David Williams's Blog, page 15

April 9, 2011

Quotes book now available 'almost free' on Kindle

I have just completed the publication of my updated version of 10000 Great Quotations for Business, Management & Training as an Amazon Kindle title available in my Almost Free series. The link I've provided above is to the UK site, but it's also generally available here on Amazon.com.



I compiled this collection originally because I needed it myself. That is to say, my mountain of notes, cuttings and print-outs was threatening a landslide in my store cupboard. I could lay a hand on an appropriate quotation just when I required it, provided I had two days' notice of the occasion and nothing else to do but sift through the pile built up over several years. 
The project to create a book of quotations from the best of this random collection put a semblance of order back into my life and on the way provided me with a great deal of pleasure as I rediscovered some of the wise and witty observations that stirred me enough to write them down at the time, only to bury them under my own disorder.

One of the most difficult tasks in selecting material for the book was deciding what to leave out. (My full collection extends to more than 3,000.) It is a highly subjective choice, one which is bound to reveal my own slants and prejudices. There is a bias towards business, management and training because that's how I used to make my living as a public presenter, but many readers have told me how they apply to their own lives, and I trust you will find that too. Many of the quotes stem from seemingly unrelated disciplines such as sport or mass entertainment, and many have been originally spoken or written in an age quite different from the one we know today, but still seem to apply.

Although I have tried to ensure as much variety as possible and offer a wide range of authors, some names do crop up again and again. The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, is a notable quotable. Ironically, he is the man who once famously said 'I hate quotations.

The astonishing Albert Einstein is another I keep returning to, especially for his comments on creativity and learning. Motor manufacturer Henry Ford was a master of the memorable aphorism, as was author Mark Twain.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)I have tried to reflect modern management thinking with an assortment of observations from contemporary 'gurus', especially those I most admire and in some cases have worked with – Tom Peters, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker. I do hope that the tiny nuggets of business philosophy I have scattered among these pages will inspire readers to discover or renew acquaintance with their stimulating books or, in the case of those who still tread the conference platforms, go along to one of their electrifying presentations.


I have sorted this selection of quotations alphabetically into themes and subjects that I trust readers will find appropriate. Some of the distinctions are quite subtle; there are obvious links between Achievement, Success and Winning, for example, and between Failure and Mistakes. I recommend 'surfing' around associated themes for the best results. One of the advantages of this new Kindle edition over the paperack is that the reader can quickly jump to the required section using the 'Go To' function and hyperlinks, but this is also the sort of book that, I hope you will agree, rewards browsing.


I hope I have succeeded in avoiding the predictable and over-familiar. I want readers to be surprised by unexpected gems, to experience the same pleasure I felt when I first came across them, to nod their heads at succinct sagacity, smile at truths eloquently revealed, have their minds expanded by insightful observation and their hearts lifted by inspirational thoughts.

I have tried to sow a little wit among the wisdom – a seedling from Groucho Marx here, from Woody Allen there. Every so often a cartoon character I have uninventively named Murphy pops up with one of those ironic maxims that send up business and office life and help us remember what my friend and sometime colleague Benjamin Zander calls Rule Number 6: 'Don't take yourself so goddam seriously'.

Murphy
My thanks to cartoonist Frank Taylor for creating the Murphy character and to his colleagues at NB Group who helped to realise the original print edition. Working backwards along the production line, an encore of thanks to Julie McPherson and Sue Little for converting my bits of paper into workable manuscript, to Laura James and my son Joe for their hours of help researching sources, and especially to my wife Paula, not only for encouraging me to start the project but for shaping it in a publishable form.

The original print edition of this little book of quotations found its way into offices and homes all over the place (and is still available on Amazon). I trust my new and updated Kindle edition will find new readers in even more places and circumstances.  By making it 'almost free' I'm trying to make it accessible to all.


Of course I will still continue to post extracts from the quotes daily on this blog, but I do hope you will enjoy having the whole selection collected in one place. Enjoy.
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Published on April 09, 2011 10:05

Quotes about Ideas

Here's the next section of quotes from my book 1000 Great Quotations for Business, Management & Training

If you want to have a great idea, have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling, US chemist, double Nobel Prize winner (1901-1994)
Linus Pauling
 If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.
Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist, businessman (1833-1896)


If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Albert Einstein, German physicist (1879-1955)


The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Edward de Bono, Maltese psychologist, author (b. 1933)


The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.
Elbert Hubbard, US publisher, editor (1856-1915)


Daring ideas are like chessmen moving forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, letter-writer (1749-1832)


You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
Ursula K Le Guin, US author (b. 1929)


You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.
Sean O'Casey, Irish dramatist, nationalist (1880-1964)


A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.
Charles Brown, US explorer, adventurer (1863-1945)


Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
Ken Hakuta, US-Japanese entrepreneur (b. 1950)


An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
Franklin D Roosevelt, US President (1882-1945)


Ideas are the raw materials of progress. Everything first takes shape in the form of an idea. But an idea by itself is worth nothing. An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.
Bertie Charles Forbes, British journalist, founder of Forbes Magazine (1880-1954)


The barriers to innovation in many companies are social as much as they are organisational; whole categories of people are ignored as sources of ideas.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, US academic, management author (b. 1943)


If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person.
Ralph Bunche, US diplomat (1904-1971)


A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.
John F Kennedy, US President (1917-1963)


Between the idea
and the reality
falls the shadow.
T S Eliot, US/British poet, dramatist, critic (1888-1965)
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Published on April 09, 2011 09:41

April 8, 2011

Quotes about Habit

Here's the next section of quotes from my book 1000 Great Quotations for Business, Management & Training

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright, essayist (1856-1950)


If you have always done it that way, it's probably wrong.
Charles F Kettering, US engineer, inventor (1876-1958)


If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.
Ed Foreman, US politician, entrepreneur (b. 1933)


New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704)


It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
Kenichi Ohmae, Japanese management consultant (b. 1943)


It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian author, essayist (1821-1881)


Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as criticism of themselves.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, mathematician (1872-1970)
Bertrand Russell

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle, Greek philosopher, scientist, physician (384-322 BC)


It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Henry David Thoreau, US essayist, poet (1817-1862)
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Published on April 08, 2011 08:59

April 7, 2011

Word riddles and puzzles

My son Joe and I have been exchanging riddles about words and language, so I thought readers of my blog might like to take part. Here are twenty tricky ones for you to puzzle over. If you need to check the answers click the Show button at the end of the list. Got some of your own? Use the comments box to add your contribution, or to let me know how well you did.

Riddle 1:
Sentence is not, but word is.
Adjective is not, but noun is.
TLC is not, but TLA is.
Can you explain?


Riddle 2:
Can you write a five letter word in capitals that reads the same upside down (ie rotated)?


Riddle 3:
I can take a beating without a bruise, and when I stop you lose. What am I?


Riddle 4:
I am used to bat with, but I never get a hit. I am always near a ball that is never thrown. What am I?


Riddle 5:
What seven letter word becomes longer when the third letter is removed?


Riddle 6:
I can be long, I can be short;
I can be grown, I can be bought;
I can be painted or left bare;
You can make me round, or make me square.
What am I?


Riddle 7:
What common English word of nine letters remains a common English word each time you remove a letter, even when only one letter remains?


Riddle 8:
Which seven-letter English word contains nine other English words without rearranging any letters?


Riddle 9:
What word can you write, six letters it contains,
If you take away one, twelve is what remains?


Riddle 10:
Take away my first letter, take away my second letter, take away all my letters and I remain the same. What am I?


Riddle 11:
Complete the sentence: I had to walk because I ran...


Riddle 12:
Apart from being methods of transport, what links race car, kayak and smart trams?


Riddle 13:
It's a common question asked in a public place, even though the answer is perfectly obvious. What is the question?


Riddle 14:
You'd be over a hundred before you used this for the first time. What have you been doing, and what have you used for the first time in doing it?


Riddle 15:
Sounds like one letter and written with three,
Two letters the same, and two used you see,
It's single, they're double, brown, blue, green and grey,
Read from both ends it's the same either way.
It's...?


Riddle 16:
It touches only one person, but binds two. What is it?


Riddle 17:
What insect has an insect inside it?


Riddle 18:
If you don't keep it after you have given it you will break it. What is it?


Riddle 19:
What goes up at the same time as it come down, and is both present and past?


Riddle 20:
Think of words ending in -GRY. Two of them are ANGRY and HUNGRY. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The answer is plain to see.



Show/Hide

 



ANSWERS

1. The second in each pair is a word that describes itself (and also describes the first word in the pair), but the first word does not describe itself.

2. SWIMS

3. Your heart.

4. An eyelash.

5. Lounger

6. A fingernail.

7. Startling (Starting [or Starling], Staring, String, Sting, Sing, Sin, In, I)

8. Therein (There, The, Herein, Here, Her, He, Ere, Rein, In)

9. Dozens.

10 A postie.

11 Out of petrol.

12 They're all pallindromic, reading the same forwards and backwards.

13 Is anyone sitting there?

14 Writing out every number in words, starting from ONE. You would not use the letter A until you reached ONE HUNDRED AND ONE.

15 An eye.

16 A wedding ring.

17 Beetle (Bee)

18 A promise.

19 See-saw.

20 Language (the third word in 'the English language').

.Show/hide

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Published on April 07, 2011 11:25