“The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of the ages may be preserved by quotation”
– Isaac D’Israeli
Non Fictional Characters
J.R.R Tolkein
I “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost”
II “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens”
III “If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world”
IV “It’s a job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish”
Albert Einstein
I “Stay away from negative people, they have a problem for every solution”
II “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that’s counted truly counts”
Friedrich Nietzsche
I “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”
II “The man who seeks wit, has no wit”
III “Shared joy, not compassion, makes a friend”
IIV “I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws”
Viktor Frankl
“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour”
George Orwell
I “Fascism is an extreme form of class rule paradoxically expressed through socialist ideology” (paraphrase)
II “People appreciate power at the level which they understand it”
Yuval Noah Harari
I “Monotheism explains order but is mystified by evil. Dualism expects mans evil but is puzzled by order”
II “Reality is composed by many threads”
Phil Knight
I “The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone, say goodbye”
II “The cowards never strayed, the weak died along the way – that leaves us”
Abraham Lincoln
I “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”
Ray Dalio
I “Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all”
II “Pain + Reflection = Progress”
III “The happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it”
Christopher Hitchens
I “Nationalism is most prominent at its periphery”
II “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”
III “Human decency is not dervied from religion. It precedes it”
IV “The essence of the idependent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks”
V “High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments”
VI “You have to choose your future regrets”
VII “The finest fury is the most controlled’
VIII “Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay”
IX “Cheap booze is a false economy”
X “He accused me of trying to assassinate his character and I had to remind him, no, i’m afraid your character committed suicide a long time ago”
XI “I most respect Jesus for being able to turn water into wine, I can only turn water into piss”
XII “He seems to be chewing far more than he bites off”
XIII “I hate not to write though I’m not sure I enjoy it. The real pleasure comes much later when you see it in print”
XIV “I think it’s positively immoral to teach morality by means of lies and threats”
XV “For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”
XVI “The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics”
Sigmund Freud
“The future of evolution will continue, as long as you are afraid of death”
Winston Churchill
I “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”
II “A lie gets half way across the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”
III “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”
IV “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees an opportunity in every difficulty”
V “Kites ride highest against the wind, not with it”
VI “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”
VII “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones”
VIII “You put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.”
VIV “The faintest ink is better than the best memory” Japanese Proverb
“Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable…A meeting of grave citizens, protected by all the cynicism of these prosaic days, is unable to resist its influence. From unresponsive silence they advance to grudging approval and thence to complete agreement with the speaker. The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned the directions…it appears there are certain features common to all the finest speeches in the English language…rhetorical power is neither wholly bestowed nor wholly acquired, but cultivated. The peculiar temperament and talents of the orator must be his by nature, their development is encouraged by practice. The orator is real. The rhetoric is partly artificial…The orator is the embodiment of the passions of the multitude…Before he can draw their tears, his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe. He may be often inconsistent. He is never consciously insincere.”
Ernest Hemingway
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man, true nobility is being superior to your former self”
Charles Dickens
“Noone is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another”
Warren Buffett
I “Someone is sitting in the shade today, because someone planted a tree a long time ago”
II “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it”
III “Debt is like driving a car at 100 miles and hour down a hill with no seatbelt with a dagger taped to the middle of the steering wheel”
Will Durant
“The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit”
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”
“A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean”
“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”
“you can’t fool all the people all the time,” but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country”
“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war”
“Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice”
“One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages”
“the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”
“Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life.
One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy.
Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy.
A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government”
“We are choked with News and starved of History”
“Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance”
Norm Macdonald
“Once I learned this truth, I began to see examples of it everywhere. A picture hung on the wall of our parlor. In it, a woman was taking a shirt from a clothesline. She had clothespins in her teeth and it was windy and a boy was tugging at her dress. The woman looked like she was in a hurry and the whole scene gave me the idea that, just outside the frame, full, dark clouds were gathering. But that was not what it was. It was paint. So I decided right then and there to see the picture as it really was. I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is”
“It takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is”
David Foster Wallace
I “Blind certainty – a close mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up”
II “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else”
III “On surviving the day to day trenches of adult existence”
IV “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of, quote, ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
Joseph Stalin
I “It doesn’t matter who votes, it only matters who counts the votes”
II “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic”
Oscar Wilde
I “A cynical person is one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”
II “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at”
III “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power”
IV “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist”
Bernard Arnault
“Luxury goods are the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins”
Thomas Sowell
I “It takes considerable knowledge just to realise the extent of your own ignorance“
II “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing“
Plato
I “Wise men speak because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something”
Jack Ma
“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine”
Albert Camus
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life”
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is”
“Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal”
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t”
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world”
Will Durant
“Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarted by the fertility of the simple”
Naval Ravikant
I “Money has a steep discount rate”
II “The mark of a charlatan is to explain simple things in a complicated way and the mark of a genius is to explain complicated things in a simple way”
III “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand waiting to throw it at somebody”
IV “Everyman has two lives and his second starts when he realises he has one”
V “Bankers raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it. They’ve taken huge risks where they privatised the gains and socialised the losses”
Blaise Pascal
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”
Nassim Taleb
“Wind can extinguish a candle but energise a flame”
“A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting the conversation“
“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee“
“You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure”
“Anyone who likes meetings should be banned from attending meetings”
“Reaping the benefits of a positive outcome must also be associated with paying the negative outcomes“
“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions”
“No muscles without strength,
friendship without trust,
opinion without consequence,
change without aesthetics,
age without values,
life without effort,
water without thirst,
food without nourishment,
love without sacrifice,
power without fairness,
facts without rigor,
statistics without logic,
mathematics without proof,
teaching without experience,
politeness without warmth,
values without embodiment,
degrees without erudition,
militarism without fortitude,
progress without civilisation,
friendship without investment,
virtue without risk,
probability without ergodicity,
wealth without exposure,
complication without depth,
fluency without content,
decision without asymmetry,
science without skepticism,
religion without tolerance,
and most of all: nothing without skin in the game“
“I take risks crossing the road every day, so according to you I should stay home in a state of paralysis. The answer is that we don’t cross the street blindfolded, we use sensory information to mitigate risks and reduce exposure to extreme shocks”
Carl Jung
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
“The kernel of all jealousy is a lack of love”
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell”
Roald Dahl
“Life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones”
Napoleon
“If I have any ambition, it is so natural to me, so innate, so intimately linked with my existence that it is like the blood that circulates in my veins, like the air I breathe.”
“To have lived without leaving a trace of one’s existence is not to have lived at all.”
“A man must know himself. Until then, all endeavors are in vain, all schemes collapse.”
Eduardo Galeano
“England and Holland are gold and slave contrabandists”
Tom Petty
“She was a part of my heart and now she’s just a line on my face”
Søren Kierkegaard
“Life can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”
“ANGST= a condition when we understand how many choices we face, and how little understanding we can ever have of how to exercise these choices wisely. Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. Our constant angst means that unhappiness has been written in the script of life”
“Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back”
“Life is something to experienced not explained”
“I opened my eyes and saw the real world – and I began to laugh, and I have been laughing ever since”
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
Admin
“We will see what today looks like tomorrow”
“Don’t eat spicy food the night before a big hike”
“Yesterday’s tomorrow doesn’t look like today”
“I’m not stoic enough to survive upraised”
“You are unique, just like everybody else”
“A man must be certain of some things, but uncertain about most”“Never assume something that is obvious to you, is obvious to others”
Other
I “Getting a few coins at any price” Siberian Man
II “She’s rasing your kids while she’s swallowing mine” J. Cole
III “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything drops to zero” Tyler Durdin
IV “The difference between 2% and 3% isn’t 1%, it’s 50%” Nasim Taleb
V “There’s a thin line between heaven and here” Bubbles
VI “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction” Antoine de Saint-Exupery”
VII “If the government were put in charge of the Sahara dessert, within in 5 years they would have a shortage of sand” Milton Friedman
IIX “Amorality is acting in interest, with no regard to good or evil” Unmodern
IX “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.” Anthony Bourdain
X “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them… I have others” Gaucho Marx
XI ” The largest arm, the greatest charm, doing all the harm” Chael Sonnen
XII “One hopes the prose will give a sort of pleasure without you being able to tell why” Martin Amis
XII “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal” Paulo Cohello
XIV “Rockbottom is a solid foundation upon which to build your life” J.K Rowling
XV “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat” Socrates
XVI “On travel, the invigorating embrace of risk, the engrossing immersion in the totally unkown, and the etnoxicating copmany of foreign woman” James Holman
XVII “perfect happiness is a beautiful sunset, the giggle of a grandchild, the first snowfall. It’s the little things that make happy moments, not the grand events. Joy comes in sips, not gulps” Sharon Draper
Sherlock Holmes
“If you are going to do something amazing, you are certainly underqualified to do it” Watson
The Talented Mr Ripley
“This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life” Tomas Ripley
Gandalf
I “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us”
II “All good stories deserve embellishment”
III “I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil”
IV “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom”
Bilbo Baggins
“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost”
Aragorn
“Deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised”
The Count of Monte Cristo
I “One does a bit of everything, a man must live”
II “Vague plans, they are founded on sand which blows away in the first breeze”
Don Draper
‘You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts, but I never forget.’
Billions
“The best way to bond with someone is’nt doing them a favour, it’s asking for one” Chuck Roades
Westworld
“You can’t play god without being acquainted by the devil” Dr Robert Ford
Icarus
“The best advice is worthless if you don’t take it” Icarus
Pride and Prejudice
I “It is my intention, if i may so bold, to remain close to you throughout the evening” Mr Collins
