Niklas Denser > Niklas's Quotes

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
― Maya Angelou

“The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.”
― Maya Angelou

“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”
― Maya Angelou

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
― Maya Angelou

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.Everyone wants to win but not everyone wants to prepare to win. preparing to win is where the determination that you will win, is made. Once the game or test or project is underway, it is too late to prepare to win. The actual game, test or projetc is just the end of a long process of getting ready, in which the outcome was really determined. So if you want to win, you must want to prepare to win. Once you prepare to win, winning is almost anti climatic." - Bobby Knight”
― Bobby Knight

“What is most personal is most universal.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.”
― John Wooden

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
― John Wooden

“Don't mistake activity with achievement.”
― John Wooden

“Pursuing a rapid experiment and finding out you were wrong and changing directions isn’t failure. That is the road to success.”
― Nathan Furr, Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation: The lean startup book to help entrepreneurs launch a high-growth business

“There are two types of uncertainty that influence a firm’s ability to create a customer: demand uncertainty (will customers buy it?) and technological uncertainty (can we make a desirable solution?).”
― Nathan Furr, The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization

“Products that delight customers do the unexpected. They solve a problem customers didn’t know they had, or they evoke a positive emotion.”
― Nathan Furr, The Innovator's Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization

“We try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory.”
― Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

“Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.”
― Matthieu Ricard

“but now I’m looking for the periphery, I’m looking for those surprises. That’s the good stuff. It all comes from the uncertainty. That’s the point of the journey.”
― Nathan R Furr, The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
― Lewis Carroll

“I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”
― Lewis Carroll

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“David Brooks

Oprah: I love how you say we should rank our loves in highs and lows. Tell me what that does.
David Brooks: That’s a concept from the great theologian Augustine. And he asked the question, what is sin? When we use the word sin now, we only use the word in the context of fattening deserts. But in traditional morality, it’s the sense that we have something broken. And I don’t like the word sin when it’s meant to suggest we’re dark and depraved inside. But Augustine had a beautiful formula. He said, “We sin when we have our loves out of order.” And what he meant by that—
Oprah: Oh, this is good. “We sin when we have our loves out of order.” Yes.
David: So we all love a lot of things. We love family. We love money. We love a little affection. Status. Truth. And we all know that some loves are higher. We know that our love of family is higher than our love of money. Or our love of truth should be higher than our love of money. And if we’re lying to get money, we’re putting our loves out of order. And so sometimes just by our nature, we get them out of order. So, for example, if a friend tells you a secret, and you blab it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And we know that’s wrong. That’s the wrong order. And so it’s useful to sit down and say, “What do I love? What are the things I really love? And in what order do I love them? Am I spending time on my highest love? Or am I spending time on a lower love?”
― Oprah Winfrey, The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights from Super Soul Conversations

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Plan for what it is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The intelligent have plans; the wise have principles.”
― Raheel Farooq

“No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be able to leave it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Journal of Leo Tolstoy

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”
― Gloria Steinem