Quotes
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.
- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic
In the information age, the barriers just aren’t there. The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.
- John Carmack, Masters of Doom
For any given project, there is some team size beyond which adding more people will actually cause things to take longer. This is due to loss of efficiency from chopping up problems, communication overhead, and entropy. It’s even easier to reduce quality by adding people. I contend that the max programming team size for id is very small.
- John Carmack, Masters of Doom
It really comes down to work ethic. If you’ve got two equally talented people and one works twice as hard as the other, that person is going to run away from the other person.
- John Carmack, Masters of Doom
Life is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us , all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water”
- David Foster Wallace, This is Water
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
- Ben Franklin
If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.
- Epictetus
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Woe to the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still be valid when the war is over. After the war, you will all look differently at these questions. Will you then have the courage to turn to the peasant contemplating the ashes of his farm, to the man who has been crippled, to the father who has lost hs children?
- Otto Von Bismarck, Master Statesman
People who try to look smart by pointing out obvious exceptions actually signal the opposite.
- Naval Ravikant
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
- G. Michael Hopf (Those Who Remain)
Revel in being discarded, or having all your energies exhausted in vain; only those who have endured hardship will be of use. Samurai who have never erred before will never have what it takes.
- Hagakure, Book of the Samurai