Aphorisms: Quotes and Wisdom Worth Remembering

If someone followed you around for a week, would they believe you were serious about your goals?

It’s important to know how good you’re not

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

It doesn’t get any easier; you just get faster.

Acumen is knowing what the fuck is going on around you

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’

Ride as much or as little, or as long or as short as you feel. But ride.

Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Never give one thing two names, or two things the same name

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer

I’d far rather be happy than right any day

One thing I learnt from almost flunking those exams was that distraction is the enemy of performance

Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.

Rule No. 1: Get the money first. Rule No. 2: don’t forget to get the money

Similarly, the best professionals I’ve known have chosen the life they live and understand that there’s no harm in ’embracing the suck,’ wrapping even the most difficult situations in the appearance of an enjoyable experience. And if the psychological reaction of forcing yourself to feign love for something you don’t enjoy brings you to like it, that’s helpful, too.

Life is like a dogsled race. If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ - lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.

Firefighters don’t get mad at fires

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating

In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo Da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin. Men of our profession - we teachers - are bound to be impressed by the tendency of youths of strikingly capable minds to become interested in one small corner of science and uninterested in the rest of the world… It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell.

In our modern tempo, that industry is in danger which is in a static state.

The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure.

Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilization. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what’s your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death.

A soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right.

Be just and if you can’t be just be arbitrary.

How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

Without persistence, principles are meaningless. You don’t give up. You double down.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

People assume that if they use higher mathematics and computer models they’re doing the Lord’s work. They’re usually doing the devil’s work.

Character is like a tree; reputation is its shadow.

The most valuable assets in any business are people and relationships. I may have neglected to appreciate this at the time, when we were down in the fray. Now that I am a bit older and slowing down, just a little, I have realized that, all along, the most important element was who was involved, not what.

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited.

I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you - and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

Part of what defines gumption involves a willingness, even a hunger, for one’s mettle to be challenged.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise!

Son, you be sure to set your goals so high that you can’t possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you’ll always have something ahead of you.

Whether you’re talking about a person or a country, it’s okay to be rich and it’s okay to be powerful, just as long as you’re humble and cooperative. But if you combine being rich and powerful with being arrogant and uncooperative, people won’t cut you much slack.

In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them.

I have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle, it’s not going to be satisfying.

I also learned the value of withholding judgement until I could make a decision based on evidence.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process.

The person across the table is never the problem. The unsolved issue is. So focus on the issue.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

Don’t tell me what you ’think,’ just tell me what’s in your portfolio.

The basic problem is people want things they don’t want to pay for.

The only thing that we know about financial predictions of startups is that 100 percent of them are wrong.

Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship, but, as with many things in life, attitude impacts outcome.

There are only a few key things most VCs look at: the problem you are solving, the size of the opportunity, the strength of the team, the level of competition, your plan of attack, and current status.

I’ve come to realise that everything is a waste of time unless you think of it otherwise.

I know of no better way to make a friend than to pitch in on hard work together, and the shittier the conditions, the faster the friendship forms.

There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea - let’s do more of those!

I believe that this is a practical world and that I can count only on what I earn. Therefore, I believe in work, hard work. I believe in education, which gives me the knowledge to work wisely and trains my mind and my hands to work skillfully. I believe in honesty and truthfulness, without which I cannot win the respect and confidence of my fellow men. I believe in a sound mind, in a sound body and a spirit that is not afraid, and in clean sports that develop these qualities. I believe in obedience to law because it protects the rights of all. I believe in the human touch, which cultivates sympathy with my fellow men and mutual helpfulness and brings happiness for all. I believe in my Country, because it is a land of freedom and because it is my own home, and that I can best serve that country by ‘doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with my God.’ And because Auburn men and women believe in these things, I believe in Auburn and love it.