Maxims
Do not to others what you don't want them to do to you.
Other rules for life:
- Be kind, be honest, and be useful
- Keep it simple
- Be humble, but step with confidence
- Adapt or die
- Think for yourself (and remember that you always have a choice)
- Sit high in the saddle
- Just get started
- Discipline is freedom
- Few forces are more powerful than compounding and incentives
- Don't forget to have fun
Quotes
"A foolish faith in authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
- Albert Einstein
"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"
- John Wooden
"You tend to get told that the world is the way it is, but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact; and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you... Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again."
- Steve Jobs
"Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."
- Kansas City Star Style Guide (via Ernest Hemingway)
"It's easier to invent the future than predict it."
- Alan Kay
"Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?'"
- Marcus Aurelius
"To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"
- John Boyd
"The plans are nothing but the planning is everything."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The strong are saying nothing until they see."
- Robert Frost inside a book given to Dwight D. Eisenhower
"If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you need is not to be in a different place but to be a different person."
- Seneca
"If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can. If anything gets in the way, keep moving forward, making good use of what you have on hand, and sticking to what seems right."
- Marcus Aurelius
"The future belongs to the discontented."
- Robert Woodruff
"You're more limited by your beliefs than your abilities."
- Tom Amberry
"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
- Seneca
"If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it."
- Scott Adams
"Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and generally more useful."
- Mark Rippetoe
"...if a thing is new, it is seldom good; because if it is good, it is only for a short time new."
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are."
- Will Durant
"A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in."
- Christopher Alexander
"Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil."
- James Carse
"If you spend your life keeping your options open, that's exactly what you'll do... spend your life keeping your options open."
- Jim Collins
"Always look a gift horse in the mouth."
- Milton Friedman
"Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the m*********** who plays it is 80 percent."
- Miles Davis
"There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of [those] who quell the storm and ride the thunder."
- Teddy Roosevelt