Aviv Kotek > Aviv's Quotes

“The worker picked up Pakhom’s spade, dug a grave, and buried him - six feet from head to heel, exactly the amount of land a man needs.”
― Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories

“The further one goes, the better the land seems. ”
― Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? and Other Stories

“You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
― Marcel Proust

“Think, think, think.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
― Ronald Reagan

“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.”
― vladimir nabokov, Lolita

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
― Bhagavad Gita

“You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits.”
― Bhagavad Gita

“Arise, slay thy enemies, enjoy a prosperous kingdom,”
― Bhagavad Gita

“One who sees inaction in action, and action in inaction, is intelligent among men.”
― Bhagavad Gita

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.”
― Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavad Gita

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.”
― Kenneth Grahame (Wind in the Willows), The Wind in the Willows

“Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself - without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat.”
― Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

“कालो ऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो..... ( I am Time, the great destroyer of the world ~Bhagavad Gita 11.32)”
― Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita

“I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
― Bhagavad Gita, or Song of the Lord, The Bhagavad Gita

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Always having what we want
may not be the best good fortune
Health seems sweetest
after sickness, food
in hunger, goodness
in the wake of evil, and at the end
of daylong labor sleep.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product, or another legal hassle to an already overworked legal counsel thinking more about her next stock-vesting date than your suit. Also, large companies have valuable public brands they must delicately preserve, and which can be assailed by even small companies such as yours, particularly in a tight-knit, appearances-conscious ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley. America still loves an underdog, and you’ll be surprised at how many allies come out of the woodwork when some obnoxious incumbent is challenged by a scrappy startup with a convincing story. So long as you maintain unit cohesion and a shared sense of purpose, and have the basic rudiments of living, you will outlast, outfight, and out-rage any company that sets out to destroy you. Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.”
― Antonio Garcia Martinez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

“Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.”
“Company culture is what goes without saying.
There are no real rules, only laws.
Success forgives all sins.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.
Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.”
― Antonio García Martínez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley