Great Quotes
The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, "But how happy you must be!" we usually protest.
I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.
The great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this great majority.
The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.
The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who reduced to absurdity the wisdom of this world (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul's resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one's own will the name of God, Torah - that is essentially Jewish.
For in one's heart one loveth only one's child and one's work; and where there is great love to oneself, then is it the sign of pregnancy: so have I found it.
It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.
The special ops guys and the firefighters around the world have this great phrase. They say, 'Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,' and that is true. Everything I've accomplished in my life has been because of that attitude.
We need to know what the resources of the moon are. We have great evidence now because of different kinds of radar andspectroscopic analysis that people have been able to do. But we really do need to go visit there, and we can do that with a robot craft without any problem.
Even when our kids were four, we would let them use sharp knives, and when they were seven or eight, we would let them use certain power tools. My wife, much to her credit, has this great saying: "I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid," which is a great attitude about life.
I will hazard a prediction. When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the mostpersonal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made.In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you, and good luck!
Here's what we've figured out. Often, when a memo isn't great, it's not the writer's inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They're trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we're not coaching them right.
The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is toput the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shoutingabout it, marketing it.
I have been incredibly lucky all my life. I've had a family that has loved me and given me incredible opportunities. I've gone to great schools. I've travelled across the country.
I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.
In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating.
It was a great step in science when men became convinced that, in order to understand the nature of things, they must begin by asking, not whether a thing is good or bad, noxious or beneficial, but of what kind it is.
And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, - nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.
We have no intention of failing. The only question is how great a success we'll have.
Popular Authors
