Samir > Samir's Quotes

“Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo
Ipse domi stimul ac nummos contemplar in arca.
(The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box.)”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies. But they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“If I had reasons to love you, then there’d be reasons for me to not love you”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“Beautiful friendships” are often based on the fact that the players complement each other with great economy and satisfaction, so that there is a maximum yield with a minimum effort from the games they play with each other.”
― Eric Berne, Games People Play

“To hurry is to neglect that environment and to be conscious only of something that is still out of sight down the road, or of mere obstacles, or solely of oneself.”
― Eric Berne, Games People Play

“Another simple rule is, when you are verbally assaulted, do not counterattack. Instead, disarm your counterpart by asking a calibrated question.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky--but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“It is the brain, the little gray cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within--not without." ~ Poirot”
― Agatha Christie

“Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm