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