Quotes from the Year
Some inspirations on New Year's Day
To start the new year simply, here’s a small collection of quotes I came across (and kept coming back to) over the past twelve months. Some are familiar, some were new to me, all felt worth pausing on. No argument, no thesis, just a few lines that lingered, and might do the same for you as the year begins.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Working with people who believe in you regardless of the mid-term data and volatility is one of the rarest things in the world. We don’t want people who ignore data, that doesn’t make us better, but we do want people who believe in why we’re making a series of decisions, not just that we’re making them, and have a desire to help us continually make better decisions.
The Line makes itself felt,— thro’ some Energy Unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near.
Everything has been said about New York and yet that will never be enough. It is a city that needs to be lived. Just as you think you get a grasp of her, she changes again and dissolves through your fingers.
A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.
This is the thing no training regime can teach. Not taste, not speed, not range, not even the ability to reason, but the capacity to be remade by something unexplainable, and to let that remaking govern you even when the world calls you ridiculous. To step back into the noise—the meetings, the metrics, the slop, the benchmaxxing—and refuse to let it rewrite what you saw.
To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.
I’ve always believed the best early-stage founders are artists – they're obsessive about new and unusual things, they feel compelled to bring creation into the world, and they are often misunderstood for long periods of time–even lifetimes. Building businesses is their art.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.
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