• Don’t argue. Build the future. The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person. It’s a status-acquisition hack, a quick way to gain relative status. Your critique of the existing system may be correct. But you need a product, not just a critique.

  • Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And character isn’t formed out of smart people, it’s formed out of people who have suffered.
    I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.
    – Jensen Huang

  • Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are far more important than how hard you work.

  • People pay you for how valuable they think your product is, not how hard it is to make. Very few understand this.

  • It’s all too common to see startups spending their runway chasing the siren song of product and engineering craftsmanship, only to crash against the jagged rocks of market irrelevance.

  • Speed is currency and the only moat in the age of intelligence.

  • If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
    – Reid Hoffman

  • If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
    – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  • Maybe people are just working on the wrong things.
    – Patrick Collison

  • Networking is overrated. Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.
    – Naval Ravikant

  • Committees can criticize, but they cannot create. Search the parks in all your cities you’ll find no statues of committees.
    – David Ogilvy - Confessions of An Advertising Man

  • People have too much faith in large organizations.
    – Malcolm Gladwell

  • Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.
    – Carl Jung

  • Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.

  • A thousand years from now nobody is going to know that you or I ever lived. The cynic is right, but lazy. He says ‘You live, you die and nothing you do will ever make a difference.’ But as long as I live, I’m going to shake my fist at fate and try to do something for those who live here now and who knows how far into the future that will go. If I accomplish nothing more than making my arm sore, at least I will be satisfied that I have lived.
    – Jackson Burnett

  • A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
    – Theil

  • “Make something people want” is the destination, but “Be relentlessly resourceful” is how you get there.
    – Paul Graham

  • Because it’s there.
    – George Mallory when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest

  • Plans should be measured in decades. Execution should be measured in weeks.

  • The struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
    – Albert Camus

  • A society grows great when old men plant trees the shade of which they know they will never sit in.
    – Greek Proverb

  • Move faster. Slowness anywhere justifies slowness everywhere. This year instead of next year. This week instead of next week. Today instead of tomorrow. Moving fast compounds so much more than people realize. Trust the exponential, be patient and be pleasantly surprised.
    – Sam Altman

  • Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
    – G.K Chesterton

  • Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
    – Peter Drucker

  • Any work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.
    – Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

  • All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.
    – Henry Ford

  • The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
    – Tara Ploughman

  • The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great idea is that, when people hear it, they say, ‘Gee, I could have thought of that.’
    – Charles Townes - How the Laser Happened

  • He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.
    – Divorce complaint of Feynman’s second wife

  • That the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world . . . frightens me much more than bombs.
    – George Orwell

  • Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
    – Nassim Taleb - Antifragile

  • Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true.
    – Theil

  • See far into the distance, and you will realize that the great men whom you believe to be violent, cruel, and what not are merely politic. They know themselves, they judge themselves better than you judge them, and if they are really able, they know how to master their passions, for they calculate the effects of even these.
    – Napoleon Bonaparte

  • 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

  • Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal.
    – Forugh Farrokhzad

  • History remembers the artists. Great software is art, great business is art, starting a new country is art. You’re creating something out of nothing—that is the most rewarding thing to be doing. But art can’t be forced. Art is done for its own sake.
    – Naval Ravikant

  • Only the paranoid survive.
    – Andy Grove

  • Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.
    ― Roger Scruton

  • If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Don’t eat with people you wouldn’t starve with.

  • Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
    – Wayne Gretzky

  • When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
    – Peter Drucker

  • The only real laughter comes from despair.
    – Groucho Marx - The Groucho Letters

  • Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
    – Bertrand Russell

  • There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
    – Peter Drucker

  • If more information was the answer we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.

  • Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old Time is still a-flying;
    And this same flower that smiles today,
    Tomorrow will be dying.
    – Robert Herrick - To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

  • When uncertain, trust what has stood the test of time. It’s a shortcut to robustness and durability. Time is the ultimate proof of value. Invest in what outlives trends and flashing novelties.
    – Nassim Taleb

  • All the greats you admire from afar are deeply flawed humans who stood up in one area of their life. That’s it. That’s the difference.

  • There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle and a very happy start.
    – Shel Silverstein

  • The best things in life are free. The second best are very very expensive.
    – Coco Chanel

  • Fail fast. Fail cheap. Fail often.
    – YC

  • The trouble is, you think you have time.

  • Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
    – Rene Girard - Mimetic Desires

  • Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.
    – Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

  • They may say I was reckless, but they’ll never say I was boring.
    – Bear Grylls

  • Well like the man said: Don’t take life too seriously, you won’t make it out alive.
    – Bugs Bunny

  • Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
    – Leonardo Da Vinci

  • Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.
    – David McCullough

  • The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

  • Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.
    – John Galt