Quotes

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?

…believed art shouldn’t be sequestered in museums. It is important to undo the center of power, travel to see the work in a landscape that held meaning and inspiration for the art and artist, and to recover the intimacy and emotion of pilgrimage, the lure of adventure, even the exhaustion and discomfort of travel. The place, the pilgrimage, the art, all in synthesis, create the sublime tingling we all yearn for whether it be in art, in religion, in love, or in nature.

Patience is not the ability to wait. Patience is to be calm no matter what happens, constantly take action to turn it to positive growth opportunities, and have faith to believe that it will all work out in the end while you are waiting.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.

The second half of your life doesn’t have to look anything like the first half of your life. The first half was bound; the second half is free. Free, free, ever more free. Free from my own distorted thinking, free from any lingering shame and fear and resentments, free from expectations. This is what I look forward to.

To be effective, you have to be inefficient.

You’re not old, you’re not young, you’re in the moment.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

Until you’re saying the stuff that upsets your parents, you’re not really doing your job. You have to cross that threshold.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

The Magician helps to integrate the unconscious with the conscious, the intuitive with the rational, the inner world of feeling with the outer world of action.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

We consume culture to enlarge our hearts and minds.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

Don’t ask what it means or what it refers to. Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.

But it’s a distinction Bertrand Russell made between wise decisions and fortunate decisions. You can make a wise decision that turns out to be unfortunate.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present.

The secret to life is to have no fear.

If you want to create a new culture, throw a better party!

I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Intelligent people who are happy are the rarest people I know.

The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Technical, know-how, skill, craft, art. Involved in production, manufacturing and making. Using good deliberation, understanding, resulting in deliberate desire to be carried out with cleverness.

It was only possible for me to do it, he said, because it was necessary.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

You can pay me to think about your problems.

I work to keep myself from being bored.

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Orality knits persons into community.

Sei geduldig gegen alles Ungelöste in deinem Herzen und versuche, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben, wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Suche jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die dir nicht gegeben werden können, weil du sie nicht leben könntest. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Lebe jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht lebst du dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, in die Antwort hinein.

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to realize it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. In other words, see the world as it really is, warts and all, but still forge ahead with courage, tenacity, persistence, acceptance. The will can overcome many challenges if hope remains alive.

Successful problem solving requires finding the right solution to the right problem. We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.

I guess you haven’t realized yet, the adventure isn’t outside in the street. The adventure is at your desk.

People aren’t really meant to be anything, because we’re not made; we’re […] molded, thwarted, scalded, encouraged by events and encounters.

Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.

We have two lives; the second begins when we realise we only have one.

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful, rowdy prisoners.

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much — and I’m using it to light the torches of others. Because only if each of us has a torch will there be enough light.

There’s something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

I cannot teach you, only help you to explore yourself, nothing more.

I am the gap between what I am and what I am not, between what I dream and what life has made of me.

We are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Advice to my younger investing self: find mentors faster; read more science; study more psychology; network every day; read books, not news; make more VC investments; find paths of progress; seek volatility; cut losses faster; press winners harder; save more; spend less; invest more often.

Art is what you can get away with.

Nobody cares. Do it for yourself. Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay, etc., especially if you haven’t finished it yet. And the ones who aren’t too busy you don’t want in your life anyway.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

The man who says it can’t be done shouldn’t interrupt the man who is trying to do it.

If you try to make something nobody hates, no one will love it.

Well done is better than well said.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither.

A boy said to his grandfather, “It feels as though there’s a fight between two vicious wolves raging inside of me. The first wolf is full of anger, self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness. The second is full of hope, empathy and courage.” The grandfather said, “That same fight is going on inside all of us.” The boy thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Well grandfather, which wolf will win?” The old man simply replied, “The one you feed.”

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.

I allowed the tears which I had been holding back to fall, and I let them flow as they would, making them a pillow for my heart.

We have collectively learned to admire the values of the arts in the special arena of galleries. But their more important application is in the general, daily fabric of our lives.

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

We start by being made by others, and then we remake ourselves.

Kind over nice, outcome over ego, velocity over speed, quality over quantity, effective over efficient, ability over experience, progress over perfection, consistency over intensity, competence over charisma, environment over willpower, correctness over consensus, long-term over the short-term, the right way over the shortcut, avoiding stupidity over seeking brilliance.

Don’t tell me the story of your past, tell me the story of your future.

You got to unionize and find a cause that actually makes sense. Take down the structure but only take down the structures to show the structure how it can be restructured in the first place. Don’t just be taking shit down just to take shit down, you’re just a destroyer. A destroyer without reaffirmation and the rebuilding of an idea that is better than the first that was destroyed in the first place is just a failed attempt at something that doesn’t make sense.

It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

The cure to boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

You can’t think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

Assuming the worst in others, we show our worst.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

The best things in life aren’t things.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

To forgive is to give up all hope for a better past.

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

The approval of the public is to be avoided like the plague. It is absolutely essential to keep the public from entering if one wishes to avoid confusion. I must add that the public must be kept panting in expectation at the gate by a system of challenges and provocations.

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies.

Freedom is a possibility only if you’re able to say no.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

The value of an idea lies in the using of it.

People overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade.