Quotes

"A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and the constant restlessness that comes with it."
Albert Einstein (scientist)
"However vast the darkness, we must provide our own light."
Stanley Kubrick (film maker)
"Integrity depends on being consistent in your principles. Progress depends on being flexible in your policies."
Adam Grant (author)
"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Voltair - Francois-Marie Arouet (author, philosopher)
"It is not the stongest of the species that survive, nor the most itelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Charles Darwin (scientist)
"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious."
Stephen Hawking (scientist)
"Hard times create strong people; Strong people create easy times; Easy times create weak people; Weak people create hard times."
G. Michael Hopf (author)
"See everything; Overlook a great deal; Correct a little"
Pope John
"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
G. Bernard Shaw (playwrite)
"You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity gets found, it emerges."
Reid Hoffman (technology entrepreneur)
"The genius of life is to carry the spirit of childhood into old age."
Aldous Huxley (author)
"I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."
Roger Ebert (film critic)
"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done - then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."
Frances Hodgson Burnett (author The Secret Garden)
"Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes."
Steve Jobes (Apple CEO/Founder)
"Music was transcendent in my life. It took me to another level, to another place - images, fantasies, stories, people, colors - everything came to mind. It was like cinema. It made me live another way; it made me think another way."
Martin Scorsese (movie director)
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"
Hunter S. Thompson (author)
"The Internet is not just a series of pipes. It's core architecture embeds an assumption about human nature. The Internet is designed to empower individuals not control them. It assumes that the if individuals are empowered, they will do the right thing the vast majority of the time."
Brad Burnham (VC, blogger)
"Grandparents are very important because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information."
Kevin Kelly (futurist/author, Whole Earth, The WELL)
"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."
Steve Jobs (Apple CEO/Founder)
"To me, being rich means covering the basic necessities, and then having a challenging career, fun and fulfilling leisure time, and the love of family and friends."
Andy Kessler (author, hedge-fund manager)
"We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails."
Dolly Parton (musician)
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (swiss designer)
"You have to be able to ignore the present in order to understand the future and the past."
Alan Kay (computer scientist)
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
Buckminster Fuller (engineer, inventor, designer, author)
"Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn't yet dramatically transformed, it will."
Chris Dixon (technology entrepreneur)
"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done - then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."
Frances Hodgson Burnett (author The Secret Garden)
Practical principles for surviving and prospering in the decades ahead: "self-reliance, resilience, reciprocity, and transparent opt-in organizations with clear lines of accountability"
Charles Hugh Smith (journalist)
"Our obsession with instant gratification and self-glorification has led to a culture of what I call permanent adolescence. Politicians who promise a pain-free continuation of the status quo are rewarded by re-election, and those who speak of sacrifice are punished. An unhealthy dependence on the State to organize and fund everything manifests in a peculiar split-personality disorder: people want their entitlement check and their corporate welfare, yet they rail against the State's increasing power."
Charles Hugh Smith (journalist)
"Freedom without responsibility and accountability is not really freedom; it's simply an extended childhood."
Charles Hugh Smith (journalist)
"Reliance on propaganda has become so pervasive that the notions of truth and honesty have been hollowed out. Nobody expects the President or Ben Bernanke to speak honestly, as the truth would shatter an increasingly fragile status quo. But this reliance on artifice, half-truths and propaganda has a cost; people are losing faith in government , in all levels of authority, and in the Mainstream Media - and for good reason."
Charles Hugh Smith (journalist)
"The only failure is not trying."
Elbert Hubbard (writer, philosopher)
"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity."
Irving Kristol (journalist)
"Good design uses the process of elimination. Delight in an experience that is simple and clear"
Yves Behar (designer)
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Thomas Jefferson (US president)
"I personally think you should be too high to operate a device at a concert"
Chris Robinson (musician, The Black Crowes)
"Three guidelines for contentment: follow reason in knowing what to do and not do; restrain passion from overcoming reason; and resist desiring things that lie beyond your reach"
Descartes (philosopher)
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens (author, humorist)
"The biggest weapon your brain or your parents can give you is curiosity."
Tom Peters (business author)
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Albert Einstein (scientist)
"May the Declaration of Independence be to the world what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition has persuaded them to blind themselves."
Thomas Jefferson
"Reality is telling us very clearly to prepare for a new way of life in the USA. We're in desperate need of decomplexifying, re-localizing, downscaling, and re-humanizing American life."
James Howard Kunstler (author)
"Waste not, want not. Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without."
L. Reid (classic Depression-era saying)
"Alone is an unfortunate predicament. Lone is an aesthetic choice."
Batmanuel (The Tick, TV show)
"An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream the dreams and is foolish enough to try to make those dreams come true."
Vinod Khosla (founding Sun Micro CEO, now VC)
"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 (Apple CEO/Founder)
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."
Albert Einstein (scientist)
"The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven."
John Milton (poet)
"The marvelously constructed and beautiful living forms we see around us are not the miraculous arbitrary productions of a supernatural creator, but instead have developed gradually over eons of time by means of a purposeless blind process of random genetic variation followed by differential reproductive success."
Dr. Jerry N. Stinner (scientist)   [writing about Charles Darwin]
"Economic growth will depend on innovative entrepreneurs, not incumbent corporations. At the most fundamental level we need a restructuring of capitalism. We need to get rid of the 'incumbency capitalism' that entrenches participants in a market while stifling innovation by raising the barriers to entry for innovative ideas."
Vindo Khosla (newsweek author)
"This is what Life is all about: sharing our stories, [making] mistakes, learning from each other, and helping each other to get better."
Maureen McCormick (actor)
"At 15, you are just an egg out of its shell walking around, trying desperately not to get maimed emotionally."
Diane Lane (actress)
"The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself'."
Robert Pirsig (author, Zen and The Art of Motorcyce Maintenance)
"Our means of processing information and finding rational solutions are badly corrupted by television."
Al Gore (eco-evangelist)
"We have to stop treating the earth as a wholly-owned subsidiary of our economy."
Gary Hirshberg (CEO Stonyfield Farm)
"Make things just as simple as they need to be, but not simpler."
Albert Einstien (scientist)
"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
Margaret Thatcher (government leader)
"Ultimately, our strongest competitive advantage is the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the Amercian people."
Michael S. Malone (WSJ Editorial Writer)
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
Albert Einstein (scientist)
"Being a true American patriot means being willing to risk one's neck to challenge the prevailing powers of government to do the right thing. It should not be confused, as it so often is, with jingoism, which is a blind, flag-waving nationalism that refuses to acknowledge any failings whatsoever of our society."
James McBride (WSJ Editorial Writer)
"If we want to fight global warming, we are going to have to innovate ourselves out of this dilemma."
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (authors, futurists)
"Only the paranoid survive"
Andrew Grove (Intel CEO)
"In this great experiment that is American democracy, "secular" is the only word we have to describe the idea, handed down by the Founders, that our leaders do not belong to God, they belong to us."
Lisa Miller (author, Newsweek)
"If you make decisions based on society's opinion, you are going to make boring choices."
Jake Gyllenhaal (actor)
"Music is the soul of the future"
Fela (musician)
"I think music is supposed to make you high, to give you an experience so that you can transport yourself from wherever you are and that whole physical contact with the world so that you can gain a little more consciousness - inner consciousness."
Herbie Hancock (musician)
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor saftey."
Benjamin Franklin (polymath & "First American")
"simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
Leonardo Da Vinci (genius)
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Brainy Quotes