Quotes a collection of quotes that I love
If you can train yourself to ask "is there a better way to do this?" at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
When you want something, the whole universe conspires in order for you to achieve it.
Ventriloquize long enough and your voice alters; the mask becomes your face.
Always produce is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. Always produce will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.
Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.
We have entered a world where knowledge is commoditized. The only thing that matters is effort.
Once you fully own your status as a wicked queen, imperious and impossible, yet still capable of sauntering haughtily through the world, painting her long nails the demonic purple of cold planets, and proclaiming herself magnificent even when the empirical evidence does not support this conclusion. Empirical evidence can go fuck itself, because you are THE QUEEN.
I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.
Listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do.
To truly understand something, you can't just break it down. You have to be able to put it back together, too.
If you're marketing, don't sell them a thing, sell them a self-image that your thing happens to reinforce.
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
Lemon, what tragedy happened in your life that you insist upon punishing yourself with all this mediocrity?
I love the notion of "surplus" value, that you become a man when you add more than you take.
Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play.
Stories mediate between the conscious and the unconscious; storytelling is one of the most direct ways to transfer unconscious content into other people's consciousness, so it can eventually become part of reasoned discourse.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing.
Wisdom is how to live. It is the residue of mistakes, metabolized by time and reflection. It can't be rushed, and it can't be copy-pasted. It is an embodied—as in felt in the body—experience, guidance from the inside.
You can't truly feel gratitude for something you think is owed.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The keys are right under your fingers. All you gotta do is hit the right notes.
Every strange thing you've ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.
Don't let your principles stop you from learning from non-principled people and their practices.
Negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth or forceful you are. It's about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea.
Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.
Your job isn't to ask me what's keeping me up at night. It's to tell me what should be!
You've drunk from the pool of infinite sorrow, and you know you're not the first. You know it's the same substance that every conscious being touches and twists away from, and by inhabiting it you can touch them too. By not resisting your pain, you can be with them in theirs. This alone makes it worth it. Pleasure is great, but pain is increased surface area with which to touch others; this is a unique, brutal gift of intimacy.
As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.
I've never let my school interfere with my education.
In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
The essence of commitment is making a decision. The Latin root for decision is to 'cut away from,' as in an incision. When you commit to something, you are cutting away all your other possibilities, all your other options.
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
The foundation of all intelligence is curiosity.
Advice is disproportionately written by defective people. Healthy people perform naturally and effortlessly. You walk so gracefully that a million man-hours into bipedal robots fail to match your skill. But if some stroke patient or precocious one-year-old asked your secret, you would just say 'I put one foot in front of the other.' If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy.
You are doing what you love when you love to sweat the details. When the details drive you nuts, maybe it is time to find a different owner, or role.
The struggle to obtain a reward teaches us the reward's worth.
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.