Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
— Steve Jobs
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
— Nelson Mandela
Now there are two kinds of working hard: you can work smart or you can work dumb. When I was in sixth grade my dad dumped a pile of bricks in the backyard and after school he had us, me and my brothers, move the bricks to the side yard. The next day he had us move them back to the backyard, next day back to the side yard, and so forth. This continued for quite awhile. I’m not sure what he intended by this but I did learn that work, hard work, for hard work’s sake alone would not do. Later, in observing the tenure system so endemic to academic ventures, I would think to myself, “Hey they are just moving a pile of bricks”.
— Michael Burry
Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: 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
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
— Albert Einstein
There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
— Nelson Mandela
Ask questions, seek answers.
— Michael Burry
If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don’t you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can’t think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think everything you’re supposed to think? Buy what you’re told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.
— Tyler Durden, Fight Club
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
— Steve Jobs
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
— Albert Einstein
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
— Vince Lombardi
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
— Steve Jobs
Choose courage over comfort.
— Brené Brown
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
— Sun Tzu
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
— Steve Jobs
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
— Winston Churchill
Foolish faith in authority is the enemy of truth. But so is a foolish cynicism.
— Charles Percy Snow
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
— Albert Einstein
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Mark Twain
What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm?
An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.
— Dominick Cobb, Inception
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
— Steve Jobs
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
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
We’re only at one percent of what’s possible. Despite the faster change in the industry we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have.
— Larry Page
The longer animals go without encountering the rare event, the more vulnerable they will be to it.
— Nassim Taleb
As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.
— Al Gore
The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
— Steve Jobs
The only person you should compare yourself to is your previous self.
— Unknown
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
— Winston Churchill
On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
— Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Economics is the science of confusing stocks and flows.
— Michal Kalecki
When you have to classify the very capacity of the Earth to support life as an “externality”, then it is time to rethink your theory.
— Herman Daly
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
— Aristotle
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
— Amos Tversky
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
— Abraham Lincoln
In life, everything is lost. Everything. At some point, everything goes away, and therefore to have anything at all, we must be willing to accommodate that loss.
— Mark Manson
Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.
— Warren Buffett
Time is one of several currencies — something you trade for something else. Capital is renewable. Time is non-renewable. If you’re finding you consistently don’t have time, it’s a symptom of not having sufficiently clear priorities.
— Tim Ferriss
I just want to be rich enough to not be motivated by money.
— Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip
Invest in as much of yourself as you can, you are your own biggest asset by far.
— Warren Buffett
The things you own end up owning you.
— Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.
— Leonardo da Vinci
You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.
— Warren Buffett
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
— Albert Einstein
Convictions are stronger if they are self-generated, rather than taught.
— David MacKay
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
— Aldous Huxley
“Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth…” You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us — you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend, you pawn it off as your own — your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?
— Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting
Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.
— The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded
If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.
— Warren Buffett
Find what you love and let it kill you.
— Charles Bukowski
I want to be a lifelong learner.
— Mark Hart
You dropped 150 grand on a fuckin’ education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!
— Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting
If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.
— Larry Page
The best products are built in small steps, not by waiting for a perfect final product to be created.
— Hilary Parker (blogger of Not So Standard Deviations)
The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
— Leonardo da Vinci
You are the average of the five people you associate with most.
— Tim Ferriss
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
— William Gibson
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
— Albert Einstein
Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.
— Winston Churchill
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
— Steve Jobs
Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot. Say I’m working at NSA, somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself, ’cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are sayin’, “Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area” ’cause they don’t give a shit. It won’t be their kid over there, gettin’ shot. Just like it wasn’t them when their number got called, ’cause they were pullin’ a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some kid from Southie takin’ shrapnel in the ass. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, ’cause he’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they’re takin’ their sweet time bringin’ the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin’ play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain’t too long ’til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s got to walk to the fuckin’ job interviews, which sucks ’cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin’ him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starvin’, ’cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they’re servin’ is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I’m holdin’ out for somethin’ better. I figure fuck it, while I’m at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.
— Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting
The above are my all-time favorite quotes and my constant inspiration, a list I read and review on a regular basis. Another amazing inspiration are quotes from Albert Einstein. Some secondary quotes I pounder about can be found here.
Gordon Schücker 