“The only safe procedure for you, now that you have started, is to make sure from this day forward until the day you are buried, you do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight, and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day. Now does that seem extravagant?”
“There lived two frogs, an optimist and a pessimist. One evening they went jumping over some grass and detected the wonderful smell of fresh milk emanating from a nearby dairy. The frogs were tempted and jumped into the dairy through an open window. They miscalculated and flopped into a large jar of milk. What to do? The pessimist looked around and, seeing that the walls of the jar were high and sheer and that it was not possible to climb up, fell into despair. He turned on his back, folded his legs and sank to the bottom. The optimist did not want to perish so disgracefully. He also saw the high and sheer walls, but decided to flounder while he could. All night long he swam, beat the milk energetically with his legs, and displayed various forms of activity... By the time morning came, the optimistic frog had quite unawares churned a big knob of butter out of the milk and thereby saved his life. The same will happen to the British Empire.”
“If you're a research scientist what you want is not retirement but another five hundred years.”
“I will offer one bit of a useful state of mind, which — if one adopts it — makes everything much easier: to accept reality as it is, and to try not to regret the past, and try to improve the situation. And the reason I say it is because it's so hard to adopt it. It's so easy to think, 'Oh, like some bad past decision, or bad stroke of luck, something happened, something is unfair' — and it's so easy to spend so much time thinking like this. While it's just so much better and more productive to say, 'Okay, things are the way they are. What's the next best step?' And I find that whenever I do this myself, everything works out so much better. But it's hard. It's hard. It's a constant struggle with one's emotion, and that's why I mention it to you. Perhaps some of you will adopt it yourself. This is a reminder to adopt this mindset as best as one can — and also a reminder for myself.”
“If you are able to state a problem — any problem — and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved.”
“There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. It is: If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.”
“My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.”
“Almost every day last fall we took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren't particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren't hard.”
“You know better than to kill an idea without giving it a chance to live. We set our sights high. That's why we accomplish so many things. Now go back and try again.”
“Once when I was trying to sell Mickey Mouse, a fellow told me something. He said, 'Mickey Mouse? What is it? Nobody knows it... They don't know you and they don't know your mouse.' That hit me. I said, from now on they're going to know. And I stuck Mickey Mouse so darn big on that title that they couldn't think it was a rabbit or anything else.”
“On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit'. And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.”
“Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's 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.”
“When I look back on the perils which have been overcome, upon the great mountain waves through which the gallant ship has driven, when I remember all that has gone wrong and remember also all that has gone right, I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.”
“History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.”
“In war, which is an intense form of life, Chance casts aside all veils and disguises and presents herself nakedly from moment to moment as the direct arbiter over all persons and events.”
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
“There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.”
“You can't learn everything, but you have to convince yourself that you can learn anything.”
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time — none, zero.”
“I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first is white-hot, 'in the zone' seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice. This happens about 3% of the time. The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair... In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision...”
“What you have to handle doing mathematics as an older child is accepting this state of being stuck.”
“The maxim, 'Nothing prevails but perfection,' may be spelled PARALYSIS.”
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
“There is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere: 1) Take a simple, basic idea and 2) take it very seriously.”
“People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence.”
“As in all Land's projects, the work went forward under the twin adages of 'Never go to sleep with a hypothesis untested' and 'Every problem can be solved with the things in the room at the time.'”
“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.”
“If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time.”
“Writing a book is an adventure ... To begin with it is a toy, an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then a master, and then a tyrant, and then the last phase is that, just as one is about to be reconciled to one's servitude, one kills the monster.”
“I find it's important to work intensively for long hours when I am beggining to see solutions to a problem. At such times, atavistic competences seem to come welling up. You are handling so many variables at a barely conscious level that you can't afford to be interrupted. If you are, it may take a year to cover the same ground you could cover otherwise in sixty hours.”
“The thing that really made this film pack possible was that the Chairman of the Board, President, Director of Research, head of that particular laboratory, and director of this particular project said, 'We're gonna make the trap to catch the excess fluid no bigger than this and we're gonna contain all the liquids and anyone who doesn't believe it isn't here anymore.' And some of them aren't.”
“Whenever you do something new and think it is based on a new principle, you check it in two ways: one by taking other examples that seem to you to involve the same principles; and the other, if you are a good laboratory worker, I guess, is to try the opposite of what you believe and see if the principle is there when you do the opposite of what you believe.”
“As you so well know, the research of science is nothing but failures. You fail and fail and fail, and when you succeed you stop. So the record of science is experiments that didn't work and that are then the basis of one that does work.”
“If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even though the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start taking the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”
“I think that self-limitation is the major limiting factor for most people in the world. People could do far more things than they believe they can.”