November 1955, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler.
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Ted Hughes: Nest of small scorpions
“Marriage is a nest of small scorpions, but it kills the big dragons.” —Ted Hughes, Letter to Daniel WeissbortAutumn 1961,Letters of Ted Hughes.
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Yukihiro Matsumoto: Ruby
“I didn’t work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it’s not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.” —Yukihiro Matsumoto.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe: The longest day must have its close
“The longest day must have its close — the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.” —Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and novelist.
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Werner Erhard: Life is a game
“Life is a game. In order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. If what already is, is more important than what isn’t, the game is over. So, life is a game in which what isn’t, is more important than what is. Let the good times roll.” —Werner Erhard.
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Mencken: First love
“A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that begins to bunch them.” —Mencken.
