My Favorite Quotes

It's better to feel pain than nothing at all. The opposite of love is indifference.

Your pain pushes you, until your vision pulls you.

The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth.

To get through the hardest journey we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping

The best way out is always through

What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say

Lying is the royal road to chaos

Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.

Does this grow corn?

If you commit to nothing, you will be distracted by everything.

The aggregation of marginal gains

Make before you manage

Time must be explicitly managed, like money.

Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax

I always stop when things seem out of focus.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion

Your mind doesn't have a mind

Don't confuse planning for progress.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

“Great” opportunities cost “good” ones; you can’t have both.

You have to actually make a decision. If you try to be everywhere, you’ll end up nowhere. If you try to be everyone, you’ll end up no one.

I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

When there is a fire, you don't ask who the fireman is

Knowing when not to make your own decisions is one of the most important skills you can develop.

He who lives by the crystal ball is destined to eat ground glass

Leaders are people who make quick decisions and are sometimes right.

If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it.

It's very hard to fail completely, if you aim high enough

Adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later.

Sic Parvis Magna (“Thus great things from small things (come)” or “Greatness from small beginnings”)

If you hang around the barbershop long enough, sooner or later you will get a haircut

Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.

Entertainment and distraction is the enemy of creation and learning. They will keep you in mediocrity.

Fear and sorrow inhabits action; anger generates it.

We cannot lower the mountain, therefore we must elevate ourselves

A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.

The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

I don't like that man, I must get to know him better.

Perception without conception is blind

There are two ways to have the tallest building in town. Go and tear down all the others or build one for yourself.

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious

That’s really the pot calling the kettle black.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

How can those who live in the light of day possibly comprehend the depths of night?

The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

Your depression is not a malfunction. It is a signal.

And there will come a day when you would give everything you have left to have what you have right now.

We never run out of time, Tim. Time continues.

The days are long but the years are short

Many people fear death will take something away from them. The wise person realizes that death is constantly giving them something. Death is giving meaning to your life.

We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the lure of advertised values, to pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.

Sometimes I miss what I haven't yet lost, as if I'm staring through the masterpiece at the empty wall behind it.

When you become truly spiritual, you are totally different from everybody else. That which everybody else wants, you don’t want. That which everybody else resists, you totally accept.

Not wanting something is as good as having it

I should be suspicious of what I want.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable

That which you seek is seeking you

Who you are is a result of who you were, but where you end up depends entirely on who you choose to be from this moment forward.

You’ve got to wake up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.

You want to minimize the distance between how you're living and how you will wish you had lived, at the end of each day. And week. And month. And year. And at the end of your life.

Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.

I cannot believe that the purpose in life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Life brought rewards, but no lasting peace or satisfaction.

The problem in life isn't in receiving answers. The problem is in identifying your current questions. Once you get the questions right, the answers always come.

It says that whenever people cross our paths, there is always a message for us. Chance encounters do not exist. But how we respond to these encounters determines whether we're able to receive the message.

Look for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying

"Nothing's really happened like I thought it would". That about does it, sums it all up. And we all grew old, buried wishes, places, people. Buried the hope. A strange acceptance came over us. And if in every day we find some peace, then we won. It's just life, it's okay, it passes. Every day is every day. Some rain in the afternoon. Some wine, a cup of coffee. A song, a hug from a loved one or a pet, a smile from a stranger. A song from Bon Iver. And they all lived until the time to live was no more.

The winner of the rat race is still a rat.

"Call me any friday night in my office at ten o'clock and I'll tell you."

Do not work more to fix overwhelm — prioritize. If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late and apologize, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer, etc.) to get the big important things done. The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates — or doing more — it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.

It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way.

It is the mark of a genius to explain a complex topic in a simple way.

Everything is leased

Satisfaction is the death of desire

You can't have everything - where would you put it?

I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... Perhaps you've seen it.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

There is no duty we so underrated as the duty of being happy

You can not BECOME happy. You can only BE happy.

This is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show!

Don't stumble on something behind you.

[...]imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.

The goal of meditation is not to become a meditator. Not even a good one. The goal is to recognize how the mind always already is. And to experience the freedom that is inherent to the nature of consciousness. Freedom from fear, and shame, and envy, and craving. Freedom from self.

Do I care enough to feel discomfort to get to the other side? If not, I should turn off the input. Sitting with an uncomfortable input when not caring enough to make things better, is a formula for unhappiness.

It is always now

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves — slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

It's so much easier to be successful than to be happy

Not your circus, not your monkeys.

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls - family, health, friends, integrity - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships.

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartbreak, carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Self-esteem is the ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in regard.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Whether you think you can, or think you can't - you're right

The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts.

The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery, while those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.

Dear lord, make me chaste-but not yet.

You get rewarded in public for what you do in private.

Even a shallow dive gets you wet

There is no such thing as tough. There is trained and untrained.

The more you sweat in peace time, the less you bleed in war time.

True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less

It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.

Money is like gas during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

Avoid clichés like the plague

You say you need more space; are you an astronaut?

You're so beautiful you're almost ugly

A morning of awkwardness is better than a night of loneliness

[...]what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

[...]a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not at his world through our eyes.

I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Rather than learn the general lesson of art's attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn't cover and cities he didn't visit, suffering instead of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.