Category: Quotes

The future is only an illusion…

The future is only an illusion inferred from our present state. What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is most important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does. Only then does your life become fulfilled. And do not ask yourself questions about time. Jesus did not explain a thing about the eternity of life, but his influence brought people to the eternal. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

…from Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom [Kindle].

Here’s more Emerson.

December quotes: “We often confuse a clear view of the future with a short distance” – Paul Saffo

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form. – Nabokov

I read Nabokov’s Lolita but his writing felt powerful but foreign, like tasting spicy Balinese food for the first time (I actually don’t know if that is a thing). Need to re-read.

God gives a choice to every soul between truth and peace. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mastery, in various forms, has defined civilization and gauged human achievement. To name, to number, to time, to represent–symbolic culture is that array of masteries upon which all subsequent hierarchies and confinements rest. – John Zerzan

An elegant, concise way to define humanity in its highest form.

Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. – Henry David Thoreau

Reminds me of Nietzsche’s quote: “Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.”

Follow the best way of life you possibly can, and habit will make this way suitable and pleasant for you. – Leo Tolstoy

Yes, the power of habit!

I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me. – Napoleon at the opening of his Russian campaign

I am reminded of the theme and messages in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.

A donkey was placed between a pail and a bale of hay and starved to death – Derek Sivers

Therefore I say, the Perfect Man has no self; the Holy Man has no merit; the Sage has no fame. – Zhuang Zi

Remember that you are more free if you change your opinion and follow those who have corrected your mistakes, than if you are stubborn about your mistakes. – Marcus Aurelius

I am re-reading Aurelius’s Meditations. Wise and concise. I particularly enjoy the section where Aurelius describes what he has learned from the people closest to him, from his father to Maximus (I believe this is THE Maximus from Gladiator) to Roman senators to his wife.

The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day. – Steven Pressfield

I am also reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. It’s an inspiring book for artists, musicians, writers, creators (really, though, every job can be a creative one).

I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance – Rockefeller

To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right. – Heraclitus

Reminds me of Shakespeare: “nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so.”

We often confuse a clear view of the future with a short distance. – Paul Saffo

I try not to forget this, especially in the context of technology startups and Silicon Valley.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour. — William Blake

Every thought a person dwells upon, whether he expresses it or not, either damages or improves his life. – Lucy Malory

An innovation is anything that breaks a constraint – Michael Raynor

A clear, concise definition of innovation, heard on the a16z podcast.

Without truth there is no kindness; without kindness the truth cannot be told. – Leo Tolstoy

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. – Albert Einstein

I believe in something like this, too.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man. – Mark Twain

You can always count on Twain for a piercing platitude. Even if he didn’t say it, which is probably true for most quotes…

Put that coffee down…coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. – Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross

I highly recommend Alec’s podcast, Here’s The Thing.

Thanks for reading! Here’s a growing collection of my favorite quotes.

October quotes: “In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” – Hindu saying

Alright Jack Donaghy, follow your heart: Hard Equations and Rational Thinking – Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock

No rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete – Cal Newport

“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

If you would like to know how to recognize a prophet, look to him who gives you the knowledge of your own heart. – Persian saying

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you. — Hindu saying that Steve Jobs was fond of (as read in Appletopia)

Old pond…
A frog leaps in
Water’s sound
-Matsuo Basho

Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
—John Donne

I’m like my mother: I stereotype, it’s faster. — George Clooney, Up in the Air

Knowledge is limitless. Therefore, there is a minuscule difference between those who know a lot and those who know very little. — Leo Tolstoy

It is time to leave our comfortable rooms, every corner of which we know, and venture forth into eternity — Rilke

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. — Why the lucky stiff

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ― Rainer Maria Rilke.

Make the body capable of doing many things. This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God. – Spinoza, paraphrased by Huxley in The Island

As Balzac says, there goes another novel — Woody Allen in Annie Hall

…to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. — Victor Frankl

We have one party with two wings which represents 4% of the population — Gore Vidal

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. — Vladimir Nabokov

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. — George Orwell

Here is an ongoing collection of my favorite quotes.

Success requires no apologies, the tech founders edition

It ought to be admitted that some performances are considered so essentially noble as to justify the sacrifice of everything else on their behalf. The man who loses his life in the defence of his country is not blamed if thereby his wife and children are left penniless. The man who is engaged in experiments with a view to some great scientific discovery or invention is not blamed afterwards for the poverty that he has made his family endure, provided that his efforts are crowned with ultimate success. If, however, he never succeeds in making the discovery or the invention that he was attempting, public opinion condemns him as a crank, which seems unfair, since no one in such an enterprise can be sure of success in advance. – Bertrand Russell

From The Conquest of Happiness.

Random Quotes! “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” — Rilke

Here are 12 quotes I recently came upon that moved me in some way.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. — Thucydides

Cynical and perhaps less true today?

There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them. — Jonathan Swift

Would make a great short story

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. — Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke is high up my list of “dead people I want to meet”

We don’t know one percent of one millionth about anything — Thomas Edison

Whether physics or philosophy, in discovery we simply reveal more mystery…

When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. — Meng Tzu

Reminds me again of Rilke — “this is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings”

In a work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not even a work of genius, just good work…

Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power. — Eric Hoffer, from Mass Movements

The book Mass Movements is at times hard to penetrate, but every few pages I have a completely mind-blasted moment

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye — Antoine de St. Exupery

Yes, yes! and meditation helps…

Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. — Henry David Thoreau, Walden (used by Bertrand Russell)

I partly agree

The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind…That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right. — Neil Gaiman

Reminds me of Chris Rock who said “if people in your life aren’t uncomfortable then you aren’t really writing”

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. — Camus

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves. — Bertrand Russell

Reminds me of Anais Nin’s “we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are…”