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CHANGE

  • The battered idealist. It's just my favorite character … To me, a hero is somebody who is able to accept the environment of the world, deal with the stuff that's thrown in their path … and somehow keep their heart. -Cameron Crowe
  • There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme. In the first place, “is it good in itself?” In the second, “Can it be easily put into practice?” -Jean Jacques Rousseau
  • Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. -Albert Einstein
  • Give up any hypothesis, however much beloved … as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it. -Charles Darwin
  • They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. -Andy Warhol
  • I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. - E.B. White
  • With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on. -William Morris
  • How many chairs does it take to change a sociology department? Only one, but the department has to really want to change. - Gary Marx

EDUCATION

  • 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
  • Time? What time? Your problem isn’t managing time. Learn to manage your emotions and you will be a success. –Gerald Marwell
  • Do your homework and know your business better than anyone. Otherwise, someone who knows more and works harder will kick your ass. -Mark Cuban
  • A balanced education consists of knowledge in the mind, honesty in the heart, and strength in the body ... a true human being is an educator not by words alone but by being an example. –Jhoon Rhee
  • The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. -Douglas Engelbart
  • The manuscript is long, but the font is large. -Jeff Manza

CREATIVITY

  • I was writing the most boring, clever songs that had no real truth to them ... like an "A" student with no guts. They were just kind of small, annoying, clever, clever, clever, clever little songs. And to me, that's like death … all craft, no gift. –Liz Phair
  • It’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. -Norman Mailer
  • If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. -Charlie Parker
  • The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth. -John Keats
  • You don't have to keep the edge. The fuckin' edge is not kept, okay? The edge comes and visits when the edge wants to, regardless of whether you're sittin' on a fuckin' throne or a bed of nails. -Neil Young
  • I wrote that [Mr. Soul] on the floor in my little cabin. With a felt-tip pen. On the floor on newspapers in the bathroom...writing on newspapers. It's so easy and it looks so good. You write in black on top of it, and it's hidden because of the black-and-white background. The words can't come out and assert themselves that way. They lay in there, so you're not intimidated by seein' them so clearly. -Neil Young
  • I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream. -Vincent van Gogh
  • Thank him for me, then shoot him and don't give him time to pray. -Mark Twain, on his editor
  • The nut of the thing is that if what you make is hard like a diamond, you can put it anywhere. You can put it up your *** and it will still be beautiful. -Iggy Pop
  • It's difficult to think of rock artists who are great without being cool, since that's precisely why we need them to exist. There have been countless bands in rock history -- T.Rex, Jane's Addiction, the White Stripes, et al. -- who I will always classify as "great," even though they're really just spine-crushingly "cool." -Chuck Klosterman
  • A designer knows [s/]he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint Exupery
  • A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. -Aldous Huxley

STARTING A PROJECT

  • It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning. -Rainer Rillke
  • If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the [wo]men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. -Antoine de Saint Exupery
  • Every day we ought to review our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let me make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught! -Thomas Kempis
  • There’s time enough, but none to spare. -Charles Chestnutt
  • Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -Thomas Edison
  • If a guy hasn't got any gamble in him, he isn't worth a crap. -Evel Knievel

MORALITY AND HUMAN FRAILTY

  • Most of us follow our conscience as we follow a wheelbarrow. We push it in front of us in the direction we want to go. -Billy Graham
  • Acknowledgment of our weakness is the first step toward repairing our loss. -Thomas Kempis
  • When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. –Dale Carnegie
  • The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be. -Socrates
  • Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices. - R. Buckminster Fuller
  • We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -Kurt Vonnegut
  • The intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I don't really feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel. -David Foster Wallace

JOY

  • Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words. -Plautus
  • Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams. -Hosea Ballou
  • It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?"-George Eliot
  • It's very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he's creating, the fact that he's experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we're in a brotherhood of some kind... we're in it together. -Chick Corea
  • Courage to me means ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things...My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does, I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide -F. Scott Fitzgerald

FAME

  • I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great. -Ray Charles
  • Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else. -Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success. -Thomas Edison

LEADERSHIP

  • The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided. -Casey Stengel
  • He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause. -William Shakespeare
  • Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. -Robert Jarvik
  • A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm. -Henrik Ibsen
  • Wanted: for hazardous journey. small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. honour and recognition in case of success. -Sir Ernest Shackelton

CRIME

  • The number one rule of thieves is that there is nothing too small to steal. -Jimmy Breslin
  • The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague. -Napolean Bonaparte

MEANING

  • To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures. -John Stuart Mill
  • If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly. -Eugene O’Neill
  • Life is a continuous adjustment in internal relations to external relations. -Herbert Spencer
  • To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift. -Steve Prefontaine
  • My whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche...it's one of the reasons a lot of my generation are always on the fence about things. They're afraid to commit to anything for fear of seeming like a cliche. They're afraid to commit to their lives because they see so much of the world as a cliche. -Beck
  • Nihilism is best done by professionals. -Iggy Pop
  • Our generation has had no great War, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives. -Chuck Palahniuk
  • [T]he happiest people are those who make a conscious effort to live useful lives. Their happiness, of course, is not a shallow exhilaration where life is one continuous intoxicating party. Rather, their happiness is a deep sense of inner peace that comes when they believe their lives have meaning and that they are making a difference for good in the world -Ernest Fitzgerald
  • The universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect. - Paul Valery

LOVE

  • What else is there to write about when you're 17? Love, dude. –Tyson Ritter
  • Kisses are the remnants of paradise. -Joseph Conrad
  • Love talked about can be easily turned aside, but love demonstrated is irresistible. –W. Stanley Mooneyham
  • Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. -Mozart
  • We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. –Albert Einstein
  • Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so. -David Grayson
  • We can do no great things; only small things with great love. -Mother Teresa

STRESS

  • A sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul. -Zoroaster
  • Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline. -Edwin Whipple
  • How easy it is for a fantasy to grab hold of your foot like a rope, and dangle your life upside down while brigands go through your pockets … Deal with the life you’ve got. Solve the problems you have, rather than fantasizing about a life without them. –Bill James
  • I think it's probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness. -Wayne Coyne
  • If life gives you lemons, make some kind of fruity juice. -Conan O'Brien

SPORT

  • I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be. –George Sheehan
  • I like to make something beautiful when I run … it's style. It's doing something better than anyone else. It's being creative. -Steve Prefontaine
  • Train hard, eat light, and avoid television and people with bad attitudes. -Scott Tinley
  • I could have played another year, but I would have been playing for the money, and baseball deserves better than that. -George Brett

MONEY

  • Principles have no real force except when one is well fed. -Mark Twain
  • Keep it moving. Don't hoard. Money's no good, get rid of it. Turn it into people doing things. Turn it into jobs. Turn it into happiness...The more people I employ, the happier I am -- that means my money's goin' into other people's lives, and if I can give 'em something to create that they can be happy with, that's great. -Neil Young
  • Outperforming the majority of investors requires doing what they are not doing. Buying when others have despaired, and selling when they are full of hope, takes fortitude. -Sir John Templeton
  • Success results when preparation meets opportunity. –Joseph Wirthlin (and Bass Fishing magazine…)
  • The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. - Hunter S. Thompson

TECHNOLOGY

  • Nobody realized digital wasn't as good...The first time, "Hey -- no hiss, wow, great!" You didn't realize there was no sound until a little while later...It hurts. Did you ever go in a shower and turn it on and have it come out tiny little ice cubes? That's the difference between CDs and the real thing --water and ice. It's like gettin' hit with somethin' instead of havin' it flow over ya. -Neil Young
  • Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. -William Morris

CONFLICT

  • The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. -Mahatma Gandhi
  • Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much. –Oscar Wilde
  • No doubt there are other important things in life besides conflict, but there are not many other things so inevitably interesting. The very saints interest us most when we think of them as enganged in a conflict with the Devil. -Robert Lynd
  • Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it. -Rene Descartes
  • Long, flat expanses of professionalism bother me. I'd rather have a band that could explode at any time. -Neil Young

LOGIC

  • It’s not a problem, unless it’s a problem. –Jane McLeod
  • I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin'. -Dan Cole
  • It is what it is. –Al Gore, Jay-Z, Donald Rumsfeld…
  • "It is what it is" means what it means. -J. Daniel Janzen
  • The Rolling Stones are Gunsmoke. The Strokes are Kiefer Sutherland's 24. Jimi Hendrix was The Twilight Zone. Devo was Fernwood 2-Night. Lynryd Skynyrd was The Beverly Hillbillies, which makes Molly Hatchet Petticoat Junction. The Black Crowes are That '70s Show. Hall & Oates were Bosom Buddies. U2 is M*A*S*H (both got preachy at the end). Dokken was Jason Bateman's short-lived sitcom It's Your Move. Eurythmics were Mork & Mindy. -Chuck Klosterman

 

 


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