My Favourite Quotes
"It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?" - R. Buckminster Fuller
"As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come ? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week's meals become "now." If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world." - The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts.
Everything that is wonderful about life doesn’t cost a penny, and the rest is way cheaper than you think it is. - Benny Lewis
"If you want the rainbow you have to put up with the rain" - Dolly Parton
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). - Vladimir Nabokov
You are today where the thoughts of yesterday have brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you. - Blaise Pascal
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people that come alive" - Howard Thurman
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ~Leonardo DaVinci
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. ~E.F. Schumacher
"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions, all life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. - Anne Frank
The cave you most fear to enter contains the greatest treasure — Joseph Campbell
Put yourself in a state of mind where you say to yourself, 'Here is an opportunity for me to celebrate like never before, my own power, my own ability to get myself to do whatever is necessary' -Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment"- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Work is more fun than fun" - Noel Coward
"It's easy to recognize a genius: mediocre people will form coalition against him/her" (J.Swift)
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. ~ Albert Einstein
"Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor." - NASA
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” - Peter Drucker
“You tend to get told that the world is the way it is, but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact; and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” - Steve Jobs
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience." ~ Henry Miller
Life is not the way it's supposed to be. It's the way you cope with it is what makes the difference. Virginia Satir
"Lose time and it's gone forever" - Peter Bregman
"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it." - Christopher Hitchens.
“We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.” -- Margaret Mead
"How forcible are right words!" - Job 6:25
"Imagination is everything - it is the preview of life's coming attractions" - Albert Einstein
"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor" - Stephen King
“he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.” - Emerson
"We say we waste time, but that is impossible. We waste ourselves." - Alice Bloch
Thomas Mann: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”2
"Time is a created thing.
To say, 'I don't have time'
is to say, 'I don't want to.'"
~ Lao Tzu
"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation." - Andre Gide
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it doesn't go away"- Philip K Dick
"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable" - Dwight D Eisenhower"The best evidence of a mind is when you change it" - Roger Scruton
“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”—André Gide
"There is at bottom only one problem in the world and this is its name: HOW DOES ONE BREAK
THROUGH? How does one get into the open? How does one
burst the cocoon and become a butterfly?" - Thomas Mann
"Words are of course the most powerful drugs used by mankind" - Rudyard Kipling
"A ship is safe when it is docked in the harbor. But that's not what ships are for."
Most good thinking has its origin in fear. - Alain De Botton
"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." - Joseph Campbell
"The will to be oneself is heroism" - Jose Ortega y Gasset
The capitalist system of coordination by trade seems to be largely populated by indigestible lumps of socialism called corporations - Kevin Carson
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. - Robert Louis Stevenson
Here is Edward Bear, coming down the stairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. - A. A. Milne
In a knowledge economy there no such thing as conscripts, there are only volunteers. The trouble is we have trained our managers to manage conscripts. - Peter Drucker
Easier to build a tool for the community than a community for the tool - Twitter
"We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing" George Bernard Shaw
"How can I tell what I think till I see what I say" - E.M. Forster
"going in the wrong direction but making really good time" - Cheri Huber
"A dishonest yes is a no to yourself." - Byron Katie
"Don't be careful, you might hurt yourself." - Byron Katie
"Don't just do something, stand there."
"Those who do not move do not notice their chains." Rosa Luxemburg
"Only the disciplined are free." - James C. Penney
".... most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window,
one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth." - Rainer Maria Rilke
"What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask" -
Sam Keen
"The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon tomorrow and wastes
today" - Seneca
"A sage steers by the bright light of confusion and doubt." - Chuang Tzu
"We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing" - George
Bernard Shaw
"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck
with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be" - William Hazlitt
"The constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do in the future,
is the single largest consumer of time and energy." - Kerry Gleeson
"it's much easier to tame a wild idea than invigorate one that has no life in the first
place." - Alex Osborn
"The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development." - Alfred
North Whitehead
"Whether one is Catholic, or a Muslim, or Hindu, or a Communist, the propaganda of a
hundred, two hundred, or five thousand years is part of [the] verbal structure of images
which goes to make up our consciousness. We are conditioned by what we eat, by the
economic pressures, by the culture and society in which we live. We are that culture, we
are that society. Merely to revolt against it is to revolt against ourselves. If you rebel
against yourself, not knowing what you are, your rebellion is utterly wasted. But to be
aware, without condemnation, of what you are—such awareness brings about action which is
entirely different from the action of a reformer or a revolutionary" — J. Krishnamurti
"All truly destructive people wake in the morning feeling they are right" - Simon Parke
So don't try to change the world. Start instead to observe yourself. It will be a better
use of your time. Those who are asleep can change things but will improve nothing. The
world is not the problem. As we shall discover later, the word is quite perfect. It is the
reformers who are the problem, the activists who want to make external things better. They
are not at home with themselves - but insist on trying to lead others home. This is why
things stay the same. Solutions imposed from outside are not solutions. The bring change -
but not transformation. For you cannot promote transformation beyond the degree of
internal transformation in yourself. - Simon Parke
Going to start drinking cuz it's too dark to read. - Gordon Rae
See, even if you're stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you're stuck,
then you will immediately recognise that you can't go on that way anymore. So, just saying
precisely, writing precisely how you're stuck, or how you're alienated, opens up a door of
freedom for you.- David Whyte
It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't
like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an
individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix. - Vint Cerf
Globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations. - Cluetrain
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes -
John LeCarré'
'Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within
yourself that you have built against it.' - Rumi
"The question for writing then is this: how long are you willing to be unheard?" - Peter
Elbow
You can't wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club - Jack London
Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die - Carrie Fisher
A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It
is only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and
hesitate. - Stephen Pressfield
Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of
quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a
protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies). - Matthew Stuart
“Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.”
- Gustave Flaubert3
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we
need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Charles Kingsley
Nothing is so fatiguing than the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task - William James
"it's amazing that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
"Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly, yet he
does not know what to do with the time he gains except to kill it." - Erich Frommone
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we
need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." - Charles Kingsley
"If atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby..."
"When You Are Right, No Need To Be Angry; When You Are Wrong, You Have No Right To Be
Angry" Mahatma Gandhi
"Why should my happiness depend on the thoughts going on in someone else's head?" - Ralph
Waldo Emerson
