Quotes

A compilation of favorite phrases

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” — Socrates

“Every big accomplishment is nothing more than a lot of little accomplishments added together.” — attributed to Brian Tracy

“We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” — Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)

“The reality of getting it done is more satisfying than the dream of getting it perfect.” — attributed to Mary Kay Ash

“Everything in nature gives in its death; stars die and whole solar systems begin to evolve from the impregnation of the exploded stellar matter. Trees die, and from their wood human beings build homes and furniture, statues and Stradivariuses. If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.” — William Irwin Thompson

“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” — Napoleon Hill

“The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.” — Brian Tracy

“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” — Dale Carnegie

“Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.” — Og Mandino

“A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” — Tony Robbins

“A mediocre person tells. A good person explains. A superior person demonstrates. A great person inspires others to see for themselves.” — Harvey Mackay

“Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience.” — Jack Vance

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” — Jim Rohn

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” — Zig Ziglar

“The number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying.” — Tom Hopkins

“You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.” — Seth Godin

“We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.” — Terence McKenna

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.” — Pablo Picasso

“Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Every truth you know is merely the idea that came along and replaced the first one.”

“Everything that I accepted as being true up to now I acquired from the senses or through the senses. However, I have occasionally found that they deceive me, and it is prudent never to trust those who have deceived us, even if only once.” — Descartes

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” — George Orwell

“Simple minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; great minds discuss ideas.” — often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though it predates her

“They must find it difficult… those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.” — The Walrus

“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power” --P.J. O’Rourke

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” --Robert A. Heinlein

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

“Never let a crisis go by. It’s a great opportunity.” — paraphrasing Rahm Emanuel (“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”)

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

“Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will, his personal responsibility.” — Albert Schweitzer

“To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all.” — Peter McWilliams

“Sometimes we think that to develop an open heart, to be truly loving and compassionate, means that we need to be passive, to allow others to abuse us, to smile and let anyone do what they want with us. Yet this is not what is meant by compassion. Quite the contrary. Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal.” — Sharon Salzberg

“Every person you will pass on the street today is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?” — Sam Harris

“I can tell you from experience, the effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is.” — Jim Carrey

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” — Albert Einstein

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be afraid of the dark.” — Sarah Williams (The Old Astronomer)

“What you share with the world is what it keeps of you.”

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin. “ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“What the world needs is those who have come alive.” — paraphrasing Howard Thurman

“Change before you have to.” — Jack Welch

“Be patient & tough; someday this pain will be useful.” — Ovid

“We are that which we repeatedly do. Therefore arete is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant, summarizing Aristotle

“A man unwilling to fight for what he wants deserves what he gets.”

“When you complain you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change it, or accept it. All else is madness.” — Eckhart Tolle

“The true power that you hold is your reaction to forces beyond your control.”

“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.” — a popular paraphrase attributed to the Buddha

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” — Eric Hoffer

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” — Archilochus

“Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance — now at this very moment — of all external events. That’s all you need.” — Marcus Aurelius

“Don’t cling to a mistake because you spent a lot of time making it.”

“Let us not confuse acceptance with passivity.” — Ryan Holiday

“Expect more from yourself, than you do of others” — Fortune Cookie

“They laugh at me because I’m different, I accept them because they’re all the same.” — Sienna

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the most of yourself?” — Epictetus

“There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.” — Mark Twain

“Accept the things I cannot change. Have the courage to change what I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr (the Serenity Prayer)

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” — Viktor Frankl

“Your currency is not the dollar or yen. It is your time, and if you can’t spend that wisely, you can’t spend anything at all. You have the same amount of time, as everyone else. Why not spend it on the best things you could be spending your time on.”

“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” — Alan Watts

“Be the thermostat. Not the thermometer.”

“Hard times call for furious dancing.”

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman

“Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling but start. Start and don’t stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just… start.” — Ijeoma Umebinyuo

“Your religion should be in your actions.”

“Be careful with getting good (skill-wise) at the wrong thing. Be cautious with getting good at something that you hate.”

“What the father does not possess, cannot be passed down to a child.”

“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.” — Jordan Peterson

“The only label you need is your name.” Sir Ian McKellen

“Only dead people never get stressed, never feel the disappointment that comes with failure, never have their hearts broken. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.” — Susan David (You don’t get to reach a meaningful life without stress and discomfort, therefore it doesn’t make sense to base your sense of wellness strictly upon those feelings. Rather, we can anticipate and engage with those feelings as part of the process.)

“If you’re not fucking up and making mistakes every once in a while then you’re not trying hard enough.”

“Creative evolution occurs at the growth edge of risk.”

“More often than not, a hero’s most epic battle is the one you never see; it’s the battle that goes on within him or herself.” — Kevin Smith

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you can’t be happy while washing dishes, you can’t be happy.” — Nora Ephron

“The notes are right under your fingers baby, you just need to take the time out to play the right notes, that’s life.” — Ray Charles

“There is no transfer of potential without practice.”

“Extreme people get extreme results.”

“You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.”

“Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.”

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” — Mark Twain

“The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. Hence, make sure that you have a rich life. Invest in your relationships. No one has ever died hoping that they had worked more. “ — Esther Perel

“Make it so that when people remember you, they smile.” — Esther Perel

“If you have a dream that has accompanied you throughout your entire life, go ahead and try it.”

“You have more willpower than a doughnut.”

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Have I not destroyed my enemy when I have made him into my friend?” — Abraham Lincoln

“Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.” -Tryon Edwards

“President means chief servant” — Gandhi.

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it.” — Jamis from Dune (2021 film)

“You must first learn patience if you wish to learn anything at all.” — Michael Crichton (Dragon Teeth)

“Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected.” — Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)

“Truth survives doubt.”

“Analysts who know the most about a situation, have the most to unlearn when the world changes.”

“Find your gift and deliver it to as many people as possible.”

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” — Nelson Mandela

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” — Jimmy Dean

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson

“Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility.” “You don’t need mentors, you need action.” — Naval Ravikant (others in response: “You don’t need to be highly skilled to get started, you need to get started to become highly skilled.”, “Doubt increases with inaction. Action is a magnet for mentors. Action brings momentum, momentum brings clarity.”)

“Allow yourself the fantasy that you’re 13.8 billion years old, and you are part of this incredible ocean of happening instead of just this one individual. Let yourself experience that for a second; the glorious knowledge that you are a never-ending, ever-changing flow of matter with an ability to express love. That’s a fun way to spend your time here before you end up getting eaten by a lion or have a heart attack or whatever happens. We’re like dolphins jumping out of the eternal, shooting up into time where we get a chance to do some back flips or a couple of chirps… that’s our life’s work, and then we plunge back into infinity until we get to do so again.” — Duncan Trussell

“It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given, and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.” — Often misattributed to Marcus Aurelius, Eric Greitens said this within the Intro of his translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

“Be curious, not judgmental.” — Often misattributed to Walt Whitman; popularized by Ted Lasso.

“He who has a why can bear almost any how.” — Nietzsche

“Vincent, where’s the shore? We’re too far out. We have to go back.” — Anton
“You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton. I never saved anything for the swim back.” — Vincent (Gattaca)

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!’” — William Hutchison Murray

“I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” — Horace Mann

“Love is that which enables choice.” — Forrest Landry (as interpreted by Liv Boeree: “A good/benevolent act is one that empowers the other to make the best choices for themselves.”)

“Dreams without goals are just dreams, and ultimately they fuel disappointment. On the road to achieving your dreams, you must apply discipline but more importantly, consistency. Without commitment you’ll never start, but without consistency, you’ll never finish.” — Denzel Washington

“I did something, that makes people present their best selves to me wherever I go.” — Jim Carrey

“You will never have more time to achieve your goals than you have right now.”

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” — Mark Twain

“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” — Jack Welch

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams

“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.” — Colin Powell

“You never change things by fighting the reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal. If opportunity does not knock, build the door.” — often attributed to Winston Churchill (the second line is usually credited to Milton Berle)

“Don't design goals alone. Build systems that achieve your goals for you.”

“To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Beware of your thoughts, they become your words.
Beware of your words, they become your actions.
Beware of your actions, they become your habits.
Beware of your habits, they become your character.
Beware of your character, it becomes your destiny.”

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.” — Charles Bukowski

“A single word can scar another. A single word can also give comfort and relief or stir one's spirit to courage. The care with which we use words reflects the depth of our humanity.” — Daisaku Ikeda

“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

“The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.” — Mark Caine

“I don't believe you have to be better than everybody else. I believe you have to be better than you ever thought you could be.” — Ken Venturi

“Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” — Thomas Jefferson

“You can't change what you don't notice and not noticing won't make it go away. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. To avoid pain, we rationalize, minimize, deny, and go numb. The antidote is the willingness to look at yourself with unsparing honesty, and to hold yourself accountable to the person you want to be.” — Tony Schwartz

“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.” — Theodore Roosevelt (Citizenship in a Republic)

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

“Be the change you want to see in this world.” — Gandhi

“In life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.” — Anthony Robbins

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Viktor E. Frankl

“A man's true delight is to do the things he was made for.” — Marcus Aurelius

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” — Lao Tzu

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What holds most people back isn't the quality of their ideas, but their lack of faith in themselves. You have to live your life as if you are already where you want to be.” — Russell Simmons

“The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning ‘heart.’ Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.” — Rollo May

“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” — Epictetus

“Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like no one is watching.” — Satchel Paige

“Of course motivation is not permanent. But then, neither is bathing; but it is something you should do on a regular basis.” — Zig Ziglar

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl

“I studied the lives of great men and women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.” — Harry S. Truman

“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.” — Vince Lombardi

“We are what we frequently do.” — Aristotle

“Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm. It moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.” — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” — Henry David Thoreau

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” — Seneca

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.” — Bruce Lee

“Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.” — Bruce Lee

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” — Oscar Wilde

“When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that man has to say.
For it isn't your father, or mother, or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.
He's the fellow to please – never mind all the rest
For he's with you, clear to the end
And you've passed your most difficult, dangerous test
If the man in the glass is your friend.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you've cheated the man in the glass.” — Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr. (The Man in the Glass)

“‘You,’ he said, ‘are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.’” — E. Autumn

“People may forget what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel.” — often attributed to Maya Angelou

“Is about finding strength in others, and setting it aflame.”

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; it will be lost. The world will be lacking. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep your channel open clearly & directly.” — Martha Graham

“Someone once told me the definition of hell, the last day you have on earth, the person you became... meets the person you could have been.”

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” — Hunter S. Thompson

“Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson (Civilization)

“We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because that challenge is one we're willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. Because that goal will serve to measure the best of our energies and skills.” — paraphrasing John F. Kennedy (Rice University, 1962)

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)

“Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet; sapere aude, incipe.” (“He who has begun is half done; dare to know, dare to begin!”) — Horace (Epistles)

“You get what you measure.
You get what you celebrate.”

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” — a modern variation of the full passage from Henry David Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”

“No one is immune to peer pressure, so pick good peers.”