"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
- Søren Kierkegaard
"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength."
- Corrie ten Boom
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
- Carl Jung
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
- Alfred Adler
"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
- Sigmund Freud
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
- Ben Franklin
"Reality denied comes back to haunt."
- Philip K. Dick
"There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness."
- Franz Kafka
"Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status."
- Derek Sivers
"You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too."
- Denzel Washington
"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time."
- Charlie Munger
"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought...Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, it doesn’t matter. Some people recover and others don’t. There I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and that your duty was not to be immersed in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea."
- Charlie Munger
"The way to be safe is to never be secure."
- Ben Franklin
"I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
- Isaac Newton
"The belief in posthumous fame is a harmless vanity which often reconciles the artist to the disappointments and failure of his life."
- Somerset Maugham
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
- Winston Churchill
"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
- Chuck Palahniuk
"The plural of anecdote is data."
- George J. Stigler
"When you hit a wrong note, it's the next that makes it good or bad."
- Miles Davis
"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"A man is about as big as the things that make him angry."
- Winston Churchill
"What is to give light must endure burning."
- Viktor Frankl
"The man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest."
- Thoreau
"Reps, reps, reps. You might think you only do reps in the gym, but repetitions are the key to life. Whether you want to improve at speaking in public or reading books or just eating better, you will need to do reps. Whatever you work at, it becomes easier and less uncomfortable with every rep you do."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young."
- Henry Ford
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
- Mark Twain
"But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
- Ben Franklin
"To laugh often and much: To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."
- Kurt Vonnegut
"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."
- Gustave Flaubert
"To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion."
- Stephen Hawking
"No man was ever wise by chance."
- Seneca
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can't achieve it."
- The Wolf of Wall Street
"We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."
- Anonymous, inspired by JFK
"Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
- Albert Camus
"Sometimes being in a car, looking at the road, not having to make eye contact, is the ideal setting for heavy conversation."
- Francine Prose
"When you focus on you, you grow. When you focus on shit, shit grows."
- Dwayne Johnson
"It seems to me that what makes genius is the combination of natural gifts for creation with an idiosyncrasy that enables its possessor to see the world personally in the highest degree, and yet with such catholicity that his appeal is not to this type of man or to that type, but to all men."
- Somerset Maugham
"Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect."
- Margaret Mitchell
"In this short Life,
That only lasts an hour
How much – how little – is
Within our power"
- Emily Dickinson
"I guess I’ve been working so hard, I forgot what it’s like to be hardly working."
- Michael Scott
""Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." - Voltaire"
- Lars Peter Hansen
"Fear is the fuel that we use for overachievement. If I wasn’t afraid at times, I wouldn’t work as hard."
- Sylvester Stallone
"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck."
- Paul Virilio
"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation."
- C. S. Lewis
"Live for coincidences. They give you the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe we are moving towards some kind of destiny where it's all explained."
- Jonathan Ames
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."
- C. S. Lewis
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass...It's about learning to dance in the rain."
- Vivian Greene
"An exclamation point is like laughing at your own jokes."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
- Ernest Hemingway
"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."
- John Steinback
"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."
- Andy Bernard
"Never cross a river that is on average 4 feet deep."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something."
- Dmitri Shostakovich
"You don't know how fast time goes by until you get there."
- The Irishman
"Hide your strength, bide your time."
- Deng Xiaoping
"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."
- C. S. Lewis
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
- Lao Tzu
"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past all of us all the time. The key is that you must be paying attention to see them, you must be willing to take risks, you must expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure and you must believe in what you are doing so much that you do it anyway."
- Richard Garriott
"If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."
- Mark Twain
"Sometimes it seems that it might be better to go back to those simpler days, that one might get more out of a less complex life. But it cannot be done. One changes with prosperity. We all think we should like to lead the simple life, and then we find that we have picked up a thousand little habits which we are quite unconscious of because they are a part of our very being-and these habits are not in the simple life. There is no going back-except as a broken man."
- Harvey Firestone, Men and Rubber (1926)
"I have attempted things that were foreign to my nature and obstinately persevered in them because in my vanity I would not confess myself beaten."
- Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938)
"Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself."
- Sol LeWitt, in a letter to Eva Hesse
"What is a friend? I will tell you. It is a person with whom you dare to be yourself. Your soul can be naked with him. He seems to ask of you to put on nothing, only to be what you are. He does not want you to be better, or worse. When you are with him, you feel as a prisoner feels who has been declared innocent. You do not have to be on your guard. You can say what you think, so long as it is genuinely you. He understands those contradictions in your nature that lead others to misjudge you. With him you breathe freely. You can avow your little vanities and envies and hates and vicious sparks, your meannesses and absurdities and, in opening them up to him, they are lost, dissolved on the white ocean of his loyalty. He understands. You do not have to be careful. You can abuse him, neglect him, tolerate him. Best of all, you can keep still with him. It makes no matter. He likes you. He is like fire that purges to the bone. He understands. He understands. You can weep with him, sin with him, laugh with him, pray with him. Through it all—and underneath—he sees, knows and loves you."
- C. Raymond Beran
"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one's health and it were constantly one station ahead—I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it—but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion... if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right." "
- Soren Kierkegaard
Best opening lines:
- "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." - 1984, George Orwell
- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- "If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are." - The Nightinagle, Kristin Hannah
- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. - A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
- There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis