Marvin Ma > Marvin's Quotes

“Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
― Henry Ford

“Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux réjouies
Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!”
― Paul Valéry, Le cimetière marin / El cementerio marino

“A good question is worth a million good answers. A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age. A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play-
I dropped the worry on the way-
And God was good to me every day.”
― John D. rockefeller

“We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of" national efficiency," are less visible) less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated.

We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.”
― Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management

“Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities:

Pick the future as against the past;

Focus on opportunity rather than on problem;

Choose your own direction - rather than climb on the bandwagon; and

Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.”
― Peter Drucker, EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE

“What I’ve found works best for me personally is a pen-and-paper list for each day with ~3 major tasks and ~30 minor ones, and an annual to-do list of overall goals.)”
― Sam Altman, Startup Playbook

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Wild Years

“Judge an article not by the quality of what is framed and hanging on the wall, but by the quality of what’s in the wastebasket.”
― Leslie Lamport

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. ”
― Edwin Schlossberg

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”
― Samuel Johnson, Johnsonian Miscellanies - Vol II

“Never trust a preacher with more than two suits”
― Lenny Bruce

“I feel an enormous sense of relief and some joy, but mostly relief. There’s a monkey that’s been sitting on my shoulder for 40 years, and he’s been nattering in my ear and saying, “Ehhh, how do you know this is really going to work? You’ve gotten a whole bunch of people involved. Suppose it never works right?” And suddenly, he’s jumped off. It’s a huge relief.”
― Rainer Weiss

“Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room...”
― Andrew John Wiles

“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”
― Lautreamont

“A 19-year-old with this sort of foresight and life plan was truly unprecedented and typical of his anything-but-average youth, which would explain his drive and obsession to get things done, and now.
‘For every new day, a new invention.’
Surprisingly, Son had managed to pull his invention scheme off, thanks largely to combining pre-existing things into something new. To facilitate this, he had written down random nouns in English – ‘tangerine’, ‘spike’, ‘memory’ – on cards. Once he had amassed a deck of around 300 cards, he would pull three out of the stack, turn them over, and then see whether or not the words he had chosen could be combined into a new product. The three words could be completely nonsensical together, but could still produce good ideas, no matter how eccentric”
― Atsuo Inoue, Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley

“If there is one thing the experts agree on, then it is this: You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The way that Feynman learned and internalized new ideas was to first attack them head-on the old-fashioned way — by reading and thinking through them. The key emphasis in that sentence is on the word thinking. Famously, Feynman would read the abstract of a scientific paper, and before reading any further, attempt to solve the stated problem. Only then would he read through the rest of the paper. He was focused on mentally wrestling with an idea as opposed to letting someone else walk him to the final answer.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I did not feel discouragement very often, and when I did, it did not last longer than overnight. But there was one evening, during the writing of The Fountainhead, when I felt so profound an indignation at the state of "things as they are" that it seemed as if I would never regain the energy to move one step farther toward "things as they ought to be." Frank talked to me for hours, that night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despises. By the time he finished, my discouragement was gone; it never came back in so intense a form.”
― Ayn Rand

“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
― Steve Jobs

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that bums with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.”
― Gary Provost

“Around 2002 I attended a private party for Google—before its IPO, when it was a small company focused only on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“When you view the world as a series of outputs, you form opinions. But when you view the world as a series of systems, you form strategies”
― Channing Allen

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
― Seneca the Younger

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
― Louis Pasteur

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann