Roger Lawrence > Roger's Quotes

“There is only one way to learn,” the alchemist answered. “It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“If a person is living out his Personal Legend, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” “I’m”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist: The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel

“He still dreams about Cinderella and she keeps pining for Prince Charming, while they argue about whose turn it is to take out the rubbish.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day forfeit their ability even to understand the questions being asked. What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Christianity and other traditional religions are still important players in the world. Yet their role is now largely reactive. In the past, they were a creative force. Christianity, for example, spread the hitherto heretical notion that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries. In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Dataism finds such scenarios utterly ridiculous. ‘Come on,’ it admonishes the Hollywood screenwriters, ‘is that all you could come up with? Love? And not even some platonic cosmic love, but the carnal attraction between two mammals? Do you really think that an all-knowing super-computer or aliens who contrived to conquer the entire galaxy would be dumbfounded by a hormonal rush?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
― Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“Vires acquirit eundo”
― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

“We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” —Archilochus”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Tons of people deserve to be successful because they’re supersmart and interesting and work hard, but they just haven’t had the luck.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Five days a week, I read my goals before I go to sleep and when I wake up. There are 10 goals around health, family, business, etc., with expiration dates, and I update them every 6 months.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Sure, that sounds kinda cool,” I’d say, dropping it in the calendar. Later, I’d pay the price of massive distraction and overwhelm. My agenda became a list of everyone else’s agendas. Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills. To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that, basically, even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“Create slack, as no one will give it to you.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Even more important, the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech could restructure not just economies and societies but our very bodies and minds. In the past, we humans learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us. We knew how to build a dam and stop a river from flowing, but we did not know how to stop the body from aging. We knew how to design an irrigation system, but we had no idea how to design a brain. If a mosquito buzzed in our ear and disturbed our sleep, we knew how to kill the mosquito, but if a thought buzzed in our mind and kept us awake at night, most of us did not know how to kill the thought.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Most humans never enjoyed greater peace or prosperity than they did under the aegis of the liberal order of the early twenty-first century. For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined).6”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from. ~ Jodie Foster”
― M.J. DeMarco, The Millionaire Fastlane

“Time isn’t a commodity, something you pass around like a cake. Time is the substance of life. When anyone asks you to give your time, they’re really asking for a chunk of your life. ~ Antoinette Bosco”
― M.J. DeMarco, The Millionaire Fastlane

“At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“It is hard to explain to naive data-driven people that risk is in the future, not in the past.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning