Because coffee has limits.

1. 96 Quotes* on Making Big
Ideas Real and Challenging
the Status Quo * A library of greatest hits**
** For now

2. The strength of words is directly related to
their ability to inspire action. I hope the
following examples help accomplish this
goal.

3. “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish
nothing if you do that. Your mind must
know it has got to get down to work.”
-Pearl S. Buck

4. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence,
then, is not an act, but a habit.”
-Aristotle

5. “You can’t TRY to do things, you must simply
DO them.”
-Ray Bradbury

6. “It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s
the way you carry it.”
-Lena Horne

7. “It is not enough to be busy (the ants are busy):
we must ask: ‘What are we busy about?’”
-Henry David Thoreau

8. “The most basic form of human stupidity is
forgetting what we are trying to accomplish.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

9. “Creation is in part merely the business of
forgoing great and small distractions.”
-E.B. White

10. “Tell me to what you pay attention and I
will tell you who you are.”
-Jose Ortega y Gasset

11. “The difference between successful people
and very successful people is that very
successful people say ‘no’ to almost
everything.”
-Warren Buffett

12. “You can do anything, but not everything.”
-David Allen

13. “Our intention is to affirm this life, not to
bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest
improvements in creation…but simply to
wake up to the very life we’re living.”
-John Cage

14. “A creator needs only one enthusiast to
justify him.”
-Man Ray

15. “Your mind will answer most questions if
you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
-William S. Burroughs

16. “The artist who aims at perfection in everything
achieves it in nothing.”
-Eugene Delacroix

17. “Life is either daring adventure or nothing
at all.”
-Helen Keller

18. “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of
operating.”
-John Cleese

19. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us
just show up and get to work.”
-Chuck Close

20. “There is no quality in this world that is not
what it is merely by contrast. Nothing
exists in itself.”
-H. Melville

21. “Above all, try something.”
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

22. “I never worry about the future. It comes
soon enough.”
-Albert Einstein

23. “The world of reality has its limits; the world
of imagination is boundless.”
-J.J. Rousseau

24. “He who moves not forward goes backward.”
-JW. van Goethe

25. “Know that there is often hidden in us a
dormant poet, always young and alive.”
-Alfred de Musset

26. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of
the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
- Mark Twain

27. “I can’t give you a surefire formula for
success, but I can give you a formula for
failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
- Herbert Bayard Swope

28. “Everything popular is wrong.”
-Oscar Wilde

29. “I am an old man and have known a great
many troubles, but most of them never
happened.”
-Mark Twain

30. “Action expresses priorities.”
-Gandhi

31. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
-George Bernard Shaw

32. “Perfection is not when there is no more to
add, but no more to take away.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

33. “Love of bustle is not industry.”
-Seneca

34. “Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not
the chess piece.”
-Ralph Charell

35. “In the end it’s not the years in your life that
count, it’s the life in your years.”
-Abraham Lincoln

36. “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard
enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.”
-Frank Wilczek

37. “I love fools’ experiments. I’m always making
them.”
-Charles Darwin

38. “Know the rules well, so you can break them
effectively.”
-Dalai Lama XIV

39. “Out of clutter, find simplicity.”
-Albert Einstein

40. “Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may
find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed
ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all
because we never push through the obstruction.”
-William James

41. “One who makes no mistakes makes nothing
at all.”
-Giacomo Casanova

42. “Discovery consists of seeing what
everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought.”
-Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

43. “There are two types of creativity: the creativity
of making zero to one, and the creativity of
making one to 1,000.”
-Kazuhiro Nishi

44. “We don’t pay attention to boring things.”
-John Medina (Brain Rules, Rule #4)

45. “You do not merely want to be the best. You
want to be considered the only ones who do
what you do.”
-Jerry Garcia

46. “We don’t know where we get our ideas
from. We do know that we do not get them
from our laptops.”
-John Cleese

47. “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action
breeds confidence and courage. If you want to
conquer fear, do not sit home and think about
it. Go out and get busy.”
-Dale Carnegie

48. “No one is obliged to be a genius, but everyone
is obliged to participate.”
-Philippe Starck

49. “My friend, drop all your preconceived and
fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why
this cup is useful? Because it is empty.”
-Bruce Lee

50. “All children are born artists. The problem
is to remain artists as we grow up.”
-Pablo Picasso

51. “If I’d have followed the rules, I’d never have
gotten anywhere.”
-Marilyn Monroe

52. “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a
quickening that is translated through you into
action, and because there is only one of you in
all of time, this expression is unique.”
-Martha Graham

53. “Action may not always be happiness…but
there is no happiness without action.”
-Benjamin Disraeli

54. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they
feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to
them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and
synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more
experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very
diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear
solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the
human experience, the better design we will have.”
-Steve Jobs

55. “All big things in this world are done by
people who are naïve and have an idea that is
obviously impossible.”
-Charles Hamilton

56. “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What
was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their
work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was inner go.
Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security
was the watchword – as if life knew any other stability than through
constant change, or any form of security except through a constant
willingness to take risks ”
-Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man

57. “The future is sending back good wishes and
waiting with open arms.”
-Kobi Yamada

58. “Your imagination is the preview to life’s
coming attractions.”
-Albert Einstein

59. “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have
exactly the same number of hours per day that were
given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo,
Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson,
and Albert Einstein.”
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

60. “You have brains in your head and feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own and you know what you know
And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.”
-Dr. Seuss

61. “The tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goals,
the tragedy lies in not having any goals to reach. It isn’t a
calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity
not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture
your ideals, but it is a disaster to have no ideals to capture.
It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a
disgrace to have no stars to reach.”
-Dr. Benjamin Mays

62. “So many of our dreams at first seem
impossible, then seem improbable, and
then, when we summon the will, they soon
seem inevitable.”
-Christopher Reeve

63. “Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child, listen to the DON’TS –
listen to the SHOULDN’TS, the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
– listen to the NEVER HAVES. Then listen close to me –
anything can happen, child. ANYTHING can be.”
-Shel Silverstein

64. “This may be the turning point your grandchildren will tell stories about
years from now: the time you leap over the abyss to the other side of the
Great Divide and begin your life in earnest. On the other hand, this
moment of truth may end up being nothing more than a brief awakening
when you glimpse what’s possible on the other side of the Great Divide,
but then tell yourself, “Nah, that’s waayyy too far to jump.” In that case,
your grandchildren will have to be content talking about what delicious
cookies you used to bake or what your favorite sports team was. It will
depend on how brave you’ll be.”
-Rob Brezsney

65. “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its
best day and night to make you like everybody else means
to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight
– but never stop fighting!”
-e.e. cummings

66. “Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greatest
results in business and career if you drop the word
“achievement” from your vocabulary and replace it with
“contribution.””
-Peter Drucker

67. “We are here on earth to do good for
others. What the others are here for I do
not know.”
-W.H. Auden

68. “Here is the test to determine whether
your mission on earth is finished: If you’re
alive, it isn’t.”
-Richard Bach

69. “I would rather be ashes than dust; I would rather that my spark
should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot;
I would rather be in a superb meteor, every atom of me in a
magnificent glow than in a sleepy and permanent planet; the proper
function of man is to live, not to exist; I shall not waste my days trying
to prolong them; I shall USE my time.”
-Jack London

70. “Because of our routines we forget that
life is an ongoing adventure.”
-Maya Angelou

71. “Life is truly a ride. We’re all strapped in and no one can stop it. When
the doctor slaps your behind, he’s ripping your ticket and away you go.
As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity,
sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang
onto that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most
you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair is messed, you’re out
of breath and you didn’t throw up.”
-Unknown

72. “Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one
elementary truth—that the moment one definitely
commits oneself, then Providence moves, too.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

73. “The belief that becomes truth for me… is that which
allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of
putting my virtues into action.”
-Andre Gide

74. “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
-Proverbs 23:7

75. “There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its
reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad
principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to
angelship.”
-Mark Twain

76. “Experience is not what happens to a man;
it is what a man does with what happens
to him.”
-Aldous Huxley

77. “Some men see things as they are, and say,
‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were,
and say, ‘Why not?’”
-George Bernard Shaw

78. “He that cannot ask cannot live.”
-Old Proverb

79. “Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

80. “There can be no transforming of darkness
into light and of apathy into movement
without emotion.”
-Carl Jung

81. “Nothing splendid has ever been achieved
except by those who dared believe that
something inside of them was superior to
circumstance.”
-Bruce Barton

82. “A man’s character is his guardian divinity.”
-Heraclitus

83. “Be more concerned with your character than your
reputation, because your character is what you really are,
while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
-John Wooden

84. “Hold yourself responsible for a higher
standard than anybody else expects of you.”
-Henry Ward Beecher

85. “The knowledge of the world is only to be
acquired in the world, and not in a closet.”
-Lord Chesterfield

86. “It is only with the heart that one can see
rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

87. “The great man is he that does not lose his
child’s-heart.”
-Mencius

88. “Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives,
that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit,
every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want
to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.”
- Michael Landon

89. “If I had my life to live over again, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I’d limber
up. I’d be sillier than I’ve been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more
chances, I would take more trips, I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would
eat more ice cream and less beans. I would, perhaps, have more actual troubles but fewer
imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who was sensible and sane, hour after hour, day
after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments. If I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d
try to have nothing else—just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead
of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a
hot-water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I could do it again, I would travel lighter than I
have. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way
later in the fall. I would go to more dances, I would ride more merry-go-rounds, I would pick more
daisies.”
-Nadine Stair

90. “Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man
loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is
thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money,
but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of
his mind.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

91. “Live as brave men and face adversity with
stout hearts.”
-Horace

92. “Pereunt et imputantur.” (“The hours
perish, and are laid to our charge.”)
-Inscription on a sun dial at Oxford

93. “Rest not! Life is sweeping by, Go and dare,
before you die; Something mighty and
sublime Leave behind to conquer time!”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

94. “The chiefest action for a man of great spirit
is never to be out of action … the soul was
never put into the body to stand still.”
-John Webster

95. “Fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can
hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When
your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that
you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to
sleep, fight one more round—remembering that the man who fights
one more round is never whipped.”
-James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett

96. “First we make our habits, then our habits
make us.”
-John Dryden

97. “Be regular and orderly in your daily affairs
that you may be violent and original in your
work.”
-Gustave Flaubert

98. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the
time you spent working in the office or
mowing the lawn. Climb that goddamn
mountain.”
-Jack Kerouac

99. All for now
John Tintle // Seattle, WA