Hey Guys,
One of the things I have learned is that I didn’t have to learn everything for myself. I can learn from the successes and failures of others. It’s a vital lesson I wish I had learned earlier. Sometimes, I learn by knowing other people. Sometimes by reading stories or biographies of others. Often, quotes are a good way to embrace a little bit of knowledge from someone else. A guy named Paul Graham put together a pretty stellar list, which is linked below. (Hopefully the link is still good by the time you guys are reading this.) I have pulled out some favorites.
- “The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.” – Tara Ploughman
- “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay
- “But the audience is right. They’re always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don’t believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never.” – William Friedkin, in a NYT interview
- “Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.” – Ivor Brown, The Heart of England
- “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” – Einstein
- “Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.” – G. M. Trevelyan, “Bias in History”
- “Your twenties are always an apprenticeship, but you don’t always know what for.” – Jan Houtema
- “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain
- “The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.” – John F. Kennedy
The full list: http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html
Love you guys!
Dad