Posted on
Friday 29 April 2005
- Values were meant to be costly. If it doesn’t cost much, we probably wouldn’t appreciate the value.
- To become financially independent you must turn part of your income into capital; turn capital into enterprise; turn enterprise into profit; turn profit into investment; and turn investment into financial independence.
- You cannot succeed by yourself. It’s hard to find a rich hermit.
- A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.
- Resolve says, ‘I will.’ The man says, ‘I will climb this mountain. They told me it is too high, too far, too steep, too rocky and too difficult. But it’s my mountain. I will climb it. You will soon see me waving from the top or dead on the side from trying.’
- Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.
- Books are easy to find and easy to buy. A paperback these days only costs six or seven dollars. You can borrow that from your kids!
- Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.
- If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.
- Emotions will either serve or master, depending on who is in charge.
- The amount you give isn’t important. What matters is what that amount represents in terms of your life.
- Life is part positive and part negative. Suppose you went to hear a symphony orchestra and all they played were the little, happy, high notes? Would you leave soon? Let me hear the rumble of the bass, the crash of the cymbals, and the minor keys.
- For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.
- Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need is just one more good idea.
- I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.
- Don’t join an easy crowd; you won’t grow. Go where the expectations and the demands to perform are high.
- Only by giving are you able to receive more than you already have.
- Don’t say, ‘If I could, I would.’ Say, ‘If I can, I will.’
- The best motivation is self-motivation. The guy says, ‘I wish someone would come by and turn me on.’ What if they don’t show up? You’ve got to have a better plan for your life.
- Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experiences and invest them in the future.
- Some things you have to do every day. Eating seven apples on Saturday night instead of one a day just isn’t going to get the job done.
- If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.
- We must all wage an intense, lifelong battle against the constant downward pull. If we relax, the bugs and weeds of negativity will move into the garden and take away everything of value.
- Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.
- Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
- How sad to see a father with money and no joy. The man studied economics, but never studied happiness.
- Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
- The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.
- To attract attractive people, you must be attractive. To attract powerful people, you must be powerful. To attract committed people, you must be committed. Instead of going to work on them, you go to work on yourself. If you become, you can attract.
- If you talk to your children, you can help them to keep their lives together. If you talk to them skillfully, you can help them to build future dreams.
- Let others lead small lives, but not you.
- I used to say, ‘I sure hope things will change.’ Then I learned that the only way things are going to change for me is when I change.
- If you care at all you will get some results. If you care enough you will get incredible results!
- The walls we build around us to keep out the sadness also keep out the joy.
- Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing.
- Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need is just one more good idea.
- Humility is a virtue; timidity is a disease.
- Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect. It is important to know how to feel, how to respond, and how to let life in so that it can touch you.
Posted on
Friday 29 April 2005
- All governments needed to remain under suspicion during their time of power. Trust no government! Not even mine! (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- All men beneath your position covet your position. (Dune)
- A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it. (Dune)
- Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain you cannot see the mountain. (Dune)
- Anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.
- A world is supported by four things. The learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. (Dune)
- Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is true of humans in the infinite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules sealed in a flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
- Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest. If you want profits, you must rule. There is truth in those words, but I ask myself who are the rabble and who are the ruled? (Dune)
- Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. (Dune Messiah)
- Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
- He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.
- How easy it is to kill the uprooted plant, especially when you put it down in hostile soil. (Dune)
- How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
- Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person. (Dune)
- If you believe yourself sufficiently hungry, you will eat your own thoughts.
- If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken. (Dune)
- If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
- I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich…
- It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
- Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.
- Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it. (Chenoeh: “Coversations with Leto II”)
- Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.
- One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
- Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.
- People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
- Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy
- Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.
- Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ablility to learn. The judgemental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.
- Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
- Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
- Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
- Something cannot emerge from nothing.
- The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
- The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
- The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.
- The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.
- The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
- The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
- The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving paradise in this life–we went soft, we lost our edge. (Dune)
- The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.
- There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover.
- There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
- The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.
- The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria.
- The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind every great event. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.
- To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.
- To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
- Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.
- Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
- We should grant power over affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase the reluctance. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose. (Chapterhouse: Dune)
- When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
- Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
- What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
- You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.