Quotes

“So, at the age of 33 and with an h index of 1 (latest papers not yet published), I entered the Western job market for postdocs.”

• Andre Geim, a co-discoverer of graphene

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

• Aristotle

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

• Steve Jobs

“People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”

• Alan Kay

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

• Max Planck

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934)

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

• Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

“We underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year. That’s the key: consistency. People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.”

• Paul Graham

“Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.”

• Paul Graham

“Your Enemy is the back button.”

• Paul Graham

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

• Leonardo da Vinci

“The people that are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

• Steve Jobs

“Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur.”

• Ron Conway

“The Internet is like the nervous system of the body, every cell in the body system knows what the rest of the cells are doing.”

• Elon Musk

“In technology, the tradition things have been built was based on how things were at that time. Always think of re-inveting the wheel. Also, obsolete obsession is hard to beat with its quality of work.”

• Jack Carmack

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

• Mahatma Gandhi

“If you ask people what they want, they would say a faster horse.”

• Henry Ford

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

• Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

“If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”

• Thomas Aquinas

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

• Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1962)

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

• Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1962)

“If there is a 90 percent chance of failure on a transformative project, then we have a 10 percent chance of transforming the world.”

• Vinod Khosla

“I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action.”

• Theodore Roosevelt, The Man In The Arena: Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt

“Future is not knowable, but inventable.”

• Vinod Khosla

“It’s not a religion if it works.”

• Unknown

“Seven hundred million (or so) people have the rich lifestyle, either in environment, energy, housing, healthcare, education, food, that seven billion people on this planet want.”

• Vinod Khosla

“We are all taught to ‘be yourself.’ What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”

• Jeff Bezos

“80-90% of engineers and scientists who ever lived live today.”

• Marc Andreessen

“You’re going to live for 30,000 days.”

• Drew Houston

“We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

• Steve Jobs

“Micro pessimist macro optimist.”

• Patrick Collison

“Computer is a bicycle for the mind.”

• Steve Jobs

“What can be imagined technologically can be invented”

• Unknown

“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”

• Donald Knuth

“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”

• Elon Musk

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

• Gall Law

“Output of any company is the vector sum of people within it.”

• Elon Musk

“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”

• John Collison

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

• Alan Turing, 1950

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

• Walt Disney

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

• Carl Sagan

“Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.”

• Thomas Edison

“You think of 25 years of features in your first 6 months of a software project.”

• Unknown

“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence. If you want to create, you have to get rid of all conditionings; otherwise your creativity will be nothing but copying, it will be just a carbon copy. You can be creative only if you are an individual, you cannot create as part of the mob psychology. The mob psychology is uncreative; it lives a dragging life, it knows no dance, no song, no joy; it is just mechanical.”

• Osho

“Maximum impact with minimum innovation.”

• Ilya Sutskever

“It’s important to work on problems that if you didn’t work on, nobody would be doing.”

• Peter Thiel

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

• Shunryu Suzuki

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

• Robert Frost

“The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.”

• Galileo

“Business is like a war without bullets.”

• Phil Knight

“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”

• Coco Chanel

“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

• Robert Oppenheimer

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

• Jim Carrey

“No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.”

• Leon Battista Alberti

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”

• Rene Descartes

“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”

• Miyamoto Musashi

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”

• Abraham Lincoln

“Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

• Steve Martin

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

• Arthur C. Clarke

“Focusing is about saying no.”

• Steve Job

“If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas.”

• Linus Pauling

“The thing you do obsessively between age 13 and 18, that’s the thing you have the most chance of being world-class at.”

• Bill Gates

“People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past.”

• Clayton M. Christensen

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

• Ira Glass

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

• Stephen Hawking

“In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.”

• José Raúl Capablanca

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”

• Muhammad Ali

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

• Bill Joy

“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

• Lao Tzu

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

• Alan Turing

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

• Robert F. Kennedy

“Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.”

• Eddie Rickenbacker

“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

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”

• Myke Tyson

“People think of education as something they can finish.”

• Isaac Asimov

“I must search. Even if the endless powdering of stars in the Galaxy makes the quest seem hopeless, and even if I must do it alone.”

• Isaac Asimov

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.”

• Bob Marley

“I think, therefore I am.”

• René Descartes

“However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

• Stephen Hawking

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”

• Phil Karlton

“If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but…life finds a way.”

• Jurassic Park

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Running a start-up is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends.”

• Elon Musk’s friend

“With enough persistence, most things that seem impossible become possible.”

• Vinod Khosla

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

• Rumi

“This too shall pass.”

• Unknown

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

• Nelson Mandela

“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one”

• Bruce Lee

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”

• Mahatma Gandhi

“The future is open. It is not predetermined and thus cannot be predicted – except by accident. The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say ‘It is our duty to remain optimists”, this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil, but, rather, to fight for a better world.”

• Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework

“One does not criticize mountains - one climbs them or stays at home. Nietzsche was probably the first to understand what conventional moralism is: the criticism of mountains by non-climbers.”

• Peter Sloterdijk

“Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession. Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it.”

• James Clerk Maxwell

“Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.”

• Kurt Gödel (1906 - 1978)

“Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage.”

• Nicolas Boileau

“Plus de peur que de mal.”

“Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.”

• Antonio Machado, Spanish

“Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.”

• Dante Alighieri, Italian

“知之者不如好之者，好之者不如乐之者。”

• Confucius, Chinese

“When Feynman faces a problem, he’s unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks… He was so unstuck — if something didn’t work, he’d look at it another way.”

• Marvin Minsky, MIT

“The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to… No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”

• Richard Feynman

“There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science [pseudoscience]… It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards.”

• Richard Feynman

“The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.”

• Richard Feynman

“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird… I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer.”

“I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad.”

• Richard Feynman

“Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.”

• James Gleick

“In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.”

• The Art of Science and Engineering by Richard W Hamming

“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

• Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

• Einstein

“Change is the only constant”

• Greek philosopher Heraclitus

“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”

• Sherlock Holmes

“I need physics more than friends.”

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

“We offer no explanation as to why these architectures seem to work; we attribute their success, as all else, to divine benevolence”

• Noam Shazeer

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

• Abraham Maslow 1966

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.”

• Soren Kierkegaard

“But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is . . . Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.”

• CS Lewis

“How terrifying would it be if that was true? Is it possible that Thompson was burdened by responsibilities his entire life, and then in a brief moment of freedom did some of the most important work anyone has ever done?”

• Ken Thompson wrote the UNIX operating system in a week when his wife went on vacation

“A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms.”

• Zen Shin

“The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

• Einstein

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

• A. N. Whitehead

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

• Werner Heisenberg

“Code never lies, comments sometimes do.”

• Ron Jeffries

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

• Neil Armstrong

“As creatives, our job is to uncover what lies in the darkness and give it new life and new identity.”

• Lucy H. Pierce

“You’ve got to live right, too. It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together … The real cycle you’re working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.”

• Robert M. Pirsig

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

• Howard Aiken

“The future is already here, it’s just not equally distributed”

• William Gibson

“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!”

• George Gamow (1904-1968)

“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”

• Cora L. V. Hatch, 1859

“Do not speak negatively about yourself, even as a joke. Your body does not know the difference. Words are energy and they cast spells, that’s why it is called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself, and you can change your life.”

• Bruce Lee

“We are always ready to take a long journey across the seas for the purpose of seeing things to which, when they are before our very eyes, we pay no attention.”

• Pliny the Younger, Letters, 8.20

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

• George Bernard Shaw

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.”

• Nikola Tesla, 1896

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

• Marshall McLuhan

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

• Yogi Berra

“You know, things are going to be really different! … No, no, I mean really different!”

• Mark Miller

“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.”

• Winston Churchill

“Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening.”

• Carl Sagan

“ ‘The future can’t be predicted’, is a common refrain … But … when [this perspective] is wrong, it is profoundly wrong.”

• John Smart

“The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.”

• Rainer Maria Rilke

“One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.”

• Michael Anissimov

“ “Playing God” is actually the highest expression of human nature. The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to “play God, the world as we know it wouldn’t exist today. A few million humans would live in savannahs and forests, eking out a hunter-gatherer existence, without writing or history or mathematics or an appreciation of the intricacies of their own universe and their own inner workings.”

• Ramez Naam

It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.”

• Richard Feynman

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never- in nothing, great or small, large or petty never give in.”

• Winston Churchill

“Immortality first! Everything else can wait.”

• Corwyn Prater

“Involuntary death is a cornerstone of biological evolution, but that fact does not make it a good thing.”

• Michael Anissimov

“Evolution, the process that produced humanity, possesses only one goal: create gene machines maximally capable of producing copies of themselves. In retrospect, this is the only way complex structures such as life could possibly arise in an unintelligent universe. But this goal often comes into conflict with human interests, causing death, suffering, and short life spans. The Past progress of humanity has been a history of shattering evolutionary constraints.”

• Michael Anissimov

“The only things you can be sure of, so the saying goes, are death and taxes but don’t be too sure about death.”

• Joseph Strout, NeuroScientist

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

• Dylan Thomas

“If you could blow the brain up to the size of a milland walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.”

• G. W. LEIBNIZ

“At one’s first and simplest attempts to philosophize, one becomes entangled in questions of whether when one knows something, one knows that one knows it, and what, when one is thinking of oneself, is being thought about, and what is doing the thinking. After one has been puzzled and bruised by this problem for a long time, one learns not to press these questions: the concept of a conscious being is, implicitly, realized to be different from that of an unconscious object. In saying that a conscious being knows something, we are saying not only that he knows it, but that he knows that he knows it, and that he knows that he knows that he knows it, and so on, as long as we care to pose the question: there is, we recognize, an infinity here, but it is not an infinite regress in the bad sense, for it is the questions that peter out, as being pointless, rather than the answers.”

• J. R. LUCAS, OXFORD PHILOSOPHER, IN HIS 1961 ESSAY “MINDS, MACHINES, AND GÖDEL”9

“Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life?”

• HaveLock Ellis

“We won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.”

• The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

• Leo Tolstoy

“We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”

• Vernor Vinge

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

• Francis Bacon

“Imagine if some alien organism landed on Earth and could do these things. Everybody would be falling over themselves to figure out how… And so really the thing that is calling out in all this work for us to go and answer is, “What in the wide world is going on inside these systems [neural networks]??”

• Chris Olah

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

• Franz Kafka

“Code is there to explain the comments to the computer.”

• Andy Harris

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

• A. Einstein (1879-1955)

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

• Sigmund

“Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”

• Maya Angelou

“The most important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

• Albert Einstein.

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.”

• Leo Tolstoy

“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.”

• Neil Armstrong

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

• Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena, April 23, 1910

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.”

• Jimi Hendrix

“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”

• Coco Channel

“We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do many things, but in my opinion the real thing its doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.”

• Steve Jobs on the Apple II launch

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

• G.K. Chesterton

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

• Steven King, On Writing

“Being wrong might hurt you a bit, but being slow will kill you.”

• Jeff Bezos

“The most entertaining outcome is the most likely”

• Elon Musk

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

• Wayne Gretzky

“Science can amuse and fascinate, but it’s engineering that changes the world.”

• Isaac Asimov

“However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

• Stephen Hawking

“They say best men are molded out of faults,And, for the most, become much more the betterFor being a little bad.”

• William Shakespeare

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”

• Socrates

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”

• T.S. Eliot

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

• The Myth of Sisyphus

“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open fwe or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

• Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”

• Marshall McLuhan

“I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.”

• Albert Einstein

“E Pur Si Muove.”

• Galileo Galilei

“As above, so below; as below, so above.”

• Emerald Tablet

“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.”

• Andy Grove

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

• Oscar Wilde

“If a lot of people love each other, the world will be a better place to live.”

• Tommy Wiseau

“What are the important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?”

• Richard Hamming

“I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me.”

• Andrew Jackson

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.”

• Barack Obama in his memoirs

“To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

• Elon Musk

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

• Franz Kafka

“The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win”

• Miyamoto Musashi

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.”

• Stephen Hawking

“Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.”

• Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)

“What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your “vision”, and you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision. In a cafe. By yourself. And build some elaborate thing without talking to users, because that’s doing sales, which is a pain in the ass, and they might say no. And you’d be way better off finding someone, anyone, who has a problem, that they will pay you to fix, and then fixing it, and then seeing if you can find more people like that. Best case is if you yourself have the problem.

You will not ship fast enough because you’re embarrassed to ship something unfinished, and you don’t want to face the likely feedback that you will get from shipping. You will shrink from contact with the real world, contact with your users. That’s the mistake you will make.”

• Paul Graham

“If I was not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. … I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music, but I do know that I get most joy in life out of my violin.”

• Albert Einstein explained in an interview in 1929

“And as for the critics, tell me I don’t get it. Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it.”

• Jay-Z

“The Light is not different; what’s different is the lamp… Muslim, Zoroastrian, Jew… The difference between them is just perspective.”

• Rumi

“Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down.”

• Reid Hoffman

“Study the science of art. Study the art of Science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

• Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”

• Edgar Allan Poe

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

• A. Einstein

“Not only the Universe is stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

• Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976)

“History is written by victors.”

• Unknown

“My beard turns up to heaven: my nape falls in,  Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly  Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery  Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.”

• On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel by Michaelangelo Buanarotti

“There is no easy way from Earth to the stars”

• Seneca 40 AD

“When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.”

• Paul Graham

“To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre

“Let each thing you would do, say, or intend, be like that of a dying person.”

• Marcus Aurelius

“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

• Seneca

“Man conquers the world by conquering himself.”

• Zeno

“Don’t you see how much you have to offer? And yet you still settle for less.”

• Marcus Aurelius

“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”

• Charlie Munger

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

• Haruki Murakami

“I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former, I am rather more optimistic.”

• Sir Horace Lamb

“We have two lives; the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

• Confucius

“I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.”

• Rosamund Zander

“The engineer is a mediator between the philosopher and the working mechanic and, like an interpreter between two foreigners must understand the language of both, hence the absolute necessity of possessing both practical and theoretical knowledge.”

• Henry Palmer

“Utility and truth are two entirely different things.”

• Leo Strauss

“Old keys don’t unlock new doors.”

• Unknown

“Every silver lining has a cloud.”

• Unknown

“The thing that might make you weird as a kid might make you great as an adult, if you don’t lose it.”

• Kevin Kelly

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

• Naval

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.”

• Wernher Von Braun

“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.”

• Epictetus

“It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw comfort from Lessing’s fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.”

• Unknown

“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter - for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.”

• Nikola Tesla

“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

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”

• William Butler Yeats

“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”

• Scott Belsk

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

• Thomas Edison

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”

• Woody Allen

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”

• Steve Jobs

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

• Socrates

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

• Albert Einstein

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

• Jean-Paul Sartre

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”

• Stephen McCranie

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

• Jim Rohn

“The obstacle is the way.”

• Ryan Holiday

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

• Albert Einstein

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

• James Baldwin

“It is not our abilities that show what we truly are… it is our choices.”

• Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.”

• Plato

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

• Plato

“To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.”

• Aristotle

“Fortune favors the bold.”

• Virgil

“Carpe Diem” (Seize the Day)

• Horace

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

• Marcus Aurelius

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”

• Marcus Aurelius

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

• Lao Tzu

“When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.”

• Rumi

“I think people can choose to be not ordinary. You know, they can choose to not necessarily conform to the conventions that were taught to them by their parents. So, yes, I think it’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”

• Elon Musk

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds aren’t in your favor.”

• Elon Musk

“Well, I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. What I mean by that is boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach.”

• Elon Musk

“I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details, or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

• Elon Musk

“I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.”

• Elon Musk

“Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future.”

• Elon Musk

“Get the important things right.”

• N. P. Calderwood

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

• Max Planck

“If you want to combat error, critique your in-group. You speak their language and they trust you, so you might persuade someone.

If you want to raise your status, critique your out-group. They won’t listen, but your in-group will love it.”

• Bryan Caplan

“My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.”

• Elon Musk

“What every scientist knows, but few will admit, is that the requirement for great success is great ambition. Moreover, the ambition is for personal triumph over other men, not merely over nature.”

• Richard Lewontin

“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”

• Bill Gates

“We are the masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.”

• Churchill

“Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That’s what makes Bill very, very dangerous.”

• Larry Ellison on Bill Gates

“If somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing. It doesn’t have to change the world. If you make something that has high value to people, and frankly even if it’s a little game or, you know, some improvement in photo-sharing — if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, I think that’s fine. Having something that makes a big difference but affects a small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes an even smaller difference but affects a vast number of people. Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.”

• Elon Musk

“A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it almost seem like a live teacher.”

• Bertrand Russell

“I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark which said that ‘A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And that’s really true. If you go back say, 300 years, the things we take for granted today, you’d be burned at the stake for. Being able to fly. That’s crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having, effectively, with the Internet, a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth. This is stuff that would be considered magic in times past. In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that, because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren’t even imagined in times past. That weren’t even in the realm of magic. So it actually goes beyond that. So I thought, well, if I can do some of those things – if I can advance technology, then that’s like magic, and that would be really cool.”

• Elon Musk

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That’s funny…’

• Isaac Asimov

“Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.”

• Nat Friedman

“Never offer what you’d hate someone for accepting.”

• Tara Ploughman

“The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion.”

• Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 1975

“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”

• Richard Feynman

“I think it’s very difficult to start companies and quite painful. There’s a friend of mine who’s got a good phrase for doing a startup: ‘It’s like eating glass and staring into the abyss.’ If you’re sort of wired to do it, then you should do it, but not otherwise. If you need inspiring words, don’t do it.”

• Elon Musk

“Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.”

• Alan Perlis

“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”

• Winston Churchill

“Change breaks the brittle.”

• Jan Houtema

“The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.”

• Tara Ploughman

“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

• Elon Musk

“The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

• Brandeis

“The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults….”

• Arnold Toynbee, Experiences

“Perhaps more people might consider loving humanity. Our collective light of consciousness is a tiny candle in a vast darkness. Please do not let it go out.”

• Elon Musk

“The best writing is rewriting.”

• E. B. White

“I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered.”

• Evelyn Waugh, Diary (26 Dec 47)

“We’re even wrong about which mistakes we’re making.”

• Carl Winfeld

“The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.”

• Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

“Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.”

• Edsger Dijkstra

“The path from good to evil goes through bogus.”

• Tara Ploughman

“The future should look like the future.”

• Elon Musk

“It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.”

• Emma Goldman

“Every Star that you see in the Sky might be a sun to someone.”

• Carl Sagan

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

• Noam Chomsky

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

• Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.”

• Albert Einstein

“History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.’“

• Eduardo Galeano

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

• Alan Turing

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

• Ernest Hemingway

“Father, this prayer is for everyone that feels they’re not good enough. This prayer’s for everybody that feels like they’re too messed up. For everyone that feels they’ve said “I’m sorry” too many times. You can never go too far when you can’t come back home again. That’s why I need faith.”

• Kanye

“I like to say my willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed. And too many people are just not willing to fail and so they don’t try anything new. You should try and fail, but not fail to try.”

• Vinod Khosla

“I probably have more experience screwing up than anybody in this room.”

• Vinod Khosla

“My advice always is to not be afraid to try new things. I always tell people if you are afraid to fail, you will never succeed. John F. Kennedy said only those who dare fail greatly will succeed greatly.”

• Vinod Khosla

“A bottle so distinct that it could be recognized by touch in the dark or when lying broken on the ground.”

• COCA-COLA BOTTLE DESIGN BRIEF 1915

“Life is tough, you gotta be tough.”

• My Mother

“People get far more excited about doing something as well as it can be done than about doing something adequately. If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without anything but self-motivation.”

• Steve Jobs, 1989

“A new scientific truth does not generally triumph by persuading its opponents and getting them to admit their errors, but rather by its opponents gradually dying out and giving way to a new generation that is raised on it.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”

• Max Planck (1858-1947) as mentioned in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, (1949)

“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.”

• Henri Poincaré

“If a ‘religion’ is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.”

• John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe (1995)

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”

• Edsger Dijkstra

“I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes”

• Jimi Hendrix

“Modern mathematics was born with Archimedes and died with him for all of two thousand years. It came to life again with Descartes and Newton.”

• Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960)

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

• Brian Eno

“I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.”

• Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan

“It’s insane how many Roman coins are being found! It’s as if all Romans had holes in their pockets. They sowed coins in the fields wherever they went. Maybe to grow more money…”

• Pablo Picasso (Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, Wednesday 20 October 1943)

“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. 

26 times I have been trusted to take the game’s winning shot and missed. 

I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”

• Michael Jordan

“Things get done in the world through a combination of focus and personal connections.”

• Charlie Rose

“The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”

• Henry Ford

“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers. When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

• Elon Musk

“I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good - many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm - and that’s a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.”

• Vincent van Gogh, Letter to his brother, Theo, 2nd October 1884

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

• Steve Jobs, Commencement Address Stanford 2005

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

• T.S. Eliot

“The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be.”

• Naval

“The Greeks learned that whenever an assembly is filled by untried men without experience or knowledge, the results are always the same: useless wars are undertaken, agitators seize the reins of power, and the worthiest citizens are driven into exile.”

• Cicero, Pro Flacco, 16.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

• Steve Jobs

“Some mistakes are actually subconscious problem solving.”

• Rick Rubin

“When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.”

• Napoleon

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin.

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

• Nelson Mandela

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”

• Peter Thiel

“Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.”

• Werner Heisenberg

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

• Haruki Murakami

“The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel all alone. “

• Robin Williams

“This court can find no meaningful difference between computer language, particularly high-level languages as defined above, and German or French….Like music and mathematical equations, computer language is just that, language, and it communicates information either to a computer or to those who can read it…”

• Judge Patel, April 15, 1996

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

• Steve Jobs

“Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.”

• Isaac Asimov

“This is a story about a tiger named Mohini that was in captivity in a zoo, who was rescued from an animal sanctuary. Mohini had been confined to a 10-by-10-foot cage with a concrete floor for 5 or 10 years. They finally released her into this big pasture: With excitement and anticipation, they released Mohini into her new and expensive environment, but it was too late. The tiger immediately sought refuge in a corner of the compound, where she lived for the remainder of her life. She paced and paced in that corner until an area 10-by-10 feet was worn bare of grass. . . . Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.”

• Timothy Ferriss

“Many of the more successful entrepreneurs [in Silicon Valley] seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s, where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialisation gene.

It happens to be a plus for innovation and creating great companies, but I think we always should turn this around as an incredible critique of our society.

We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?”

• Peter Thiel

“If you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take.”

• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

• John Maynard Keynes

“The yes-man is your enemy, but a friend will argue with you.”

• Solzhenitsyn

“My intuition is that more of Stripe success than one would think is down to the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because, what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and did everything in else in slapdash way. So, if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics is not an irrational thing to do.“

• Patrick Collison

“Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

• Paul Collier

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”

• Adam Smith

“For years the splitting atom, packaged in weapons, has been our main shield against the barbarians. Now, in addition, it is a God-given instrument to do the constructive work of mankind.”

• Thomas Murray, 1953

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

• Richard Feynman

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

• Richard Feynman

“Choose work you have a natural aptitude for and a deep interest in. Develop a habit of working on your own projects; it doesn’t matter what they are so long as you find them excitingly ambitious. Work as hard as you can without burning out, and this will eventually bring you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. These look smooth from a distance, but up close they’re full of gaps. Notice and explore such gaps, and if you’re lucky one will expand into a whole new field. Take as much risk as you can afford; if you’re not failing occasionally you’re probably being too conservative. Seek out the best colleagues. Develop good taste and learn from the best examples. Be honest, especially with yourself. Exercise and eat and sleep well and avoid the more dangerous drugs. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.”

• Paul Graham

“Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from and superior to all human beliefs that are not scientific statements–and this is untrue.”

• Richard Rhodes,The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“…Copernicus’ aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system….”

• Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution

“All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way.”

• Ben Rich, Skunk Works

“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.”

• G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology

“When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important:

A stodgy parent is not fun at all! What a child wants—and deserves—is a parent who is SPARKY!”

• Roald Dahl

“It’s the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.”

• Frank Warren

”Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want to be told the truth.”

• Nick Saban, 7-time National Champion, Head Football Coach at Alabama

“The most powerful person is the storyteller.”

• Steve Jobs

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is”

• Yogi Berra

“You’re telling a story using tools, you’re not using tools to tell a story”

• George Lucas.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

• Issac Newton

“If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results everyone else gets. Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average.”

• Shane Parrish

“Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before unknown men”.”

• Proverbs 22:29

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”

• Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“We have a duty to be optimistic. […] An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.”

• David Deutsch, “The Beginning of Infinity”

“It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.”

• Herman Melville

“Prompted by the lack of conceptual progress over more than two decades, I am tempted to speculate that a computer program will not gain the title of International Master before the turn of the century and that the idea of an electronic world champion belongs only in the pages of a science fiction book.”

• David Levy, 1968

“I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me.”

• Alan Kay, Xeroc Parc

“I was told I shouldn’t mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can’t be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he’s going to be.

Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I’m advising startups. On questions of design, I ask “What would Steve do?” but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask “What would Sama do?”

What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they’re going to get whatever they want.”

• Paul Graham

“If people around you don’t think what you’re doing is a bit strange, maybe it’s not strange enough.”

• Patrick Collison

“A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.

People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.”

• Sam Altman

“I think I mostly got what I wanted by ignoring advice…”

• Sam Altman

“To make money you have to do two things: (1) create something of value to the world, and (2) capture some fraction of the value you create.”

• Peter Thiel

“I happen to have discovered a direct relation between magnetism and light, also electricity and light, and the field it opens is so large and I think rich.”

• Michael Faraday; letter to Christian Schoenbein

“I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.”

- Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock”, Wired Scenarios, 1995

“It was a matter of life or death — a matter of survival. I don’t believe we really had a clear-cut strategy. We were simply doing whatever we could, and there weren’t many things that we could do then. We didn’t have much money and there were not many researchers. We had to make a lot of simple compounds as quickly and possible and screen them using very simple methods.”

• Paul Janssen

“The grass is always greener on the other side.”

• unknown

“Every rose has its thorns.”

• unknown

“The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths.”

• Balaji Srinivasan

“The mind of man at one and the same time is both the glory and the shame of the universe.”

• Pascal

“IN MY WHOLE LIFE, I HAVE KNOWN NO WISE PEOPLE (OVER A BROAD SUBJECT MATTER AREA) WHO DIDN’T READ ALL THE TIME—NONE.”

• CHARLIE MUNGER

“You could take all the gold that’s ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what it’s worth at current gold prices, you could buy — not some — all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils (XOM), plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?”

• Warren Buffett

People overvalue optionality. It’s one thing I learned in chess. You just need to have one good option, instead of going for Option A or B or C or D.”

• Peter Thiel

“The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”

• Leonardo da Vinci

“Better work often comes from those striving for excellence than from those who have already achieved it.”

• Greg Brockman

“A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers. Let your standards slip once and you’re only two generations away from death.”

• Joe Kraus

“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

• Western Union staff memo, 1876

“A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.”

• Mark Twain

“While spacewalking I realized something: I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.”

• NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman

“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

• Henry Ford (1863 - 1947)

“Where there’s muck there’s brass.”

• unknown

“No better friend, no worse enemy.”

• Sulla

“Most people don’t wake up and say ‘Oh, I wish I could go work for a company.’ They do it because they have to… I think that’s something we should work to change… I think we need to be more ambitious. We’ve got to do things that matter more to people. We’ve got to do fewer things that are zero-sum games, and more things that really cause a lot of benefit.”

• Larry Page

“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”

• unknown

“Man has a large capacity for effort. In fact it is so much greater than we think it is that few ever reach this capacity. We should value the faculty of knowing what we ought to do and having the will to do it. Knowing is easy; it is the doing that is difficult. The critical issue is not what we know, but what we do with what we know. . . I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him.”

• Hyman G. Rickover

“Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”

• Thomas A. Edison

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

• Benjamin Graham

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

• Bruce Lee

“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

• J.R.R. Tolkien

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

• Pablo Picasso

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

• Charlie Munger

“Scratch a pessimist and you will often find a defender of privilege.”

• William Beveridge

“The future is here - it is just not equally distributed.”

• William Gibson

“Most people think first of what they want to express or make, then find the audience for their idea. You must work the opposite angle, thinking first of the public. You need to keep your focus on their changing needs, the trends that are washing through them. Beginning with their demand, you create the appropriate supply. Do not be afraid of people’s criticisms—without such feedback your work will be too personal and delusional. You must maintain as close a relationship to your environment as possible, getting an inside “feel” for what is happening around you. Never lose touch with your base.”

• 50 cent

“The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”

• Jason Roberts