Greg > Greg's Quotes

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life.
To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. The next step is to transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don’t like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don’t do often enough because it seems too much trouble. There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“If people were superior to animals, they'd take good care of them," said Pooh.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“A clever mind is not a heart. Knowledge doesn't really care, wisdom does.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

“There are few things more pathetic than those who have lost their curiosity and sense of adventure, and who no longer care to learn.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley, Way to Be!: 9 Ways To Be Happy And Make Something Of Your Life

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
― Steve Jobs

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."

[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]”
― Steve Jobs

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”
― Steve Jobs

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.”
― Steve Jobs

“Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
― Clayton M. Christensen

“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”
― Clayton Christensen

“I don't view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it's actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert.”
― Clayton M. Christensen

“If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“It turns out that for most people who have chronic diseases with deferred consequences, "improve my financial health" is a much more pervasively experienced job than "maintain my physical health.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

“This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“To act without knowing why; to do things as they have always been done, without asking why; to engage in an activity all one's life without really understanding what it is about and how it relates to other things--this is to be one of the crowd.”
― Mencious

“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings

“I love, therefore I am vulnerable.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”
― Daniel H. Pink

“One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what
people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities,
the result is boredom. But when the
match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.”
― Daniel H. PInk