Quotes
An ever-growing list, from far and wide.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you’ll ever need right up to the day you die.
- William T. Wiley
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
- Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemist
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.
- Mary Schmich, “Advice, Like Youth, Probably Just Wasted on the Young”
Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
- Theodore Roosevelt
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Well done is better than well said.
- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.
- Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.
- Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (translated)
It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. This recognition must be followed by resolute and persevering action. For only the man who goes to meet his fate resolutely is equipped to deal with it adequately.
- Hexagram #5: Hsü / Waiting (Nourishment), from The I Ching, or, Book of Changes
First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.
- Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
We’re stuck in this mind-body meatsuit, so we better learn how to use it in a way that brings out the higher angels of our nature.
- Tristan Harris
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Lick your lips.
- David Goggins (paraphrased)
The concentrated mind has no room for thinking how well the body is doing, much less the how-to’s of the doing.
- Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
- John Tukey, The Future of Data Analysis
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
- George S. Patton, War As I Knew It
I notice increasing reluctance on the part of [executives] to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post, for support rather than for illumination.
- David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
They all want to be eagles, but they don’t want to act like eagles, so we’re going to have to do it ourselves.
- Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
Bad feature ideas can be argued for months and rationalized because smart people, lacking any sort of compelling real world data, are great at debating and rationalizing bad decisions.
- Manu Sporny
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
There are so many complicated questions where the only thing I’m really skeptical of is certainty in either direction.
- Patrick Collison
“Excuse me,” I said, “I thought you were a trout stream.”
“I’m not,” she said.
- Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America