Jakub > Jakub's Quotes

“It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”
― Albert Einstein

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
― Socrates

“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

“When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready... The teacher will Disappear.”
― Tao Te Ching

“1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the Way.”
― Miyamoto Musashi

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.”
― Gene Kim, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“Zrobiłem przynajmniej znudzoną minę, zawsze tak postępowałam, kiedy rozmowa w towarzystwie mnie przerastała. Wyrobiłem tym sobie opinię człowieka niezwykle inteligentnego i bywałego.”
― Szczepan Twardoch, Morfina

“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman— like a man— on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can— if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered , irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
― Voltaire

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”
― Benjamin Franklin

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.”
― Epictetus

“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
― United States Marine Corps

“If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures”
― Musonius Rufus

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
― Epictetus

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If you want to know your past life, look at your present condition.
If you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”
― Padmasambhava