Some quotes to live by.
- “Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action.” Source
- “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.” [Richard Hamming: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering]
- “Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often.” (re: friendship)
- “Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.” Source
- “If an architect believes for a moment that there are hooks in the sky to hang his creations from, he may be able to conceive of structures that he would otherwise not dare to think about. Once the design starts to take shape, he may then begin to see ways in which the essence of it can still be achieved without the need for sky-hooks at all. Maybe this will work for us, too.” (Source: Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It) (re: skyhooks)
- “People need to be able to shape, extend, reconfigure, and repair their environment to feel truly at home within it… And when there’s no space to call your own, there’s no opportunity to take refuge in quiet and solitude, and it’s more difficult to share space with others.” Source
- “Even if it’s not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.” Source
- “We’re all just walking each other home.” ― Ram Dass
- “磨刀不誤砍柴功” — Chinese Proverb. Taking a break to sharpen your saw will not delay you from cutting wood more
- Be humble at the mountaintops, be strong in the valleys, and be faithful in between. Source
- “Anything new is by nature without precedent — meaning, without data to know whether it will work or not. So when we approach building new things, we don’t optimize for metrics. We optimize for feelings.” Source
- “Yet I live earnestly, building the most beautiful sandcastles I can, knowing they will be washed away. And getting others on the beach to build with me, at times even suspending our belief of the fact that it will disappear; letting ourselves be fooled for a moment that it will last.” Source
- “You can’t build railroads before it is railroad time.” (Chuck Thacker)
- “Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will.” (Charles Baudelaire)
- “In place of occasional experiences of depth that renew and satisfy us, we are simply given an infinite surface upon which to skim indefinitely.” (Source)
- “Many a failure of love follows on the—usually false—opinion that we have exhausted the other person’s inside, that there is no further promise of depth.” (Source)
- “When the winds of change blow — some people build walls, others build windmills.” — Chinese Proverb
- “Find out who you are and do it on purpose” – Dolly Parton
- “We cannot sow seeds with clenched fists. to sow, we must open our hands” (Adolfo Perez Esquivel)
- “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” — David Graeber
- “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards” (Soren Kierkegaard)
- “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” (Paul Virilio)
- “History is made by those who show up” (Unknown)
- “Imagine you could play a computer” (Doug Engelbart, when inventing the keyboard)
- “Map the regions of your own affinity and interest, across all relevant dimensions: intellectual, aesthetic, moral. The rest, you can ignore freely. Ignore strenuously!” (Robin Sloan)
- “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” (Horace Jackson Brown Jr.)
- “Magic happens because you choose for it to - don’t forget it!” (Anson Yu)
- “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” (Antoine de Saint Exupéry)
- “It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.” (Wallace Stevens)
- “The little child discovers the world as he breathes - the ebb and flow of his breath make him welcome the world in its delicate being, and makes him project himself into the world that also welcomes him. The adult can also discover, in those rare moments when he has forgotten his fears and his knowledge, when he looks at things or himself with eyes wide open, eager to know, new eyes - the eyes of a child.”