Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad.

17th Century -- imagined ref. from antiquity

Yesterday I was so clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Rumi

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.

Kurt Vonnegut

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do.

Anton Chekhov

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

Mark Twain

There is a precipice on either side of you: a precipice of caution and a precipice of overdaring.

Winston Churchill

How did you go bankrupt? Gradually, and then suddenly.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.

George Best

We live in a packaging culture that despises content.

Jodie foster

The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse.

David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

Those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable.

Attributed to 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read? and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you dont know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order -- willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Essays in Aesthetics (1966)

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read

Mark Twain

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Hegel

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, the wise as false, and the rulers as useful.

Seneca

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Sun Tzu

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery