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John Updike: Art is like baby shoes
“Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.” —John Updike.
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Penelope Lively: Walking lexicons
“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.” —Penelope Lively.
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Winston Churchill: Prophesying beforehand
“I always avoid prophesying beforehand because it is much better to prophesy after the event has already taken place. ” —Winston Churchil.
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Seneca: Proper limit to wealth
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbour’s property, and reckons, not…
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Epicetus: Wise man
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” —Epictetus.
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Albert Einstein: Pursuit of truth and beauty
“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” —Albert Einstein.
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James Clear: Heaven and hell
“You can go to hell without moving an inch, just focus on what you lack. You can taste heaven without leaving earth, just rejoice in what you have.” —James Clear.
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Giorgos Seferis: Digested lambs
“Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” —Giorgos Seferis.
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Warren Buffett: Good jockeys
“Good jockeys will do well on good horses, but not on broken-down nags. Both Berkshire’s textile business and Hochschild, Kohn had able and honest people running them. The same managers employed in a business with good economic characteristics would have achieved fine records. But they were never going to make any progress while running in…
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Jonny Sun: Flowers
“You ever wish that fireworks were incredibly quiet and also didn’t disappear so quickly and also you could keep them in your home and also you could hold them in your hands? Because if so, I’d love to introduce you to, flowers.” — Jonny Sun.
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Carl Sandburg: God’s opinion
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” —Carl Sandburg.
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Douglas Adams: Dolphins and humans
“Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.” —Douglas Adams.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: Taxes
“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
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Steve McConnell: Quick and dirty
“The problem with quick and dirty…is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten.” —Steve McConnell.
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Luther Burbank: Nature’s laws
“Nature’s laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.” —Luther Burbank.
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Warren Buffett: They’re nonsense
“What costs us money is when we misassess the fundamental economic characteristics of the business. But that is something we would not learn by what people generally consider due diligence. We could have lawyers look over all kinds of things, but that isn’t what makes a deal a good deal or a bad deal. And…
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Michelangelo Buonarroti: Mastery
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.” —Michelangelo Buonarroti.
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Lily Tomlin: Road to success
‘The road to success is always under construction.” —Lily Tomlin.
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Penn Jillette: Wicked ugly
“For 50 million years our biggest problems were too few calories, too little information. For about 50 years our biggest problem has been too many calories, too much information. We have to adjust, and I believe we will really fast. I also believe it will be wicked ugly while we’re adjusting.” —Penn Jillette.
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Charles Duhigg: Focus becomes a habit
“The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.” —Charles Duhigg.
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Warren Buffett: How do you beat Bobby Fischer?
“It’s way better to be in securities markets if you have a hundred IQ and everybody else operating has an 80, than if you have 140 and all the rest of them also have 140. So the secret of life is weak competition. Somebody said, ‘How do you beat Bobby Fischer?’ You play him in…
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William Godwin: Collision of 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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George Bernard Shaw: I dread success
“I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.” —George Bernard Shaw.
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Alan Perlis: Error-free programs
“There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works” —Alan Perlis.
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Tzvetan Todorov: Certainties
“We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.” —Tzvetan Todorov.
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Muhammad Ali: Boxing will be nothing again
“When I’m gone, boxing will be nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down’ll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It’s goin’ to be back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn and says he’s…
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Rukmini Devi Arundale: Silent cry of agony
“Animals cannot speak, but can you and I not speak for them and represent them? Let us all feel their silent cry of agony and let us all help that cry to be heard in the world.” —Rukmini Devi Arundale.
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Warren Buffett: Casino-like behaviour
“Though the stock market is massively larger than it was in our early years, today’s active participants are neither more emotionally stable nor better taught than when I was in school. For whatever reasons, markets now exhibit far more casino-like behavior than they did when I was young. The casino now resides in many homes…
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Richard Garriott: Preparation and opportunity
“Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past all of us all the time. The key is that you must be paying attention to see them, you must be willing to take risks, you must expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure and you must believe in what you are doing…
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John Steinbeck: Things we admire
“The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”…
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Anne Lamott: Writing
“There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things;…
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Victor Hugo: Conviction
“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” —Victor Hugo.
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Charlie Munger: Fewer predictions
“If our predictions have been a little better than other people’s, it’s because we tried to make fewer of them.” —Charlie Munger.
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Benjamin Franklin: Two ways of being happy
“There are two ways of being happy: We may either diminish our wants or augment our means — either will do — the result in the same; and it is for each man to decide for himself, and do that which happens to be the easiest. If you are idle or sick or poor, however…
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Chris Bloomstran: Single greatest imperative
“Avoiding unnecessary risk is the single greatest imperative. Risk is always greatest at the peak but also the most underappreciated or recognized at the peak.” —Chris Bloomstran.
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Arthur Schopenhauer: Air of great solemnity
“There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.” —Arthur Schopenhauer.
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Anais Nin: Throw your dream into space
“Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.” —Anais Nin.
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Erich Gamma: Design patterns
“Design patterns should not be applied indiscriminately. Often they achieve flexibility and variability by introducing additional levels of indirection. A design pattern should only be applied when the flexibility it affords is actually needed.” —Erich Gamma.
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Charles Bukowski: Unless I caused it
“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.” — Charles Bukowski.
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Herbert Spencer: Fill the world with fools
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” —Herbert Spencer.
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Carson McCullers: Improvisation of human existence
“There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.” —Carson McCullers.
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Seth Klarman: Inefficient markets
“Markets are inefficient because of human nature—innate, deep-rooted, permanent. People don’t consciously choose to invest with emotion—they simply can’t help it…. In short, we believe market efficiency is a fine academic theory that is unlikely ever to bear meaningful resemblance to the real world of investing.” —Seth Klarman.
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Anthony Bourdain: Embarrassing
“I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.”— Anthony Bourdain.
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Nicole Kidman: Enormous gift
“It’s the strangest thing: A lot of people as they get older get more protected and terrified. My desire is to keep throwing myself into things. My parenting, my relationship, my work. I’ll take the pain. I’ll take the joy. Because the feeling makes me go, I’m in life. It’s an enormous gift, this life.”—…
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Alan Ashley-Pitt: Man who walks alone
“The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.” —Alan Ashley-Pitt.
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Galileo Galilei: Humble reasoning of a single individual
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” —Galileo Galilei.
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Charlie Munger: I’m not a polymath
“I’m not a polymath. What I am is a guy who has been able to take moderate obsession and a long attention span and turn them into pretty good results. Of course, a long attention span will help you a lot, if you’re reasonably smart.” —Charlie Munger.
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George Jean Nathan: Bad officials
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.” —George Jean Nathan.
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Bill Nygren: Just plain stupid
“Buying great businesses at average prices is as much value investing as buying average businesses at great prices. The idea that every business trading at a low P/E, P/B, P/anything ratio is a ‘value stock’ is just plain stupid. Some businesses are truly inferior and deserve to sell at low multiples.” —Bill Nygren.
