There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— William Shakespeare
The trouble is, you think you have time.
— Jack Kornfield
One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
No good job can be done in haste.
— @GregLiu_VT on X
You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.
Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either. Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits.
Be even-tempered in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.
— Vyasa, Bhagavad Ghita
Everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
— David Foster Wallace
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.
— Charles Bukowski
If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.
— Isaac Newton
The work of criticism is superfluous unless it is itself a work of art as independent of the work it criticizes as that is independent of the materials that went into it.
— Friedrich Schlegel
Interviewer: There’s a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.
Didion: Well, every day is all there is.
— Joan Didion
May your problems be solvable.
— Martin Davis, Computability and Unsolvability
How to write a good thank you note
1. Do not start with the thank you. 2. Start with any other sentence. If you first say, "Thank you for the nice sweater," you can't imagine what to write next. Say, "It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day." 3. Then you're done.
I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.
— Lemony Snicket
The men of the world were equal to the thinkers in every other respect and were often superior to them, just as animals in their tenacious undeviating actions in cases of necessity may often seem superior to human beings.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing, because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things.
— Bret Victor
You have to like what you do enough that the concept of 'spare time' seems mistaken.
— Paul Graham
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
— Robert J. Hanlon
Get rich, young man, for money is power and power ought to be in the hands of good people. I say you have no right to be poor.
— Russell Conwell
I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.
— Paul Graham
You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like a dance.
