A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor Quotes

“You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“You are a story that you tell yourself, and even if it is not always accurate, it is who you are, and that is very important to you.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“It's important to remember that we all change each other's minds all the time. Any good story is a mind-altering substance.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“You're radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“People will just share the things that confirm their ideology, and those things will always exist. Our reality isn't about what's real, it's about what we pay attention to.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“People who "don't consider race or gender" sure seem to end up hiring almost all white guys, almost as if they're absolutely considering race and gender.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“If you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Call me a pessimist, but I think if bigotry could be solved by access to more information, it would have been solved by now. Hate isn't about lack of understanding: it's about hate.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The solution is, everywhere and always, the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Their voice came out of the watch, slow and then all at once, like ketchup.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter. Nowadays, I don't so much want to be in the room where it happens, but I do really want to help other people choose the right rooms, and help them realize that they really are a part of things that matter. Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that's when we're really lost.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“We seek the safety of isolation even as it kills us.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“For me, it goes without saying that much of the dogma of many religions is harmful. Thinking other people will burn forever because they love the wrong person or worship the wrong god has done a whole lot of bad.
What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It's pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don't show up.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can't tell you what that might be because I don't know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“A lot of the reason we look to friends is because they’re a source of meaning. If you’re getting meaning in other ways, it’s easy to let your friendships wither. That’s one reason success can be isolating.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“This book felt, at times, entirely impossible, but a lot of people made it possible. I'll start with my son, Orin, who reminded me to take frequent breaks by pointing to my computer and saying, "Close it.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“You want stories that make sense, and this might not make sense to you. We build narratives of genius and exceptionality among the people who have power, and they are often exceptional, but no more exceptional than hundreds of thousands of others. In your system, power concentrates naturally. And so the thing that is most exceptional about a powerful person is almost always their power.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“I wanted people to understand that we are a trash fire of a species, but also most people are pretty cool.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“And it turns out, time does eventually pass no matter how anxious you are.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“But your real is real whether you deal with it or not.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“I think part of the point of loving someone is being able to deal with their brokenness.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Any good story is a mind-altering substance.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“These are the lies our brains tell us to push happiness out of our reach. What is the evolutionary purpose of that? Is happiness stagnation? Maybe. Maybe life (all life, not just human life) is nothing more than wanting something and being able to go for it. What is life with no want? Satisfaction sounds lovely, but evolutionarily it was apparently selected against.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“We all only have our own lives to live inside of.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor