My Collected Quotes

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

Samuel Johnson

The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.

Will Rogers

The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.

Unknown

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The best way out is always through.

Robert Frost

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

William B. Sprague

Men's best successes come after their disappointments.

Henry Ward Beecher

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

Robert Collier

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

Benjamin Franklin

Nothing is predestined: The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.

Ralph Blum

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

Success depends on how you react to unexpected opportunities.

Ross Perot

The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.

Thomas J. Watson Sr.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.

Scott Adams

Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it.

Chinese Proverb

"Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough", and "Good enough" is the enemy of "At all"...[source]

Paul Buchheit

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ninety percent of life is just showing up.

Woody Allen

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

The easy thing to do is nothing. But continuing on the current path is a time-tested formula for complacency.[source]

Jason Fried

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Inspiration and genius--one and the same.

Victor Hugo

If you would create something, you must be something.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No great man ever complains of want of opportunities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

Frank Loyd Wright

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.

Elbert Hubbard

The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

Chinese Proverb

There is no education like adversity.

Benjamin Disraeli

Misfortunes often sharpen the genius.

Ovid

To know thy enemy is to know thy self.

Sun Tzu

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.[source]

Howard Zinn

Be the first, be the best, or be different.

Jacyln Easton

Elegance is for tailors. Don't always believe in the numbers. There is always room for human judgment.

Albert Einstein

Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.

Albert Camus

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don't know which half.

John Wanamaker

I do not love the money. What I love is the making of it.

Philip Armour

I guess we can make them, although we never have.

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich

I never gamble.

J. P. Morgan

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

Charles Schwab

If you're going to lose money, lose it. But don't let 'em nose you out.

Gustavus Swift

If you love an idea, that is good. If you have ideas as to how to work it out, that is better.

Henry Ford

It's a barrier to entry because you're shooting at a moving target.

Bill George

Name the greatest inventors. Accident.

Mark Twain

Nothing, not all the armies of the world, can stop an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

Perceived truth is more powerful than truth itself.

Michel Fortin

Purchasers are made, not born.

Henry Ford

The ancestor to every action is a thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The march of improvement in any given field is always marked by periods of inactivity and then by sudden bursts of energy which revolutionize existing methods sometimes in a day.

George Eastman

There was never a great character who did not sometimes smash the routine regulations and make new ones for himself.

Andrew Carnegie

Think a lot. Say little. Write nothing.

J.P. Morgan

If first an idea is not absurd, it has no hope for survival.

Albert Einstein

To lead people, walk behind them.

Sun Tzu

We study the methods of improving our business as we would a science. We imitate no one.

A. Montgomery Ward

We took what was a luxury and made it into a necessity. Our only advantage was lack of precedent.

Henry Ford

What others could not or would not do we would attempt, and this was a rule of business which was strictly adhered to.

Andrew Carnegie

You can't get wet from the word "water".

Alan Watts

You can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it.

Albert Einstein

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Edsger Dijkstra

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.

Linus Pauling

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.

Calvin Coolidge

The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.[source]

Calvin Coolidge

...Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.[source]

Calvin Coolidge

...Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.[source]

Calvin Coolidge

...Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.[source]

Calvin Coolidge

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement.

Mabel Newcomber

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.

Doug Larson

The prisoner falls in love with his chains.

Edsger Dijkstra

A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu

Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.

Colin Powell

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

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.[source]

Derek Sivers

Don’t ship the org chart.

Steven Sinofsky

"Imagination is more important than knowledge for while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create."

Albert Einstein

Lazy is as lazy doesn't.

Mike Haeg

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

William Gibson

Our normal approach is useless here Perhaps this can be our new rallying cry. If it's a new problem, perhaps it demands a new approach. If it's an old problem, it certainly does.[source]

Seth Godin

The brick walls are not there to keep us out, they are there to give us a chance to show us how badly we want something.

Randy Pausch

Jack of all trades, master of none, though often better than a master of one.

Adam Savage

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Paul Graham

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

Robert Brault

If he is weak in the knees, let him not call the hill steep.

Henry David Thoreau

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.[source]

Douglas Adams

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.

Steve Jobs

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.

Steve Jobs

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Conway’s Law (Melvin Conway)

Don’t ship the org chart.

Steven Sinofsky

Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.

Reed Hastings

What’s the Unique Selling Proposition? Can you put it in five words? Will your mother or anybody else say ‘Oh my god I’ve got to have it.’

Mark Pincus

Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.

Sun Tzu

If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you'll be amazed at the results.

George S. Patton

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

George S. Patton

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

George S. Patton

The genius is always puzzled by answers, it is the fool who is satisfied by them.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Steve Jobs

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Peter Drucker

Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.

Dieter Rams

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

Team Leads: They're keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting as centers for the teams.

Valve Employee Handbook

You were hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work you could be doing.

Valve Employee Handbook

Similarly, in software, you can't be thinking about which programming language you are using, and whether you are using MongoDB or MySQL, or whether photogrid layouts are the hot new thing or not. You will never hit the proverbial fastball if that is the sort of junk filling your head. Rather, creating and shipping products needs to be muscle memory.[source]

Dalton Caldwell

Don’t worry about whether something is right or wrong, just try to find out what is going on.

Alan Kay

Innovation happens as a result of bringing together knowledge, IQ and point of view.

Alan Kay

Innovation is a change that creates a new dimension of performance.

Peter Drucker

Do things that have never been done before.[source]

Russell Kirsch

I guess, I’ve always believed that nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do. Most people think the opposite – that all things are withheld from them which they have conceived to do and they end up doing nothing.[source]

Russell Kirsch

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.

John Carmack

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

John Carmack

...Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town Waiting for someone or something to show you the way... ...And then the one day you find ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run you missed the starting gun... ...The time is gone the song is over, thought I'd something more to say...

Pink Floyd

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place… …for people just waiting.[source]

Dr. Seuss

More companies die of indigestion than from starvation.

David Packard

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

Paul Graham

Initially you have to choose between building something lots of people like a little bit, or something a few people like a lot. Choose the latter.

Paul Graham

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

Bill Joy - "Joy's Law"

You gotta swing to hit it.

Rose Marie Hedrington

A solution is a something. But a something isn’t always a solution.[source]

Mariusz Lapinskii

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.

Dr. Seuss

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.

Samuel Johnson

Sweet are the uses of adversity.

William Shakespeare

When it’s darkest, men see the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

General George S. Patton

When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.

Benjamin Franklin

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with the wind.

John Neal

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

Anonymous

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.

Ben Johnson

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes playing a poor hand well.

Jack London

The true delight is in the finding out rather than the knowing.

Isaac Asimov

Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who's forging a bullet with your company's name on it.

Gary Hamel

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.

Herbert B. Swope

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

Charles Kettering

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Everett Dirksen

Without customers you don't have a business. You have a hobby.

Don Peppers & Martha Rogers

If things seem under control, you're just not going fast enough.

Mario Andretti

Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers.

Voltaire

The minute you’re satisfied with where you are, you aren’t there anymore.

Tony Gwynn

Speed is useful only if you are running in the right direction.

Joel Baker

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Winston Churchill

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

Andy Warhol

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

Marie Curie

An organization becomes bewildered rather than energized when it’s asked to do too much at once.

Michael Hammer & James Champy