Quotes

Followers are like frequent flier miles - great until you try and use them for something.

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.

When people speak in a very elaborate and sophisticated way, they either want to tell a lie, or to admire themselves. You should not believe such people. Good speech is always clear, clever, and understood by all.

Difficult learning is durable learning.

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.

A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka' but 'That's funny...'

Education is the job of a lifetime.

Quando l'autore è più importante dell'opera, l'autore non vale niente.

People who can't laugh at themselves will always be outwitted by people who can.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

The Creative Adult is the Child Who Has Survived.

Ultimately the job of a frontend developer is to make people’s lives better, or at least not make it worse.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Don't fear moving slowly. Fear standing still.

What seems expensive is often cheap in the long run.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Be great at what you do and you won't need a resume.

You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.

The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

Clear thinkers take feedback from reality, not society.

More importantly, it’s unwise to allow a third-party to define your long-term brand identity; sure, Facebook is huge now, but then so was the T-Rex.

Creativity needs criticism.

Tutto ciò che è miope si paga a caro prezzo.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

While you can't see it or touch it, the most valuable thing you have is your attention.

Feed a man a fish, feed him for a night. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to make AI, the AI does all the fishing and everyone is fed forever. Then the AI accidentally kills all the people and the fish win.

Be married to the problem, not the technology. If you're married to technology, you might easily give up due to stress induced by setbacks or boredom. Being married to the problem will motivate you to have the perseverance to continue through hard times or tedious work.

Airbnb's product would be 25% better with one new feature: WiFi speed tests. (they actually did it)

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way, to conceal the fact that they have nothing to say. Whereas writing simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.

Better roughly right than precisely wrong.

Si offre il caffé a chi ti trova l'errore.

Don't assume malice when stupidity will suffice.

People want you to be successful until you are successful and then they don’t want you to be successful anymore. It’s a curious thing.

You are successful if you wake up every morning excited about the upcoming day.

Chi ha talento fa cose diverse perché il talento glielo permette.

It’s harder to be kind than clever.

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.

Competence > Credentials

If tobacco companies get in trouble for selling products that give people cancer, then universities should get in trouble for selling student debt to students with worthless degrees.

The advice I would give the younger me — or any young person — would be: Keep your head up in failure and your head down in success.

Clear thinkers take feedback from reality, not society.

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.

La ricchezza non è equamente distribuita, ma nemmeno il coraggio.

Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.

Avoid stupidity before seeking brilliance.

Most people in their life reduce risk to the point where the probability of success goes higher but the consequence of success is inconsequential.

The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, having traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge.

Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.

Non ho mai compreso chi si vanta con fragorosa risata di esser sempre stato una frana in matematica. Ma che si vergogni, piuttosto.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

“Take no one’s word for it.” In other words, figure it out yourself. That’s the only way to know anything.

Are you really living or just dying very slowly over seventy years.

Facebook did to our parent's generation what they thought video games would do to us.

Il creativo lavora mentre gioca e gioca mentre lavora.

Sophisticated minds adopt simplified lifestyles; simplistic minds are drawn to overly sophisticated lifestyles.

You have to start from the customer experience and work the technology backwards.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

A meeting assumes everyone’s time is equal. Rarely true.

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

Game developers: with enough if statements and while loops I can do literally anything. Web developers: I will use graph theory and a hand crafted functional state management framework to create this sign up form.

It's particles all the way down.

Le grandi storie sono nel passato, o nel futuro

Developers are students for life.

Focusing is about saying no.

The best "gift for the person who has everything" is to teach them something new.

Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.

Personality is what you do when someone is watching. Character is what you do when no one is watching.

Creativity is a lifelong endeavor.

The problem with genius is that you have to tolerate madness.

Judge your level of freedom by how long you can turn off your phone.