Stuff About Things #27

"If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all."
     — Michelangelo

"Success at anything will always come down to this: focus and effort, and we control both."
     — Dwayne Johnson

"Doubt kills more dreams that failure ever will."
     — Suzy Kassem

"The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it."
     — Marcus Buckingham

"Be at war with your vices."
     — Ben Franklin

"Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body."
     — Seneca

"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.... Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.... People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.... Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the best.... A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit."
     — John C. Maxwell

"It occurred to Yancy that, in the time they'd known each other, he hadn't once seen her look at her cell phone. She never texted, tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, or posted a single picture when they were together. He found this behavior alluring."
     — Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

"Connectivity is one of the great blessings of the internet era, and it makes extraordinary things possible. But constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction."
     — Will Schwalbe

"Simple can understand complicated but complicated cannot understand simple."
     — Shambhala Buddhist saying 

"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."
     ― Isaac Newton

"Clothing is a language, a visual language. And it's one you can learn and develop and use to express yourself ."
     — Mark Cho

"Stress, anxiety, and depression are caused when we are living to please others."
     — Paulo Coelho

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."
     — Aldous Huxley

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude... nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."
     — Thomas Jefferson

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
     — Thomas Jefferson

"All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd. But people don't draw the obvious conclusion..."
     — Terence McKenna

"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
     — Niels Bohr, physicist 

"What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach inkblot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself."
     — Lewis Mumford

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."
     — Wernher von Braun

"Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead they brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail."
     — Lao Tzu

"The amount of revenue lost (by the TV and film industry) to piracy has skyrocketed from US$6.7 billion in 2010 to nearly US$31.8 billion in 2016. The figure will hit nearly US$52 billion in 2022. These stats do not include sports or pay TV, making the numbers all the more shocking."
     — Digital TV Research Ltd

"Kim Libreri, who spent years in the film industry working on special effects... predicts that by 2022 graphics will be so advanced that they will be indistinguishable from reality." (This is not good news for Hollywood and movie stars.)
     — Vanity Fair magazine

"I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac."
     — James Baldwin

"I hope we're not that soft. I hope we can hear comments or read comments and not get offended by things. It's a professional environment; it's not a personal environment. The things I'm saying, I don't have some vendetta against any player. I care about winning, No. 1, and I'm going to say and do the things that I feel like can advance us. It's going to be tough at some points. It's not a popularity contest all the time. Obviously, as a human, you like being liked and appreciated, but I'm trying to win games because that's my job. Again, I don't feel like when you make a statement like that (criticizing the team's effort in practice) that there needs to be some big response or feelings hurt or offense that somebody takes with it. If they do, they're taking it the wrong way because this is a professional environment. Like I said, I'm doing things that I feel like are in the best interest of the team from a leadership standpoint, and if no one else is going to stand up and criticize a bad practice, then maybe I need to be the one to do it. So I did it.... You get to this league, and to stick around, you've got to be self-motivated. So as a leader, you try to inspire, but the motivation to change and to improve has got to come from within."
     — Aaron Rodgers

"Identify issues and beliefs (about yourself) and self-talk make a big difference. A lot of people believe they just can't do certain things, like remember names. A lot of people say, 'Oh, I have a bad memory.' Right? They're always like 'I have memory' or 'I have focus' or 'I don't have focus' or 'I have creativity' or 'I don't have creativity.' I want you to scrap that. Creativity is not something you have, it's something you do. Focus is not something you have, focus is something you do, energy is not something you have or don't have, it's something you do. Memory is not something you have, it's something you do. And what's the benefit of turning it into a do, as opposed to something you have? You have control over it, because you can put it into a process. It becomes a strategy. Because there's a strategy for remembering names. There's a strategy for having focus. It's a verb, not a noun."
     — Jim Kwik

"Love is a verb.... Love is not a feeling, it is behavior, it is how a person acts..."
     — Oprah

"Nobody loves free stuff more than rich people."
     — Crazy Rich Asians