At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how could life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin. – Norm McDonald 

“What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits ― Carl Jung”

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”
– Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:

From a child you can learn
1) to always to be happy;
2) never to sit idle;
3) to cry for everything you want.

From a thief you can learn
1) to work at night;
2) that if you cannot gain what you want in one night to try again the next night;
3) to love your co-workers just as thieves love each other;
4) to be willing to risk your life even for a little thing;
5) not to attach too much value to things even though you have risked your life for them — just as a thief will resell a stolen article for a fraction of its real value;
6) to withstand all kinds of beatings and tortures but to remain what you are;
7) to believe that your work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it.
-Bob Dylan

The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy. – James Clear

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat. – James Clear

You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are. – James Clear

Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. – James Clear

The present has incalculably more value than the future. Starting is, in effect, a shortcut. – James Clear

When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter. – Kevin Kelly

Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement. – Kevin Kelly

To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them. – Kevin Kelly

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system. – Charles Goodhart

To me, the good life—a full life, a rich life—is a life both of purpose and pleasure. It is when life offers satisfaction with the present, hopes for the future and peace with the past. Happiness is not a one-ingredient dish. – Meik Wiking “The Art of Making Memories”

“As long as you live, keep learning how to live.” – Seneca

Put another way: minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good. – Cal Newport Digital Minimalism

It’s hard to know what to say to something like that, so I just said, ‘Come here.’ He looked up at me, eyes narrowed. ‘What? Why?’ ‘Just come here.’ He did, slowly, warily as if he thought I might hit him. When he got close enough I grabbed him in both arms and hugged him. See, the thing about Brasti’s idea of friendship is, it’s completely unconstrained by logic or forethought. He doesn’t stop to wonder about the consequences of his actions. He just does whatever it is he thinks you’d want him to do for you in that situation. ‘Some days I love you,’ I said. – Sebastien de Castell “Saint’s Blood”

If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this. – Robert Burns

If women were allowed to get mad and men were allowed to get sad we’d all be a lot happier overall. – @emrazz

I’d love to watch a movie where programming is accurately depicted.

A team is trying to quickly build an app that will save the world. The app won’t compile. Someone keeps adding to the scope. The project manager is asking for an update every 15 minutes. – @kvlly

The test of the first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise – F Scott Fitzgerald

Time + Space + Materials = Work

Tattoos should actually make you more employable because it shows you can sit in place for hours while tiny needles are jammed into your skin and that’s what every corporate meeting I’ve ever been in has felt like. – @bananabeltbetty

I am a distant fire and a far-off sword. – Cervantes chapter 14 p99

“The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself, the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat—ONE two THREE four—not the downbeat, one TWO three FOUR, that most blues are written. Hey, I know what I’m talking about! I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it. The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat. In the end, it’s not about music—it’s about life.’ – James Brown

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. – Bertrand Russell

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal

Don’t cry because it’s over.
Smile because it happened. – Dr. Seuss

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joys in the world. – Helen Keller

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. – George S. Patton

‘See that you regularize your irregularity instantaneously,’ he called as his good-bye, ‘and set right your irrectitude and put the murderer in the cage before he rips the bag out of the whole countryside.’ – Flann O’Brien “The Third Policeman”

“Your talk,” I said, “is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.” – Flann O’Brien

“It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.” – Flann O’Brien “The Third Policeman”

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Never throw out anyone. – Audrey Hepburn

There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in. – George Bernard Shaw

Brexit has reached the part of a waterfall software development process where two years in you realise you aren’t going to hit the deadline, your architectural assumptions were all wrong, and no-one wants what you built anyway.– @doctor_julz

“You’re either the person who creates energy. Or you’re the one who destroys it.” – Seth Godin

I rarely use the term ‘agile’ these days. If I mean ‘responsive to change’ or ‘adaptive’, I just say those words. If I mean ‘self-organising’, I say it. If I mean ‘lightweight’, I say that. If I mean ‘cynically exploiting a trend to sell certifications’, I say that. – @jasongorman

Talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target that no one else can see. – Arthur Schopenhauer

To me the most amazing thing about the universe is that if you take a bunch of hydrogen and leave it alone, 13.7 billion years later a small lump of that same matter will have the idea to sell hot fresh Nutella donuts right on my doorstep. Physics, y’all. – @rhaegal

A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there. You do that by building what you hope is an unarguable structure. Beginning, middle, end. Aristotle, Page 1. – John McPhee

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. – John McPhee

You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one. If there’s a box around “sensitive” because it seems pretentious in the context, try “susceptible.” Why “susceptible”? Because you looked up “sensitive” in the dictionary and it said “highly susceptible.” – John McPhee

First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. – John McPhee

“If you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle backward is not a solution. You have to get off the train.” – David Simon

The best questions generate more questions. – Nicholas Felton

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’” – Harmon Killebrew

Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. – Louis Srygley

Another flaw in human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut

“The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” – Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.” – Douglas Adams

… if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works – Ed Catmull, President of Pixar

You don’t overcome challenges by making them smaller but by making yourself bigger. – John C. Maxwell

Someone else’s Action should not determine your response – Dalai Lama

What is essential is invisible to the eyes. – Antoine Exepury

“All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are and how you in your own way, can put life together as something that means a lot to you.” – Fred Rogers

“Death is the final act in our play of life. No need to fear it. You know it is coming. Just make sure you act the hell out of your role while you’re here.” – Marcus Aurelius

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. – Leonard Bernstein

What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. – Jane Goodall

“Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.” – Twyla Tharp

For every complex problem, there is an aswer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H. L. Mencken

“The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.” – Alan Jacobs

Happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can only achieve by focussing on other good things.

You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. – Greg McKeown

One way of measuring a life — maybe as good a method as any other — is on the basis of how much peculiarity you have helped to generate. – Charles Gaines

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” – Franz Kafka

To hold a pen is to be at War – Voltaire

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

The biggest impediment to concentration is your computers ecosystem interruption technologies – Cory Doctorow

The things which hurt, instruct. – Ben Franklin

The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four; of secondary importance is to prepare for being five – Jim Trelease

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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. GB Shaw

The greatest tragedy of mankind comes from the inability of people to have thoughtful disagreement to find out what’s true. – Ray Dalio

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. – Anthony Jay

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. – Seneca

Be Decisive. Right or wrong, make a decision. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels that couldn’t make a decision. – Unknown

“Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed. -Hunter S Thompson

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” -Archilochus, Greek Soldier

“So live that you can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell.”-John D Rockefeller Jr.

“I have slowly come to realize that any two randomly selected Canadian residents are smarter than any five U.S. citizens.” – Chuck Klosterman

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. – Robert Heinlein (quoted in Starting Strength, page iv)

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt

IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat these two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you’ve given your life to, broken
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a man, my son!
-Rudyard Kipling

“I shall not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that bring total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when the fear has passed, I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” -Dune

Some one once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. -Anonymous

YES, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool I swear that I would pull him down. . . . Because I am afraid of him; and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid. – GK Chesteron ‘The Man who was Thursday.’

“There are two goddesses in your heart…The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. SO they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” -Joe Vigil in “Born to Run”.

“So Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry” -Mark Twain

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.” -William James

“When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To fight a bull when you are not scared is nothing. And to not fight a bull when you are scared is nothing. But to fight a bull when you are scared is something.

I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy or savour the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. -EB White

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” -Winston Churchill

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. -Henri Bergson

Until you know what you care about your focus will be on your lack of focus. -Merlin Mann

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. -Confucius

You have enemies? Good. That means you stood up for something at some time in your life. -Winston Churchill

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. -Marianne Williamson

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. -Albert Einstein

“There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the body has been awakened to its true potential it is impossible to go back.” -Henry Rollins

The goal of training is to keep the goal, the goal. -Dan John

Beware the fury of the patient man. -John Dryden

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general. -Mark Rippetoe

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for your powers to be equal to your tasks. Then the doing of work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle.
-Phillip Brooks

You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club. – Jack London

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt

Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt. – Special Olympics Oath

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia. -Author Unknown

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge