It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Cynicism
Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
~ George S. Patton
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Restful
What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.
~ Hal Boyle
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Options
Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.
~ Thomas Sowell
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Inevitable failure
It’s inevitable that you’re going to fail. If you’re not failing, then you’re definitely doing something wrong because you’re supposed to find your limits. There are parts of it that are going to suck the whole way along— that’s a perfect possibility, but you’re going to grow.
~ Adam McClellan
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Fail miserably
You may fail miserably, or you’re gonna break through it— you’re gonna learn something new about yourself, and you’re gonna develop a new skill out of necessity that you didn’t have at the beginning of the painting. So that’s what keeps me excited about making paintings, is because I couldn’t do the same thing over and over again. I have to manufacture some sort of potential failure there.
~ Jonny Hart
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Effective
If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.
~ Betty Reese
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Success
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children […] to leave the world a bit better […] to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The power broker
To paraphrase Jim [Loehr]: The power broker in your life is the voice that no one ever hears. How well you revisit the tone and content of your private voice is what determines the quality of your life. It is the master storyteller, and the stories we tell ourselves are our reality. For instance, how do you speak to yourself when you make a mistake that upsets you? Would you speak that way to a dear freind when they’ve made a mistake? If not, you have work to do. Trust me, we all have work to do.
~ Tim Ferriss
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Smallest possible pieces
Excellence is the next five minutes, improvement is the next five minutes, happiness is the next five minutes. This doesn’t mean you ingore planning. I encourage you to make ambitious plans. Just rememeber that the big-beyond-belief things are accomplished when you deconstruct them into the smallest possible pieces and focus on each “moment of impact,” one step at a time.
~ Tim Ferriss
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A simple recipe
Based on everything I’ve seen, a simple recipe can work: Focus on what’s in front of you, design great days to create a great life, and try not to make the same mistake twice. That’s it. Stop hitting net balls and try something else, perhaps even the opposite. If you really want extra credit, try not to be a dick, and you’ll be a Voltron-level superstar.
~ Tim Ferriss
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Distinction
The single most important distinction in life […] is to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted.
~ Jonathan Sacks
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Banish it
Named your fear must be before banish you can.
~ “Yoda“
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Friendship
Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
~ C.S. Lewis
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Hard choices
Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices means never retiring, because the brain has to be engaged in finding new solutions in the moment, not just remembering old formulas. Hard choices makes us wiser, smarter, stronger, and wealthier, and easy choices reverse our progress, focusing our energies on comfort or entertainment. In every difficult moment ask yourself, “What is a hard choice, and what is an easy choice?” and you will know instantly what is right.
~ Jerzy Gregorek
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The game
If you must play, decide on three things at the start: The rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
~ Chinese proverb
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A little less arrogant
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Being alive
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.
~ Joseph Campbell
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Pseudo-knowledge
Zeal, dogmatism and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge; We sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalization and over-abstraction; And we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Frenzy and distraction
True fortitude is seen in great exploits, that justice warrants and that wisdom guides. All else is towering phrensy and distraction.
~ Joseph Addison
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