Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
― Herman Melville

“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
― Steve Jobs

“Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.”
― David McCullough

“The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves. The country abounds in grapes, yet they buy, at a great price, bad wine made in Boston...”
― Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
― George Mallory

“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Art is anything you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”
― Steve Jobs

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone”
― Pablo Picasso

“I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.”
― Edmund Hillary

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came.

[Remarks at the Dinner for the America's Cup Crews, September 14 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.”
― Bruce Catton

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

“If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning...”
― Walter Mosley

“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.”
― Herman Melville

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
― George Carlin