A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
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.
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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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My father knew that if I was compelled to clothe myself it would make me think and search and find ways of earning the money to do it. And furthermore he knew that I would learn this important fact: We do not meet the demands of life with money. But with the imagination, forethought, plans and energy that earn the money.
~ James Cash Penney
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People fail to get along because they fear each other; They fear each other because they don’t know each other; They don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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In this moment, we need to be reminded that stories of the future—about AI, or any kind—are never just about technology; They are about people and they are about the places that those people find themselves, the places they might call home and systems that bind them all together.
~ Genevieve Bell
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If you want to be successful in business, (in life, actually,) you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out.
~ Jeff Bezos
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