Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
~ Marin Luther King Jr.
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Quotes
Apt to escape
I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; For I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.
~ Charles Darwin
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Happiness
Wealth is not happiness nor is swimming pools and villas. Nor is great work alone reward, or fame. Foreign places visited themselves give nothing. It is only you who bring to the places your heart, or in your great work feeling, or in your large house place. If you do this there is happiness.
~ Richard Feynman
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Virtue and adversity
I may wish to be free from torture, but if the time comes for me to endure it, I’ll wish to bear it courageously with bravery and honor. Wouldn’t I prefer not to fall into war? But if war does befall me, I’ll wish to carry nobly the wounds, starvation, and other necessities of war. Neither am I so crazy as to desire illness, but if I must suffer illness, I’ll wish to do nothing rash or dishonorable. The point is not to wish for these adversities, but for the virtue that makes adversities bearable.
~ Seneca
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Course correct
Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course correct as you go.
~ Barry Diller
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Keep a notebook
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up in your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
~ Jack London
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Ruff! Ruff!
Don’t hire a dog, then bark yourself.
~ David Ogilvy
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New ideas
Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
~ Howard H. Aiken
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Knowing
Knowledge is the beginning of practice; Doing is the completion of knowing.
~ Wang Yangming
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The flowers that blossom
In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.
~ Albert Schweitzer
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Taken for granted
In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
~ Bertrand Russell
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Sight
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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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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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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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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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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