Quotes & passages I wrote down in Lisbon

I have quotes and passages of stuff that resonated with me – when reading, watching movies, seminars, talking with people, following cool people on twitter – laying around everywhere in notebooks, printed pages, marked in my favorite books.

Below you find the ones I wrote in a notebook I bought during my Erasmus stay in Lisbon.

All of these had a specific meaning for me at the time – and still bring up memories now.

These two explain why I think doing this is useful:

“Make your own bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
– Ralph W. Emerson

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, and what is uniquely your own.”
– Bruce Lee

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A

“The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.”

Gordon W. Allport
Man’s Search for Meaning

“Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you have more time and more tranquillity.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surely. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Not to assume it’s impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions – not outside.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Enter their minds, and you’ll find the judges you’re so afraid of – and how judiciously they judge themselves.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Endless suffering – all from not allowing the mind to do its job. Enough.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Isn’t it yourself you should reproach – for not anticipating that they’d act this way? The logos gave you the means to see it – that a given person would act a given way – but you paid no attention. And now you’re astonished that he’s gone and done it. So when you call someone ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘ungrateful’, turn your approach on yourself. It was you who did wrong. By assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust. Or by doing them a favor and expecting something in return, instead of looking to the action itself for your reward.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“None of us have much time. And yet you act as if things were eternal – the way you fear and long for them …”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Nothing has meaning to my mind except its own actions. Which are within its own control. And it’s only the immediate ones that matter. Its past and future actions too are meaningless.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible.
– Aiming to do what, then?
To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations

“Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Perceptions like that – latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time – all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust – to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.”
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
B

“Je mist meer dan je meemaakt.”
Martin Bril

“There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on.”
Charles Bukowski
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“It just didn’t matter to me. Just another slice out of the senselessness of life.”
Charles Bukowski
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
C

“As I grown older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”
Andrew Carnegie

“If I am walking with two other mean, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad of the other and correct them in myself.”
Confucius

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
Confucius

“Wherever you go, go with all your heart!”
Confucius

“Act the way you would like to be and soon you will be the way you act.”
George W. Crane

“Never defend yourself of words from a fool unless you are willing to become his equal.”
Gene Crawford

“No need to stress, hold you back to much.”
Kid Cudi

E

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”
Albert Einstein

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Annotated Emerson

“Finish everyday and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Annotated Emerson
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Annotated Emerson

“Don’t be timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Annotated Emerson

“When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Annotated Emerson
“So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us: since when we exist death is not yet present, and when death is present, we do not exist. Therefore it is relevant neither to the living nor the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.”
Epicurus

“Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”
Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving

F

“What is the worst thing that could happen?”
Tim Ferriss
Four Hour Work Week

“For a long time, I’ve known that they key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable.”
Tim Ferriss
Four Hour Work Week

“You are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”
Tim Ferriss
Four Hour Work Week

“The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.”
Tim Ferriss
Four Hour Body
“Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”
Tim Ferriss
Four Hour Work Week Blog
“Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”
Benjamin Franklin
“When you’re writing, don’t think about all the people who may read your words. Think of one person. Then write for that person.”
Jason Fried
ReWork

“Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. If you’re inspired on a Friday, swear off the weekend and dive into the project. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in 24 hours. Inspiration is a time machine in that way.”
Jason Fried
ReWork

“The core of your business should be built around things that won’t change. Things that people are going to want today and ten years from now. Those are the things you should invest in.”
Jason Fried
ReWork

G

“Just about all the things we treasure in our world were built by people who were intent on making things bigger, enabling things to be better, opening doors for us to achieve. The line between a realist and an optimist is hard to draw. And both might be self-fulfilling.”
Seth Godin
Seth’s Blog

“You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.”
Seth Godin
Seth’s Blog

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it’s to be satisfying.”
Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers
H

“On the outside, be like everyone else: indolent and unsure and drifting. On the inside: none of these things.”
Ryan Holiday

J

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
Steve Jobs
Stanford Commencement Adress

“Keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs Biography
K

“Look at the party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate.”
Jack Kerouac
On the Road

“For me the only people are the mad ones, the ones that are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing…”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“What do you expect out of life?”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone’s distorted view.”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“All I hope, Dean, is someday we’ll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together.”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you’ll see.”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
Jack Kerouac
On The Road

“Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.”
Charles F. Kettering

“Yes, for those of us who manage to cope somehow with our own mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their conciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their Idealism – and their assumption of Immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from the twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because and in spite of his awareness of the meaningless of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life withing the boundaries of death – however mutable a man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
Stanley Kubrick
On The Meaning Of Life

L

“Consume less, live more.”
wall in Lisbon (near Catolica)
M

“Happiness only real when shared.”
Christopher McCandless
Into The Wild

“Que sais je?”
Michel de Montaigne

“Changing your mind is a good thing.”
Michel de Montaigne

“Chapters end. Sometimes you gotta shake things up.”
Becka Moody
Californication

P

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”
Pablo Picasso
“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it’s called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it’s called a Religion.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life. Not the top.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“We always criticize most in others, that which we fear most in ourselves.”
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance.”
Steven Pressfield
The Art Of War

“Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
Steven Pressfield
The Art Of War
R

“When in doubt, sound decisive.”
Idan Ravin
@Idanwan

“Folks on top of their game never tell u what they’ll do, while folks in the middle & bottom always remind you of their plans.”
Idan Ravin
@Idanwan

“On a day when you are feeling down for whatever reason, do something kind for someone else.”
Idan Ravin
@Idanwan

“They trust me for what I am. Not for what I am not.”
Idan Ravin
@Idanwan
“Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.”
John D. Rockefeller
Titan

“John D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies.”
John D. Rockefeller
Titan

“Save when you can and not when you have to.”
John D. Rockefeller
Titan
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who never knew either victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt

S

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Action cures fear.”
David J. Schwartz
The Magic of Thinking Big

” Look at things not as they are, but as they can be. Visualisation adds value to everything.”
David J. Schwartz
The Magic of Thinking Big

“People who tell you it cannot be done almost always are unsuccessful people, are strictly average or mediocre at best in terms of accomplishment.”
David J. Schwartz
The Magic of Thinking Big

“Persisting in one way is not a guarantee of victory. But persistence blended with experimentation does guarantee success.”
David J. Schwartz
The Magic of Thinking Big
“Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters from a Stoic

“What progress have I made? I am beginning to become my own friend.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters from a Stoic

“Count your years and you’ll be ashamed to be wanting and working for the same things as you wanted when you were a boy. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters from a Stoic

“Let me indicate here how men can prove that their words are their own: let them put their preaching into practice.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters from a Stoic

“We are attracted by wealth, pleasures, good looks, political advancement and various other welcoming and enticing prospects: we are repelled by exertion, death, disgrace and limited means. It follows that we need to train ourselves not to crave for the former and not to be afraid of the latter. Let us fight the battle the other way round – retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Letters from a Stoic
T

“What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rahter indicates his fate.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden

“Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden

“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden

“In the long run mean hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden

“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
“The secret to getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
Mark Twain

“Be a quiet professional.”
US Navy Seals