Quotes

I took my “favorite quotations” off facebook a few years ago because it was too cluttered, and no one reads them in that audience. But here is a place for me to put the things that inspire me, that move me, or the things I find humorous. So I have decided to open a section to place quotes that I enjoy for one reason or another. They aren’t in any particular hierarchy or order, they just are what they are.

I invite YOU the reader to please post your own quotes in the comments below! Share your ideas and inspiration too!

Sources/People are separated by …….. If I don’t know where it came from I don’t say.

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“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.”

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
— Buckminster Fuller
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“If typography is calling attention to itself, it’s taking that attention away from what the words are saying…”
— Michael Bierut, Pentagram
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“Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.”

“One should always be a little improbable.”

“To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.”

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”
— Oscar Wilde
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“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
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“One of the things that makes beautiful things beautiful is their ephemeral nature.”
— Brenton Chamberlain
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“Be willing to make bold decisions and be willing to make glorious mistakes. Learn from your mistakes, but you’ve got to be willing to make them first.”
— Gavin Newsom
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“Dime con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.”
(Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.)
— Spanish Proverb
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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

‎”Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.”

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. [...] It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. [...] You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”

“The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. [...] When you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”

“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 the important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

“We don’t settle for anything less than excellence.”

“We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what’s driven me.”

— Steve Jobs (many of these are from the book by Walter Isaacson)
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“If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!”
— Henry Ford
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“Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.”
— Wayne Gretzky
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“Nature loves simplicity and unity.”
Johannese Kelper, astronomer
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“A brand is a living entity—and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”
— Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney
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“The job of art is to chase ugliness away.”
— Bono
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‎”It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.”
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‎”Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can’t articulate.”
— Mos Def
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‎”Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
— Leonard Bernstein
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‎”On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined.”
— Mark Twain
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“Faced with a choice, do both.”
Dieter Rot/Roth
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“Art exists to define the ‘undefinable,’ to make the impossible possible, and turn the imaginary real.”
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“It’s so rare that we have the opportunity to work on a project that is fueled by raw unbridled enthusiasm, with little regard for payment, sleep or settling for ‘good enough.’”
— Micah Barrett
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If you focus on what you’ve left behind, you will never be able to see what lies ahead”
— Chef Gousteau from Ratatouille (Pixar)
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“Life is about the people you meet”
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“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”
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“If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you’re still in the fucking tunnel.”
— John Oates
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“and then there is using everything”
— Gertrude Stein
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“Self-control is not a problem in the future. It’s only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us.”
— Shlomo Benartzi
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“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
— Ken Robinson
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“The interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.”
— Richard St. John
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“The fact that Latin America does not have the same kind of typographic tradition that exists in Europe and the United States is important and relevant because it means we can try out new things without fear, without prejudices, without a past and with a lot of future.”

“From that moment on, I’ve dedicated myself to type design full-time (and more). It’s been a crucial decision for me, because type design is something I am passionate about; and there is nothing more rewarding in life than doing what you love to do — your work.”

“I usually work on two projects at once, in order to be able to move away and look at it from a new perspective when I get back to it. That helps me a lot to keep things fresh. Yet I think my main “strategy” is to work on projects that are inspiring, fun and motivating.”
— Daniel Hernández, Chilean type designer, LatinoType
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“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
— Dr Seusse
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“When you walk with purpose, you collide with destiny.”
— Bertice Berry
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“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”
— Carlos Castaneda
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“You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.”
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“Art is a deception that creates real emotions — a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.”
— Marco Tempest
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“I learned to travel, then I travelled to learn.”
— Brother Patrick Duffy, Blue Highways, (book) William Least Heat Moon (author)

“Satisfaction is doin’ what’s important to yourself. A man ought to honor other people, but he’s got to honor what he believes in too.”
— Madison Wheeler, Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
— Mark Twain
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“To believe something strongly when it is clearly hard to define and prove, and has not been proven, is to be prejudiced.”
— Simon Ramo, Ph.D.
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“Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.”
— Hugh Macleod
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“If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any.”
— Jim Collins

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“True art is measured by the amount of paint on one’s clothing”
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“Meaningful, great art is a transcendental experience that lifts us out of the world and makes us look back and view the world more critically.”
— Dr. Damian White, professor in RISD’s liberal arts department
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“What is more informative to the design process than knowing how to make? Making teaches how to simplify, reconsider, obey physics.”
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“…les yeux sont aveugle. Il faut chercher avec le coeur.”
— Le Petit Prince
(The eyes are blind, one must search with the heart)

“Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c’est qu’il cache un puits quelque part…”
Le Petit Prince, St Exupéry
(That which makes the desert beautiful is that it hides a well somewhere)

“…les champs de blé? Je ne mange pas de pain. Le blé pour moi est inutile. Les champs de blé ne me rappellent rien. Et ça, c’est triste! Mais tu as des cheveux couleur d’or. Alors ce sera merveilleux quand tu m’auras apprivoisé! Le blé, qui est doré, me fera souvenir de toi. Et j’aimerai le bruit du vent dans le blé…”
— Le renard, Le Petit Prince, St Exupéry

(the wheat fields? I don’t eat bread. The wheat for me is useless. The wheat fields remind me of nothing. And that, it’s sad! But you have hair the color of gold. So that would be marvelous when you have tamed me. The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I will love the sound of the wind in the wheat.” — The Fox in The Little Prince.)
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“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else”
— Yogi Berra
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“Hay dos palabras que te abrirán muchas puertas — ‘Tire y Empuje’”
—Les Luthiers
(There are two words that open many doors: pull and push)
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“You know there’s an old african proverb that i made up. if you want to go quickly, go alone. if you want to go far, go together. we need to go far, quickly”
— Al Gore (on 30 Rock)
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una poema de Antonio Machado (1875-1939, España)

Cantares (Fragmento)

Todo pasa y todo queda,
pero lo nuestro es pasar,
pasar haciendo caminos,
caminos sobre la mar

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace camino
y a volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar

Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar
caminante no hay camino
se hace camino al andar.
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The following are excerpts from the book Shantaram, written by Gregory David Roberts:

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that´s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that´s all we have — to hold on tight until dawn.” (p. 346)

“Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George one said: the one you should take, and the one you do.” (p. 858)

“There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness.” (Didier, p. 546)

“At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.” (p. 629)

“‘Silence can wound as surely as the twisting lash,’ the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth. (p. 870)

Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts
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