Quotes

“The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.”

“Say no to anything that is not a high-value use of your time and your life.”

“People who take a long view of their lives and careers always seem to make much better decisions about their time and activities than people who give very little thought to the future.”

“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.”

“It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.”

“If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.”

“If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long.”

“If the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is eat a live frog, then nothing worse can happen for the rest of the day!”

“Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. The bigger your goals and the clearer they are, the more excited you become about achieving them. The more you think about your goals, the greater becomes your inner drive and desire to accomplish them.”

“Everyone procrastinates. The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on.”

Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.”

In general, one must have value oneself in order freely and willingly to acknowledge value in another. This is the basis for the requirement that modesty accompany all merits, as well as the disproportionately loud praise for this virtue which alone, among all its sisters, is always added to the praise of anyone distinguished in some way by the person who dares to praise him, so as to conciliate the worthless and silence their wrath. For what is modesty if not false humility which someone with merits and advantages in a world teeming with perfidious envy uses to beg the pardon of those who have none? Someone who does not lay claim to merit because he in fact has none is being honest, not modest.

That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

It is a great folly to lose the inner man in order to gain the outer, that is, to give up the whole or the greater part of one's quiet, leisure, and independence for splendour, rank, pomp, titles and honours.

You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.