A good quote will cause you to think or will move you to action. Below is a collection of my favourite 20 quotes from the chapter introductions of Tim Ferriss' bestseller, The Four Hour Workweek.
1. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
2. Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. - Oscar Wilde
3. An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. - Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and Nobel prize winner
4. I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. - Herbert Bayard Swope, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
5. Everything popular is wrong. - Oscar Wilde, the importance of being Earnest
6. Many a false step was made by standing still. - Fortune cookie
7. Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” - Seneca
8. There is no difference between a pessimist who says, “oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens. - Yvon Choinard, founder of Patagonia
9. People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world. - Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes
10. I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself a master. I want the full menu of rights. - Bishop Desmond Tutu, South African cleric and activist
11. I not only use all the dreams that I have, but all that I can borrow. - Woodrow Wilson
12. I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. - Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
13. All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth.
14. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer . - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
15. If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time. - Chinese proverb
16. Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment.- Paul Fussel, Abroad
17. Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. - Charles Kuralt, CBS news reporter
18. Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. - Paula Poundstone
19. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake. - Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics
20. There is nothing that the busy man is less busy with then living; there is nothing harder to learn. - Seneca
Bonus: For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and ask myself: “if today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something… Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. - Steve Jobs, college dropout and CEO of Apple Computer, Stanford University commencement, 2005
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