Quotes

Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations

— Tim O’Reilly

First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.

— Matt Webb

An entrepreneur is not somebody that starts a company and gets a bunch of funding rounds. An entrepreneur is someone who solves problems that other people haven't thought to solve.

— Sarah Robb O’Hagan

Here is a little idea I’ve been growing.
It doesn’t have a roof yet.

— Elizabeth Gilbert

A lot of times we're angry at other people for not doing what we should have done for ourselves.

— Rupi Kaur

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

— Søren Kierkegaard

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

— Marcus Aurelius

Be so good they can't ignore you.

— Steve Martin

Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant.

— Charlie Munger

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

— Socrates (attributed)

You can be busy or remarkable — but not both.

— Cal Newport

Everyone thinks of changing the world,
but nobody thinks of changing themselves.

— Leo Tolstoy

There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

— John F. Kennedy (attributed)

Being a community manager is like being a Piñata - people are going to beat you with sticks and you still have to give out candy.

— John Lewis

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

— John Gall

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion, not admiration.

— Niklaus Wirth

Intensity makes a good story but consistency makes progress.

— James Clear

Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important.

— Reid Hoffman

Don't be dyed purple.

— Marcus Aurelius

Don't look at the wall. Your car goes where your eyes go.

— Mario Andretti

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users: high tech and illegal drugs. Is this the company we want to keep?

— Jimmy Gutterman

Doubt is not a pleasant position, but certainty is absurd.

— Voltaire

Don't wish it were easier, wish you were better.

— Jim Rohn

Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the face.

— Mike Tyson

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses.

— Muhammad Ali

Until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

— Carl Jung

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

— Louis L’Amour

We tend to remember the past in ways that flatter our understanding of the present.

— Eleanor Catton

Focus means saying 'no'

— Steve Jobs

It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.

— Upton Sinclair

Lay first the foundations of humility ... the higher your structure is to be the deeper must be its foundations.

— St Augustine

Have you ever bought clothes while traveling, and been unable to fit everything in your suitcase when it was time to go home? That suitcase is what my days are like now.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.

— Desmond Tutu (attributed)

Millions of people fly from thousands of miles away, on vacations of a lifetime, to take a picture of one of the most photographed works of architecture in history, which so happens to be the very same bridge that hundreds of thousands of people commute across to work on a daily basis. Think of all those grumpy souls with coffee mugs clenched in one hand ending up as background minutiae in someone's favorite vacation photo. Then think about that photo eventually ending up on that person's desk at work thousands of miles away: a photo that they'll look at and think of happier times as they sit there grumpy and clutching a coffee mug. Where tourism and the real world collide: everything comes full circle.

— Not For Tourists

If someone has the courage to admit they were wrong, you should have the grace to give them credit for admitting it. Rubbing it in encourages them to never admit being wrong again.

— James Clear

If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, whether important or not, and they spread themselves out. That’s totally fine. After all, greatness is not for everybody.

— Kobe Bryant

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

— Robert J. Hanlon

I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.

— Leo Tolstoy

I used to think I had ambition - but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.

— Rachel Field

Ideas are not something you have. Ideas are something you do.

— Hugh MacLeod

If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have?
Still four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

— Abraham Lincoln

If you don’t know where you’re going then any road leads you there.

— Lewis Caroll

If you're not prepared to be wrong you'll never come up with anything original

— Sir Ken Robinson

What matters for most people is not how much they know, but how realistically they define what they don't know.

— Warren Buffett

Real impact is the difference between what happened with you and what would have happened without you.

— Kavin Starr & Laura Hattendorf

They’re not really values unless you apply them when it’s inconvenient.

— Kim Goodwin

Often the people who invent something and the people who work out what that thing is for are different people.

— Kevin Kelly

All investment is speculation. The only difference is that some people admit it and some don’t.

— Gerald Loeb

Put your hand in a glass of water. Now take it out. That's how easy it is to replace you.

— Steve Hanson

It's a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.

— Donald Winnicott

Humans are generally not built to derive sustainable happiness from sipping mojitos on a picturesque island somewhere in the Pacific. Once you've tasted the sweetness of a dedicated purpose, it's near impossible to be content just sitting on the sidelines.

— David Heinemeier Hansson

It’s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

— John Wooden

Let the judgments of others be the consequence of your deeds, not their purpose.

— Leo Tolstoy

Life is long. You're probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you're gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.

— Chris Rock

The myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done.

— Joshua Wolf Shenk

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

— Anonymous (misattributed to Winston Churchill)

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder
and find that it was against the wrong wall.

— Joseph Campbell

Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig loves it.

— Anonymous

There are two ways of constructing software: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

— C. A. R. Hoare

There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.

— Peter Norvig

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

— Tim O’Reilly

Optimism is a genetic defect that helps keep entrepreneurs going.

— Sam Morgan

People are not 'talent'. People have talents.

— Ryan Baker

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.

— Paul Graham

We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependant on the past.

— Seneca

Boring people focus on the past, restless people focus on the future and content people focus on the present. The lucky ones are those who are content, but the restless ones change the world.

— Paul Bassat

Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.

— David Brooks

Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.

— Wayne Gretzky

Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

— Steve Jobs

You build a startup to test an idea,
and then you build a company to execute the idea.

— Spencer Fry

Success is throwing yourself at failure and missing.

— Richard Taylor

Technology is everything that doesn't work yet.

— Danny Hillis

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

— Alan Kay

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

— George Orwell

Waving your arms around and talking bollocks.

— Martin Peake

You should take the approach that you’re wrong…
Your goal is to be less wrong.

— Elon Musk

The more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.

— Henry David Thoreau

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

— Gilles Deleuze

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

— Admiral James Stockdale

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This present moment
used to be
the unimaginable future.

— Stewart Brand

Let's throw the ball out as far as we possibly can, and run after it really hard.

— Glenn Ashby

You're not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.

— TomTom Billboard

If you want to be successful surround yourself with people who are more successful.
If you want to be happy surround yourself with people who are less successful.

— Naval Ravikant

A group of talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights some times, making some noise. By working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas.

— Steve Jobs

Your mission statement should be nine words or less: verb, target, outcome.

— Kevin Starr

In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

— Warren Buffett (via Benjamin Graham)

Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

— Mary Schmich

Wearing a watch doesn’t make you a punctual person. But it gives you the information you need to be one, if that’s your wish.

— John Walker

Start simply by asking what are the most important facts in your organisation and how many people know them

— Hans Rosling

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "what have you been wrong about and how did it change your views?" The answer shows if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.

— Stewart Brand

What we fight is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Being creative is not something you do for a living. What you do for a living is ship.

— Seth Godin

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.

— Steve Jobs

While you are still searching for your business model, your company is worthless.

— Steve Blank

Our knowledge only increases when somebody is wrong.

— Karl Popper

You can only make as well as you can measure.

— Joseph Whitworth

If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

— Reid Hoffman