Jason von der Linde

"We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions."

— Margaret Wheatley

"Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less."

— C.S. Lewis

"An enlightened American citizenship is indispensable to American self-government."

— Thomas Jefferson

"Having knowledge makes you better able to understand the world in which we live. The more I know, the less surprised I'm going to be. There are precedents and most people won't understand them."

— Alex Trebek

"There are three legal investment strategies: you can be smarter than others. You can be luckier than others. Or you can be more patient than others. Know your edge and how hard it is to maintain… Risk's greatest fuels are leverage, overconfidence, ego and impatience. Its greatest enemies are having options, humility, and other people's trust."

— Morgan Housel

"The best way to overcome the fear of death is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of your ego recede and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river; small at first and rushing passionately past rocks and waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the water flows more quietly and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea and painlessly lose their individual being."

— Bertrand Russell

"Civilization is merely a thin veneer we have put on top of our anciently derived instincts, but the veneer is what makes it possible for modern society to operate. Being civilized means, among other things, stopping your immediate response to a situation, and thinking whether it is or is not the appropriate thing to do."

— Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

"The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful."

— Tolstoy

"You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away."

— John Graham

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there is another slightly older, slightly less well-known and equally chilling possibility: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy and maturity. People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism."

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

"A nation is born stoic and dies epicurean."

— Will Durant

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."

— Maya Angelou

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

— Steve Jobs

"No man is a failure who has friends."

— Clarence, It's a Wonderful Life

"I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn't going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination."

— Albert Einstein

"You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail, and you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments."

— Jonathan Haidt

"Confidence is the food of the wise man, the liquor of the fool."

— Vikram, The Office

"There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life: to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others."

— Mary Shelley

"The magic behind magic isn't the illusion. It's that someone cared enough to create the illusion for you. The real magic is all the work that goes into making someone believe that magic is real."

— Ali, Dave

"The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts."

— Marcus Aurelius

"Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn't make up yourself — a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions."

— Fran Lebowitz

"Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. That is what most successful people actually do anyway."

— Paul Graham

"Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There's a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley?"

— Charlie Munger

"Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue. It is the grounded realization that our knowledge is always provisional and incomplete and that it might require revision in light of new evidence."

— Eric Angner

"Competence is how good you are when there is something to gain. Character is how good you are when there is nothing to gain. People will reward you for competence. But people will only love you for your character."

— Mark Manson

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate… We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

— Henry David Thoreau

"There's only so much fortune one man can have. The rest is just showing off."

— Forrest Gump

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

— Carl Sagan