assorted collection of favorite quotes
“doomed youth is romantic. doomed middle age really isn’t.”
“turns out, when you walk through life constantly wondering whether something would make for a good story, you’ll end up finding good stories.”
“what i had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
“learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
“talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.”
“you’re not just self-important, you’re actually important.”
“your twenties are always an apprenticeship, but you don’t always know what for.”
“the man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
“life is no way to treat an animal.”
“there is no safe investment. to love at all is to be vulnerable. love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. if you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. but in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, air-less—it will change. it will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. the alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. the only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.”
“nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.”
“the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”
“i’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“you can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
“life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”
“there is no such thing as a new idea. it is impossible. we simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. we give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. we keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”
“life was simple before world war ii. after that, we had systems.”
“no amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
“we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
“intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
“all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
“the real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
“avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.”
“how we spend our time is the best test of intelligence.”
“the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
“it’s difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it’s impossible to find it anywhere else.”
“the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
“the days are long but the decades are short.”
”civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
“get the important things right.”
“your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works… we’re all biased to our own personal history.”
“an expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”
“success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.”
“‘the cat sat on a mat’ is not a story. ‘the cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is a story.”
“we don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”
“creativity is not a talent. it is a way of operating.”
“a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. the inverse proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”
“short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”
“any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”
“the late richard feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, ‘gee, i could have thought of that.'”
“don’t forget that linux became only possible because 20 years of os research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.”
“pick up a camera. shoot something. no matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. put your name on it as director. now you’re a director. everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.”