Quotes
“If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”
-Seymour Cray
#Quotes
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
-Albert Schweitzer
#Quotes
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
-Oscar Wilde
#Quotes
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
#Quotes
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
-General George S. Patton
#Quotes
”Humanity always reenacts the same bildungsroman. All the principles you learn through your struggles today had been written down by the ancients thousands of years ago.”
-Ken Liu
#Quotes
“If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
“The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.”
-Eric Schmidt
(I’m not 100% in agreement but do like the sentiment about embracing creative reinvention)
#Quotes
“If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there.”
-Frank Gehry
#Quotes
“A tendency to get married to positions. There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists—or anyone.”
-Nassim Taleb
#Quotes
“Everything in nature has a structure, a way that the parts relate to one another, which is generally fluid and not so easy to conceptualize. Our minds naturally tend to separate things out, to think in terms of nouns instead of verbs. In general you want to pay greater attention to the relationships between things, because that will give you a greater feel for the picture as a whole.”
-Robert Greene
#Quotes
Learning from others’ mistakes…
“War is fraught with random dangers and careless missteps. Clear orders and relentless rehearsals based on intelligence and repetitive training build muscle—not once or twice, but hundreds of times. Read history, but study a few battles in depth. Learning from others’ mistakes is far smarter than putting your own lads in body bags.“
-General Jim Mattis
#Quotes
“Envision the ideal end to any project before you begin. Even the best gigs don’t last forever. Nor should they.”
-Samin Nosrat
#Quotes
“The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”
-Randy Pausch
#Quotes
“It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal.”
-Douglas Adams
#Quotes
“For natural ability without training is blind: and training without natural ability is defective, and practice without both natural ability and training is imperfect.”
-Plutarch
#Quotes
This was nothing like Tokyo
“This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
-William Gibson (Mona Lisa Overdrive)
#Quotes
Kevin Kelly writes:
“Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.”
I couldn’t agree more.
The best single sentence (so far) from “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari :
”As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, the pigeon was the message.”
“Nobody will open a book and wish it contains more types of letters or be disappointed because it is, again, just another variation of the same alphabet.”
-Sönke Ahrens
#Quotes