A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000
Archive
Quotes
What water gives, water takes away.
—Portuguese proverbWithout music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa, 1989No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860In real friendship the judgment, the genius, the prudence of each party become the common property of both.
—Maria Edgeworth, 1787What one man can invent another can discover.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.
—David Sedaris, 2004I shall embrace my rival—until I suffocate him.
—Jean Racine, 1669Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.
—Emma Goldman, 1917Conjecturing a Climate
Of unsuspended Suns –
Adds poignancy to Winter
Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BC