"A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking."

(Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

"To do original work: It's not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe."

(Marc Andreessen)

"Not my circus. Not my monkeys." (Polish proverb)

“Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”

(Henry David Thoreau)

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."

(Lawrence Pearsall Jacks)

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

(Pablo Picasso)

"When we speak of 'populism' today, we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street - or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on their sofa, their attention skipping fitfully from flat-screen TV to laptop to smartphone to tablet and back to television, or the man and woman at work, sitting in front of desktop PCs but mostly exchanging suggestive personal messages on their smartphones."

(Niall Ferguson)

I don’t think there’s an artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.

– Francis Ford Coppola

“If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.”

(Albert Einstein)