Andy > Andy's Quotes

“You ever think that life is something that happens and that you’re not ever completely prepared for?”
― John Lescroart, The Vig

“The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies.”
― John Lescroart, A Plague of Secrets

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi , The Essential Rumi

“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
― T.S. Eliot

“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,

within       I am awake

repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“We play a show, and there's a hundred people, and people will say "You must miss playing to a thousand people." But I don't. I might miss playing. That's what I would miss, but I don't miss it, because I am playing. I feel completely fortunate to have this outlet for something I don't really feel like I have a choice in, to make music. I've got to make it. And the fact that people care enough to want to come see me make it, or buy a recording, or want to call me up to talk about it? Fuck, man, I think that is gravy.”
― Ian Mackaye

“American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it's profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It's just about sucking everything up. My idea was: Enjoy baking, sell your bread, people like it, sell more. Keep the bakery going because you're making good food and people are happy.”
― Ian Mackaye

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
― John Lennon

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats

“Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.”
― John Keats

“From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”
― Anais Nin

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from.”
― Seth Godin

“One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.”
― Seth Godin, Poke the Box

“Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you're doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they're hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.”
― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
― Greg Mckeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”
― J.M. Barrie

“Comparison is the death of joy.”
― Mark Twain

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work”
― Thomas A. Edison

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies - every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories

“We overvalue nonessentials like a nicer car or house, or even intangibles like the number of our followers on Twitter or the way we look in our Facebook photos. As a result, we neglect activities that are truly essential, like spending time with our loved ones, or nurturing our spirit, or taking care of our health.”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”
― Voltaire