Sometimes, I feel inspired to write something like this.
Then, in succession, I think the following three things:
- I’ve heard and read impactful many things.
- I subconsciously believe a post like this communicates something like “these are my most core beliefs,” and so I feel an obligation to gather the best of the best of all time.
- I realize this would require hours of reviewing the quotes I actually have written down (which are chaotically scattered across various notetaking apps) and then addressing the issue that there are many things that hit me deep but I just never wrote down (which includes most of them).
So consider the above to be my way of explaining that I’m just going to post some quotes I loved which I also felt like recording, for whatever reason, over the past month.
Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.
— Buddha
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I hope that if you ever do a project that challenges and embarrasses you—as any good project will—you are undeterred by people being snarky on the internet in this fashion.
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People are impressed by what they hear far more than by what they read. They must be talked to about Aga, by you.
— David Ogilvy, The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker
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… it’s possible to work too hard, and if you do that you’ll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type.
— Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
and being stupid will kill you
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It makes him feel a little lonely to realize how easy it is to be liked by someone who has no idea who he is.
— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love: A Novel
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Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance… and that happen to be useful. The resulting entities are the opposite of entropy: they are more ordered, less random, than their ingredients were before. And innovation is potentially infinite, because even if it runs out of new things to do, it can always find ways to do the same things more quickly or for less energy.
— Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works
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The professional has learned, however, that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachment of the professional, the cold-blooded character to his demeanor, is a compensating device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
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“If you really believe in what you’re doing, work hard, take nothing personally and if something blocks one route, find another. Never give up.
—Laurie Notaro