Jim > Jim's Quotes

“Put plainer, my sense is that western culture would be a damn sight poorer today if John Lennon had been forced to carry a goddamn BlackBerry.”
― Merlin Mann

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.”
― William Gibson

“It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?"

Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.”
― Jim Collins

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
― Stephen R. Covey

“Do not keep company with people who speak of careers. Not only are such people uninteresting in themselves; they also have no interest in anything interesting. . . . Keep company with people who are interested in the world outside themselves. The one who never asks you what you are working on; who never inquires as to the success of your latest project; who never uses the word career as a noun -- he is your friend.”
― Roger Rosenblatt

“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.”
― Jack Welch

“Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.”
― Matt Taibbi, Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
― Ernest Rutherford

“The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.”
― Lord Kelvin

“Please, don’t drive a school bus blindfolded.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.”
― Clay Shirky

“Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.”
― Clay Shirky

“It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.”
― Clay Shirky

“Some people see things that are and ask, Why?
Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?
Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that.”
― George Carlin

“What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.”
― Jacques Monod

“Small Changes Stick.”
― Merlin Mann

“In talking with happy people, I found they've all figured out ways to focus on three things: Good Decisions, Good Relationships and Good Work.

(paraphrased from the Inbox Zero Video)”
― Merlin Mann

“Before you get good, you need to first stop sucking.”
― Merlin Mann

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Task are like Ducks. We should look to shoot them not store them.

(paraphrased from Twitter Meeting)”
― Merlin Mann

“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”
― Ovid, Heroides

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they want to connect, fuse, recombine.... They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.

The single maxim that runs through the book: Where Good Ideas Come From .”
― Steven Johnson

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities