Olufemi > Olufemi's Quotes

“they asked "do you love her to death?"

i said "speak of her over my grave and watch how she brings me back to life”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“Life is growth. You grow or you die.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“It seems wrong to call it "business". It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher–and none of us wavered in the belief that "stakes" didn't mean "money". For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for use business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living–and at some point in the late 1970s, I did, too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive. That was no longer enough to sustain me, or my company. We wanted, as all great business do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud. When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the life of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is–you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you're helping other to live more fully, and if that's business, all right, call me a businessman.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. Warmed”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets gets left on the sidelines, and I didn't want that.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on.
It's all the same drive. The same dream.
It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I'd tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt.
I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull's-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull's-eye. It's not one man's opinion; it's a law of nature.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”
― Gustav Mahler

“What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“They say best men are molded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad”
― William Shakespeare

“When from out of error’s darkness
With a word both sure and ardent
I had drawn the fallen soul,
And you, filled with deepest torment,
Cursed the vice that had ensnared you
And so doing wrung your hands;
When, punishing with recollection
Forgetful conscience, you then told
The tale of all that went before me,
And suddenly you hid your face
In trembling hands and, filled with horror,
Filled with shame, dissolved in tears,
Indignant as you were, and shaken…
Etc., etc., etc.”
― Nikolay A. Nekrasov

“But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew — and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents — that there was all the difference in the world.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“But excessive grief is like a storm at sea, where the frail bark is tossed from the depths to the top of the wave.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas — no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“Thus Dantes, who but three months before had no desire but liberty, had now not liberty enough and panted for wealth. The cause was not in Dantes but in Providence who, whilst limiting the power of man, has filled him with boundless desires.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo