Moritz Wallawitsch > Moritz's Quotes

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us where we are: what I'm good at, what I care about most, and where I'm headed.”
― Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“Figure out how to get into the networks because they are what amplifies your learnings, give you access to opportunity, information and Intelligence to know what to do.”
― Reid Hoffman

“What would you do if you weren't afraid?”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“Anything that makes weak - physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.”
― Vivekananda

“The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 21.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“the future of science in this country will be determined by our basic educational policy.”
― Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier

“We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Steve Jobs

“Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“If you don't sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice”
― Anonymous

“Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative?”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World