Quotes and bite-sized wisdom, spanning from thoughts about entrepreneurship, productivity, and traveling to life itself.
“What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”
—Bob Dylan“Profit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not there.”
—Lao Tzu“We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in.”
—Arianna Huffington“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson“I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.”
—Jonathan Swift“A good idea will keep you awake during the morning, but a great idea will keep you awake during the night.”
—Marilyn vos Savant“I have retired, but if there's anything that would kill me it is to wake up in the morning not knowing what to do.”
—Nelson Mandela“For the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
—Steve Jobs“Money is circulated. Time is spent.”
—Frank Chimero“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 Steinbeck“The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.”
—Paul Graham“The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.”
—Ellen Ullman“I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.”
—Benjamin Franklin“Many big people were chasing me. I didn't know what to do. So I thought I would surprise them and throw it.”
—Garo Yepremian“Focusing is about saying no.”
—Steve Jobs“Get the important things right.”
—N. P. Calderwood“Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
—Alan Kay“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
—Albert Einstein“It’s the stuff we do, not the stuff we have, that makes life worth living.”
—Francine Joy“Life is the space between our things.”
—Claude Debussy“Each step requires asking "What’s really important?" That’s the most important question you can ask yourself about anything. The class would really be about answering that very question at each step of the way. Whittling it all down until all that’s left is the point.”
—Jason Fried“By first limiting what you need to have in order to survive, you realize you actually don’t need much at all.”
—Nina Yau“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.”
—Jonathan Winters“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
—George Bernard Shaw“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.”
—Albert Einstein“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.”
—Charles Kettering“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
—Maria Robinson“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
—Dr. Seuss“You can waste your whole life trying to be everything to everybody. Pick your passion. And let them pick theirs.”
—Joshua Becker“You can do anything, but not everything.”
—David Allen“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
—Albert Einstein“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearc“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
—The Joker“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
—Martin Luther King“There is something magical about the early morning. It’s a time when the world belongs to only those few who are awake. And we walk around like kings while others remain unseen in their beds.”
—Shawn Blanc“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”
—Herm Albright“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, 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“Every second you separate from the cloud is another second to watch the sun rise over a misty morning. Every second you spend with the TV switched off is another second to play with your children, to cook with your husband/wife, or to spend creating something memorable. Every second you keep your phone in your pocket is another chance to smile at someone on the street, someone you may never have noticed otherwise.”
—Matt Madeiro“In the end though, no one else is going to do it for you — you need to stop thinking about changing the world, and do the nitty-gritty to get one step further.”
—Joel Gascoigne“I am a designer, not a fucking screwdriver.”
—Anonymous“Success is defined in units of fun. It’s all about being happy.”
—Jake Nickell“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth…not going all the way, and not starting.”
—Buddha“What you know doesn’t mean shit, it’s what you do consistently.”
—Tony Robbins“Each refresh takes us one refresh closer to death.”
—Gwen Bell“Act without expectation.”
—Lao Tzu“You are a victim of the rules you live by.”
—Nina Yau“Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.”
—Emerson“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.”
—Tom Hanks“Until you say ‘no’ to everything else, you cannot say ‘yes’ to something worth fully investing yourself in.”
—James Shelley“Nobody can teach you who you are. You must be the teacher and the student.”
—Nina Yau“If I’m not experience telling, I’m bullshitting.”
—Everett Bogue“Simply force yourself to step outside of your comfort zones.”
—Nike“Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.”
—Kevin Kelly“If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.”
—Henry Ford“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
—Steve Jobs“I remind: life is too short to waste my days in irritation and anger. Don’t let other people’s problems become my own.”
—Leo Babauta“They ask me what I'm writing for – I'm writing to show you what we're fighting for.”
—Talib Kweli“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”
—Albert Einstein“All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.”
—Walt Disney“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
—Thomas Edison“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
—Sun-Tzu“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
—Albert Einstein“Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.”
—Benjamin Franklin“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
—Albert Einstein“People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
—Apple Computers“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
—Michael Jordan“Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare.”
—Japanese Proverb“If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a chance of being a prophet.”
—Isaac B. Singer“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’”
—Sydney Harris“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
—Winston Churchill“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
—Abraham Lincoln“In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt“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. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
—Mark Twain“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.”
—Dr. Denis Waitley“Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.”
—Richard L. Evans“A mind is like a parachute, it doesn’t work if it isn’t open.”
—Frank Zappa“If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.”
—J.M. Power“Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it.”
—Dennis P. Kimbro“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”
—Napoleon Hill“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
—John F. Kennedy“Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
—Dale Carnegie“The elevator to success is out of order. You’ll have to use the stairs… one step at a time.”
—Joe Girard“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
—Bill Cosby“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
—Wayne Gretzky“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
—Pablo Picasso“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”
—Robert Brault“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
—Thomas Edison“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
—Confucius“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
—Winston Churchill“You make a living by what you earn; you make a life by what you give.”
—Winston Churchill“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
—Lao Tzu“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great makes you feel that you, too, can become great.”
—Mark Twain“My past is my past. That's where I came from, not where I'm going.”
—Joshua Fields Millburn“To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.”
—Derek Sivers“Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.”
—Tony Robbins“If you are not willing to risk the usual you will have to settle for the ordinary.”
—Jim Rohn“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
—Steve Jobs“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”
—Les Brown“Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners.”
—Robert T. Kiyosaki“Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is.”
—Anita Roddick“Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.”
—Mark Cuban“Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
—Albert Einstein“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
—Lewis Carroll“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.”
—Steve Jobs“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”
—Buddha“Success without happiness is failure.”
—Anthony Robbins“Are your dreams actually YOUR dreams, or are they the dreams you've been given by your culture?”
—Joshua Fields Millburn“The body is merely an extension of our mind. Where the mind goes, the body simply follows.”
—Nina Yau“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live somebody else's with perfection.”
—Bhagavad Gita“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”
—Chinese Proverb“Follow your heart, it's the best compass in the universe.”
—Ando Perez“As humans, our immediate reaction to someone’s new idea (or our own) often is to figure out why it won’t work. I know, sad but true. The problem is that when you get critical of something the moment the idea comes up, it gets stomped out immediately. It might not even make it more than a sentence or two before someone else yells out the reasons it ‘obviously’ won’t work. Then you feel stupid and move on. But if that idea were given say five or ten minutes of brainstorming whiteboard action, along with a solid dose of open, creative and non-critical discussion, it’s very possible that the idea would turn out to have some merit. Imagine how many brilliant ideas get killed too soon due to premature criticism.”
—Scott Dinsmore“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
—Thoreau“Love the life you live, live the life you love.”
—Nina Yau“When I was 5 years old, my mom told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down happy. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.”
—John Lennon“If there's something you need to get done, don't make it a drama. It's much more enjoyable without it.”
—Jonathan Mead“I am not born for one corner, the whole world is my native land.”
—Seneca“You can lose money and make it back, you can't do that with time.”
—Tim Ferriss“Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind.”
—Baz Luhrmann“I will either find a way, or make one.”
—Hannible, Carthaginian Leader & General“If failure isn't an option, then success isn't either. Success is just failure repeated until it works.”
—Seth Godin“Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.”
—37signals“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
—Rumi“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1000 things.”
—Steve Jobs“The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”
—Flora Whittemore“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear) and risk (for growth). Always choose growth.”
—Amber Rae“Listening is not simply hearing the words spoken. Listening is understanding why the words were spoken.”
—Simon Sinek“Only you live in your own skin and feel what you feel. Never let anyone tell you how to live and who you should be.”
—Nina Yau“Things do not change; we change.”
—Henry David Thoreau“Taking a step back and looking at the big picture can be a shock if you haven't done it in a while.”
—Colin Wright“If you don't feel stupid half the time, you probably aren't trying hard enough.”
—Colin Wright“Today's tragedies are tomorrow's comedies.”
—Colin Wright“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.“Not all those who wander are lost.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien“The one who follows the crowd will get no further than the crowd.”
—Albert Einstein“Sometimes a man has to hit both walls before he can find the middle.”
—Joshua Fields Milburn“People don’t know how to love the ones they love until they disappear from their lives.”
—Joshua Fields Milburn“Those who seem heartless now, once cared too much.”
—WZRD, Kid Cudi“If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.”
—Henri Nouwen“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
—Seth Godin“If you want milk, don't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in the hope that a cow will back up to you.”
—Richard Branson“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
—Mario Andretti“You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.”
—Jeffrey Pfeffer“A Good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
—Lao Tzu“When you brain tells you it’s impossible, tell your brain: That’s nice, I’m going to do it anyways.”
—Joel Runyon“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
—Will Smith“My grandmother once told me, 'Don’t let failure go to your heart and don’t let success go to your head.'”
—Will Smith“Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them.”
—Paramahansa Yogananda“Wake up early. Show up. Learn how to think. Be genuine, but appear nice. Use envy for motivation instead of destruction. Do what you say you’re going to do. Ensure balance in every area of your life. Confront repressed thoughts immediately. Surround yourself with people who are better than you (but remember the thing about envy). Work out every day. Be good at what you do. Make money doing what you love. Have good friends. Never settle. This is my personal recipe for happiness and success.”
—Dustin Curtis“The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.”
—Tim Ferriss“The essence of design… lies in the process of discovering a problem shared by many people and trying to solve it.”
—Kenya Hara“Apply what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”
—Bruce Lee“As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.”
—Buddha“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson“The easiest way to thrive as an outlier is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers. Surround yourself with people in at least as much of a hurry, at least as inquisitive, at least as focused as you are.”
—Seth Godin“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years.”
—Paul Graham“If you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain.”
—Paul Graham“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
—Gretchen Ruben“The 20-minute walk I take is better than the 3-mile run I never start. Having people over for take-out is better than never having people to an elegant dinner party.”
—Gretchen Ruben“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh“I have no understanding as to why you wouldn't try to make what you're passionate about work for you.”
—Gary Vaynerchuk“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
—Ayn Rand“I think a lot of people see simplicity as the lack of clutter. And that’s not the case at all. True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, ‘Yeah, well, of course.’ Where there’s no rational alternative.”
—Jony Ive“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.”
—Alan Keightley“You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.”
—Chris Guillebeau“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
—Thoreau“We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term.”
—Tim Hurson“We lived on farms, then we lived in cities and now we’re gonna live on the internet.”
—Sean Parker, The Social Network“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
—Benjamin Franklin“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
—Nietzsche“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
—G.K. Chesterton“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
—Winston Churchill“If you’re not a embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.”
—Reid Hoffman“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
—Wayne Gretzky“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh“All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.”
—Scott Alexander“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.”
—Margaret Thatcher“You only have to do a very few things right in your life, so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
—Warren Buffett“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”
—Charles Kettering“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone.”
—Lin Yutang“Startup life is like riding a broken bicycle: you fix it and ride it at the same time, the last thing you want is to stop.”
—@stevenc81“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
—Jim Rohn“Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I’ve always believed that if you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things turn out.”
—Randy Pausch“No matter how bad things are, you can always make them worse. At the same time, it is often within your power to make them better.”
—Randy Pausch“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“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
—John Muir“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
—Stephen R. Covey“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
—Steve Jobs“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
—Steve Jobs“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.”
—Tao Te Ching“The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is to cure it somehow, with design.”
—Massimo Vignelli“No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
—Steve Blank“If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.”
—Jeff Bezos“If you try to outlaw the future, it will just happen somewhere else.”
—Paul Graham“Most startups don’t fail at building a product. They fail at acquiring customers.”
—Gabriel Weinberg“If money is your only measurement of success, then your success will never be fully within your control.”
—Patrick Rhone“We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
—Hilaire Belloc“You don’t get to decide the truth. Other people have their own experiences, just as valid. This is easy to forget. Your slice of life seems so large and unmistakeable, like a mirage of wholeness from where you stand. But it is your job to know better and not confuse your small piece for the whole, even if you sometimes forget. Life is big—much bigger than just yours. This is the only note to self: other people are real. That’s all there is to learn.”
—Frank Chimero