A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
The idea that we should focus on disruption rather than the new value that we can create is at the heart of the current economic malaise, income inequality, and political upheaval. The secret to building a better future is to use technology to do things that were previously impossible. The point of technology isn’t to make money. It’s to solve problems!
~ Tim O’Reilly
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Those things are easy now. They might cost more than we’d like, but you can put them on a check-list and they’ll get done. What’s hard now is breaking the rules. What’s hard is finding the faith to become a heretic, to seek out an innovation and then, in the face of huge amounts of resistance, to lead a team and to push the innovation out the door into the world. Successful people are the ones who are good at this.
~ Seth Godin
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The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: If we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for… all those are gone.
So we need to hurry.
Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Most see excellences as some grand aspiration. Wrong. Dead wrong. My two cents: Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!
~ Tom Peters
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Forethought is a virtue; remember that one day, that distant future will be now, and the choices you make today will have shaped the choices you are able to make then.
~ Tim O’Reilly
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This is super important. Everybody’s impatient at a macro [level], and just so patient at a micro [level], wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing [everything] out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.
~ Gary Vaynerchuk
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It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.
[…]
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy. Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.
~ Seth Godin
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Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
~ Charles Bukowski
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The speed with which all of them vanish—the objects in the world, and the memory of them in time. And the real nature of the things our senses experience, especially those that entice us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are loudly trumpeted by pride. To understand those things—how stupid, contemptible, grimy, decaying, and dead they are—that’s what our intellectual powers are for.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.
~ Seth Godin
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I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
~ Frederick Douglass
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The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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Concentrate every minute … on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; And third, by experience, which is bitterest.
~ Confucius
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Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.
~ Publilius Syrus
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We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
~ C.S. Lewis
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