The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Relax, no one else knows what they’re doing either.
Fear is a liar.
In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
You’re telling me I can dodge bullets?” “I’m trying to tell you that — when you’re ready — you won’t have to.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish
Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom
If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream.
We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Confine yourself to the present.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The hardly bearable ecstasy of direct energy exploding on your nerve endings.
Productivity is the enemy of original thought.
Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.
It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, the ones most responsive to change.
Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.
If a person doesn’t know to which port they sail, no wind is favorable.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a reference, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves. But, nature offers you millions — all on the same tree. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.