Quotes from books, movies, music, tweets, and more. Mostly books, though. Here’s Summer 2014. Check back for Fall 2014, coming soon.
“The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for”
— Tucker Max
“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”
— James Halpern
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
—Ralph Emerson
“Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth”
— Mahatma Gandhi
“Books to me represent knowledge being power and knowledge being effectiveness. And if you know something, it doesn’t matter what they take from you — they can’t take that away from you”
— Tucker Max
“It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life.”
— Telamond of Arcadia
“Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color.”
— David Foster Wallace
“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”
— Friday Night Lights
“[For the media,] the question, “Is it real?” is less important than, “Is it newsworthy?”
— Daniel J. Boorstin
“It isn’t about being an asshole. It’s about not being a little bitch”
— John Romaniello
“Every guy on that bus, from Schwartz down to little Loondorf, had grown up dreaming of becoming a professional athlete. Even when you realized you’d never make it, you didn’t relinquish the dream, not deep down. And here was Henry, living it out. He alone was headed where they each, in the privacy of their backyard imaginations, had spent the better part of their boyhoods: a major-league diamond. Schwartz, for his part, had vowed long ago not to become one of those pathetic ex-jocks who considered high school and college the best days of their lives. Life was long, unless you died, and he didn’t intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two.”
— Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
“We all have stories that we tell ourselves about what our lives are — and those stories are always wrong.”
— Shawn Coyne
“I’m smart enough to know that being smart is not enough”
— @donni
“There are two types of people. There are those that spend their whole lives in, and for, “the scene”. They want to see and be seen. They want to gossip and snicker. They want to get invited. They want to sound smart, look hip, be cool. They want to show up at the right time, to the right party, wearing the right dress, dating the right person, saying the right things, to the right people, eating the right foods, working at the right company, etc. They are stuck in the Matrix. These are “scene” people.
Then there are real people.
Those who are in, but not of. Who navigate the choppy seas of this memetic storm, but who look down on a compass that points to True North. Who reflect deeply on what is valuable, what is meaningful, what is authentic.
Finding a real person is so refreshing. They look at you, not through you. They don’t need to exclude you to feel significant.”
—Francis Pedraza
“I went from staring at the same four walls for 21 years to seeing the whole world in just 12 months”
— The Weeknd
“Early in my life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”
— Malcolm X
“Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn’t mean you have to agree. Just because other people say that something is hopeless or crazy or broken to pieces doesn’t mean it is. We decide what story to tell ourselves. Or whether we will tell one at all”
— Ryan Holiday
“We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years.”
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
“Learning is available at the library for free; under a tree with a dog-eared paperback; at a job with a boss who gives you responsibility and mentorship; while traveling; while leading a cause, movement, or charity; while writing a novel or composing a poem or crafting a song; while interning, apprenticing, or volunteering; while playing a sport or immersing yourself in a language; while starting a business; and now, while watching a TED talk or taking a Khan Academy class…”
— Michael Ellsberg
“Great times are great softeners”
— Ryan Holiday
“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
— Paul Graham
“Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must lead”
— Charles Bukowski
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty”
—- Ralph Emerson
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.”
— Chuck Palunhiuk, Fight Club
“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
— Almost Famous
“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”
— Voltaire
“What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.”
— Seth Godin
“One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.”
—Henry Sidgwick
“We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.”
— Dr. Brene Brown
“The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are “materialistic.” Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
—- Paul Graham
“Life was never supposed to feel so serious or scary in the first place. The people who try to convince you that it has to be that way just aren’t very good at playing.”
— Charlie Hoehn
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed”
— Ernest Hemingway
“Choosing a spouse and choosing a career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.”
— Alain de Bottom
“The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.”
— Eric Reis
“Your penis betrayed you, son. Made you think stupid. It won’t be the last time that happens.”
— James Halpern’s Dad
“This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time”
— Chuck Palaniuk, Fight Club
“If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay”
— David Foster Wallace
“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Civilization is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.”
— David Gregory Roberts, Shantaram
“When I get sick, I go to my doctor like everyone else. A doctor has powerful tools that may help me. Or those tools may hurt me, make me worse. I have to decide. It’s my life. It’s my responsibility.”
— Michael Crichton
“I went to college for four years”
— Kim Kardashian
“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”
— Malcolm X
“Yes, you have cancer. Yes, your kids are on drugs. Yes, there is an elephant outside your tent. Now the question becomes, What are you going to do about it? Subsequent emotions may not be pleasant, but the hysteria stops. Hysteria accompanies an unwillingness to look at what is really going on; it promotes an unwillingness to look. We feel we are afraid to look, when actually it is not-looking that makes us afraid. The minute we look, we cease being afraid.”
— Michael Crichton
“Dreams are just furniture, Jack said, like words you keep pushing around till they fit the room somehow”
—Dorothy Livesay
“Do a good job at whatever you’re doing, even if you don’t like it. Then at least you’ll know you’re not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you’ll get into the habit of doing things well.”
— Paul Graham
“Play is a state of mind – it’s a way to approach the world. Whether your world is a frightening prison or a loving playground is entirely up to you”
— Charlie Hoehn
“A flawed [education and certification] system isn’t better than no system at all, it is worse than no system at all, because at least with no system we are forced to be accountable to ourselves for our education. “Not everyone will be so dedicated.” Correct, but now those same undedicated people get an official blessing of their ignorance. Who doesn’t walk out of even this ridiculously meaningless exam not feeling smart, accomplished, up to date? And who would dare, after passing, to criticize the exam that warmed his ego?”
— The Last Psychiatrist
“We don’t really want things. We want the feelings we think those things will give us.”
— Garry Tan
“Never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade.”
— Merlin Mann
“We are the stories we tell ourselves”
— Joan Didion
“The experience of climbing Kilimanjaro affected me so powerfully that, for a long time afterward, if I caught myself saying, “I’m not a person who likes to do that activity, eat that food, listen to that music,” I would automatically go out and do what I imagined I didn’t like. Generally I found I was wrong about myself — I liked what I thought I wouldn’t like. And even if I didn’t like the particular experience, I learned I liked having new experiences.”
— Michael Crichton
“All that is gold does not glitter; Not all those who wander are lost”
— J.R.R. Tolkien
“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”
— Hugh McLeod
“Problems are a chance for us to do our best”
— Duke Ellington
