Quotes
For 5 years now, I’ve been collecting quotes that made me tick. No intention in mind. For a long time, I didn’t know what to make of them. But lately, I’ve realized about it helps understand where my attention is, by looking back at the patterns that appear.
I never had any intention of publishing this list, but since this blog is partially about sharing what my brain is focusing on, here’s the list.
Caveats:
1. It’s half in French, half in English.
2. It’s unedited, which means it contains mistakes and boring stuff.
3. It’s not sorted by theme.
[...]
Ken Robinson
- If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original
Nicolas Hulot
- Moi aussi, je suis un enfant de cette société de consommation. Je dois avancer pas à pas vers plus de cohérence. Jusqu’où suis-je vraiment prêt à aller dans le choix ? Dans le renoncement ?
Michael Jordan, about being in the Dream Team
- The biggest motivation for me was to spend time with some of the guys I compete against all the time. I wanted to see how they practice. I wanted to see how they prepared. I wanted to dissect these guys, as I was going to be playing against them for the next couple of years. I wanted to use every little bit that I could gather so that I could gain an advantage.
Oxmo Puccino
- Il y a beaucoup plus de processus de perdition que de création.
Jeff Bezos
- I try to spend my time on things that are at the intersection of what is importance to the company and where I can add value.
Michael Lewis
- Old men can see the forest, but only because they have lost the ability to see the trees.
- A good way to get to know someone is to do something with him.
Un air de famille
- Si ça va, t’es content. Si ça va pas, tu patientes. C’est comme ça la vie.
- Moi, j’appelle ça enculer les mouches.
John Maeda
- People who can focus, get things done. People who can prioritize, get the right things done.
LZO Records
- We seek the magic.
Scott Berkun
- Craft demands repetition. Repetition demands patience. Patience demands commitment. Commitment demands sacrifice. Craft demands sacrifice.
Bruce Lee
- I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Ryan Singer
- Design education should focus on 1) getting a pattern library in muscle memory 2) defining problems and 3) applying patterns to problems. Design insight doesn’t just come from thinking hard. It also depends on having a rich library of patterns and forms you can apply.
- Whatever I have learned so far came from concentrating on the acts of someone who was better than me.
- Love that feeling of pursuing a product idea that still isn’t right but has something right about it.
Gérald Passédat, chef 3 étoiles
- La simplicité ne doit pas être un point de départ, c’est un objectif. Il faut beaucoup de travail pour en arriver là. Et, en même temps, la technique ne doit jamais l’emporter sur l’émotion.
Paul Graham
- Even being Genghis Khan is probably 99% cooperation
Exposition à propos de Caspar David Friedrich
- Le moment-limite où l’oeil peine à cerner les formes et est conduit à discerner par l’attention ce qui n’est pas immédiatement visible.
Miss Swiss
- When you complain too often about something, decide to do something about it or let it go.
The West Wing, season 7
- It feels like we’re closing a lot of doors here.
- Good strategy always does.
Stratechery.com
- The reason why smartphones rule the world is because they do more jobs for more people in more places than anything in the history of mankind
Pixar’s 22 rules to storytelling
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Phil Libin, CEO Evernote
- What’s everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?
=> I’m good at combining other people’s good ideas.
Seth Godin
- Creativity is better described as failing repeatedly until you get something right.
- Our desire to do something that’s never been done before means that the people around us generally will not encourage us to do it. Because if they were, then other people would be doing it already and it wouldn’t be unique.
Jean-Baptiste Descroix-Vernier
- Pourquoi vivre tout seul, sur une péniche, à Amsterdam ?
=> Pour vivre tout seul, justement. Pour être tranquille. Pour pouvoir me concentrer sur ce que j’aime faire, 100% de mon temps.
The West Wing
- Act as if you have faith, and faith shall be given to you. Fake it till you make it.
Ténèbres
- Parfois, plus l’on se rapproche d’un objectif, plus il nous échappe
Atul Gawande
- People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon.
Francis Jauréguiberry
- La pulsion interdit l’élaboration de l’élan
Inconnu
- Un homme tourne autour d’un lampadaire depuis un long moment.
Un passant lui demande : “Que faites-vous là ?”.
L’homme répond : “Je cherche mes clés”.
“C’est là que vous les avez perdu ?” demande le passant.
“Non, mais c’est là qu’il y a de la lumière”.
A Navy Seal
- Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. Why we train so hard.
David Heinemeier Hansson
- Find out who you are, and be the very best you.
Mad Men (Don Draper)
- That’s not a strategy; that’s two strategies connected by the word « and ».
- We’re flawed, because we want so much more. We’re ruined, because we get these things, and wish for what we had.
- You’re good. Get better, and stop asking for things.
Casey
- Avoir un oeil critique sur son propre milieu est simplement une lucarne pour regarder le monde.
David Allen
- The anxiety is compounded by a foible of the human mind: it can’t remember, and it can’t forget.
- You have to be going somewhere to realize something is holding you back.
Richard Hamming
- It is a poor workman who blames his tools – the good man gets on with the job, given what he’s got, and gets the best answer he can.
- Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, “creativity comes out of your subconscious.” Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention – you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.
Thierry Marx
- Un plat classique, c’est un plat innovant qui a réussi.
LeBron James
- I don’t get distracted easily.
Georges Roditi – L’esprit de perfection
- Chercher le perfectionnement plus que la perfection.
- L’esprit de perfection est une réussite sans avancement. Il s’agit de soigner son jardin, et non de le changer pour un plus grand.
- Les refus inspirés d’une vision d’ensemble sont au coeur de l’esprit de perfection. Rejeter ce qui ne vaut rien, cela va de soi : il est moins facile de dire non à ce qui a quelque valeur, mais s’accorderait mal avec la figure d’une société, d’une vie ou d’une oeuvre.
- On ne va pas loin dans une idée à laquelle on n’était aucunement prédestiné.
- L’homme du perfectionnement n’est pas un fanatique impatient de tout refaire. Corriger, améliorer, ces opérations partielles apparentent l’esprit de perfection à l’esprit de compromis. Il n’est extrême que par sa persévérance.
- De toute une vie, quand on regarde en arrière, il reste ce qu’on a aimé.
- Le vice des sociétés modernes est de n’offrir à la volonté aucun exercice ordinaire : le nécessaire jusqu’à la mort, et rien à attendre. Seul peut s’en accomoder celui qui voue à son coeur à quelque chose ou à quelqu’un.
- C’était une extravagance de la cuisine d’autrefois, pour chaque perdreau destiné à la table d’en sacrifier deux qui l’enserraient et lui gardaient son jus pendant la cuisson. Dans toute oeuvre classique on devine de l’inutilisé. Et la production si réduite des vieux auteurs, cela veut dire que les autres livres restaient dans les limbes ; l’oeuvre qui voyait le jour n’était pas seulement celle qui s’était s’imposée : des autres, des fantômes, elle recevait du sang.
Degas
- J’ai mis vingt ans à faire ça en vingt minutes.
- Arriver par le travail à effacer les traces du travail.
Shakepeare – Le Roi Lear
- Montre moins que tu n’as, Dis moins que tu ne sais
F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Nothing any good isn’t hard.
Steve Jobs
- Don’t look left, don’t look right, look forward.
- Why would you ask people what they want when they don’t know what’s possible?
Clint Eastwood, « The bridges of Madison County »
- We are the choices that we have made, Robert. You don’t understand… Oh, don’t you see ? Nobody understands : when a woman makes the choice to marry and have children, in one way, her life begins, but in another way, it stops. You build a life of details, you become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave, they take your life of details with them. And then you’re expected to move again, only you don’t remember what moves you because no-one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.
Ingrid Betancourt
- J’ai beaucoup appris sur l’être humain, sur moi-même, sur l’importance des détails, l’importance de certaines attitudes, l’importance de la communication, d’utiliser les mots corrects pour transmettre les sentiments corrects.
Tim Cook
- we will only do a few things. And we’ll only do things where we can make a significant contribution
- Creativity is not a process, right? It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. It’s caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn’t been thought of before. It’s providing an environment where that feeds off each other and grows.
- The most important things in life, whether they’re personal or professional, are decided on intuition. I think you can have a lot of information and data feeding that intuition
Kaamelott
- Il faudrait trouver un moyen pour faire une place à ceux qui sont motivés. A ceux qui ont du courage, même si c’est des bouseux. Faudrait trouver un moyen pour que tout le monde ait une chance de prouver sa valeur. Si c’est pour que le pouvoir, ce soient les mêmes magouilles qu’ici, ça sert à rien. Vous me dites qu’il y a une épée dans un rocher et que tout le monde a le droit d’essayer de la retirer. C’est de ça qu’il faut s’inspirer : faut que tout le monde ait le droit d’essayer.
- On devient pas chef parce qu’on le mérite andouille ! On devient chef par un concours de circonstances ! On le mérite après ! Moi, il m’a p’tet fallu dix ans pour mériter mon grade. Si c’est pas vingt. Tous les jours, j’ai travaillé pour pas nager dans mon uniforme. Y a pas trente-six solutions. Arturus ? Hein ? Fais semblant ! Fais semblant d’être dux. Fais semblant de mériter ton grade. Fais semblant d’être un grand chef de guerre. Si tu fais bien semblant, un jour tu verras, t’auras plus besoin.
Jean Christophe Hervé
- suffisamment de points communs pour pouvoir se parler, et suffisamment de différences pour avoir envie de s’écouter
Oliver Reichenstein
- Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? To most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.
Demetri Martin
- simplicity is very appealing, and I think it’s deceptively difficult to achieve
Jeff Weiner
- optimize for two things: passion and skill, not one at the exclusion of the other
Shurik’n
- Certains trouvent, certains cherchent ; ceux-là chercheront toujours si personne ne leur tend la perche.
- Laisser la trace d’un passage éphémère, dire qu’on a vécu, ne pas finir comme une chanson qui meurt parce qu’on ne la chante plus : c’est le Graal que chacun poursuit
- On peut pas dire ce qu’on a jamais entendu. Alors, on grandit seul, on vieillit seul, on meurt seul, tout ça sans avoir vécu.
Michael Haneke
- On doit accepter de ne pas savoir tout faire
Kaamelott
- L’énergie que je suis capable de fournir dans le cadre professionnel, je la retrouve pas quand il s’agit de faire quelque chose pour me sortir d’une impasse émotionnelle.
- Je marche sur la plage et je tombe sur une grosse chaîne qui sort de l’eau, posée sur le sable. Alors je la prends, et je tire dessus et hop, la mer commence à se vider…Et au bout d’un moment, y a plus une seule goutte de flotte ! Alors je marche sur le fond, et je croise tous les pécheurs qui ont coulés depuis toujours et qui réparent leurs coques. Alors je leur dis : « Mais barrez vous, qu’est-ce que vous faites là ? Des occasions comme ça, vous en aurez pas cinquante ! », et ils me répondent : « On se dépêche de réparer au cas ou ça remonte ! »
Jeff Bezos
- The three big ideas at Amazon are long-term thinking, customer obsession, and a willingness to invent
- it’s harder to be kind than clever.
Paul Graham
- Curiosity turns work into play
- People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that’s compellingly mysterious.
- put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process, keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take root
- The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it’s too obvious to your brain that you’re not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you’ve become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
- People who fail to write novels don’t do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. « I don’t have time to work, » they say. And they don’t; they’ve made sure of that.
David Allen
- A lot of people won’t keep their own agreements with themselves
- The first meeting you’ll unhook from is the one you’ve made with yourself
- Make as few plans as you can, capture every single thing that is potentially meaningful, and make sure you’ve got the appropriate maps to be able to know where to focus.
- Something out there might be more important than what you’re currently doing. You don’t remember what it is, but it might be more important than whatever you’re doing, so you’re not present anywhere. You’re at work worrying about home, and you’re at home worrying about work, and you’re neither place psychologically when you’re there physically. That’s hugely undermining of your productivity, and certainly adds hugely to the stress factor.
- Another reason a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed is because people are not in true survival or crisis mode as often as they have been in much of our history. The interesting thing about crisis is that it actually produces a type of serenity. Why? Because in a crisis, people have to integrate all kinds of information that’s potentially relevant, they have to make decisions quickly, they have to then trust their intuitive judgment calls in the moment. They have to act. They’re constantly course-correcting based on data that’s coming up, and they’re very focused on some outcome, usually live–you know, survive. Don’t burn up. Don’t die. But as soon as you’re not in a crisis, all the rest of the world floods into your psyche. Now you’re worried about taxes and tires and « I’m getting a cold » and « My printer just crapped out. » Now that flood is coming across in electronic form, and it is 24/7.
Abraham Flexner
- Hertz and Maxwell had done their work without thought of use and that throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which hadultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.
Jack Dorsey
- You have to make every single detail perfect, and you have to limit the number of details. If you pay attention to the smallest things while knowing what’s important, then everything else takes care of itself.
- Design is not just visual – design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is editing. Design is making it easy for a person to get from point A to point B. Design the beautiful. Build the impossible.
- Customer support and feedback is what our customers are telling us, and product is what we’re telling our customers. We have feedback loops, and then we speak something back, the product, this company, is what we’re telling the world.
- The company needs to have a weekly cadence. Here’s my schedule: Monday is for addressing management issues; Tuesday for product engineering and design; Wednesday for marketing and communications, and growth; Thursday for meetings with outside partners and developers; Friday for company culture and recruiting; Saturday day off; Sunday Dorsey for strategy and job interviews.
Max Lechvin
- Mastery is fractal: perfecting techniques that make up a skill inevitably exposes even subtler techniques to master further
English saying
- People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Ryan Singer, 2012
- People consistently overvalue ideas and undervalue the ability to execute on them.
- An idea doesn’t mean anything unless you can get a skilled group to understand it and coordinate their capabilities around it. No small feat.
- People overvalue ideas because they think execution is algorithmic: idea in, product out. It’s not an algorithm. Execution is an art.
Usain Bolt, 2012
- Quand tu veux réellement atteindre un objectif, tout le reste doit passer au second plan.
Portishead – Roads
- Ohh, can’t anybody see: We’ve got a war to fight
- How can it feel this wrong
Steve Jobs – 2006 Newsweek interview
- When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.
Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success (Ken Segall)
- the simpler way isn’t always the easiest. Often it requires more time, more money, and more energy. It might require you to step on a few toes. But more times than not, it will lead to measurably better results.
- simply amazing, and amazingly simple.
- the worst possible business position: having to defend an idea you never believed in.
- It’s when things are left unresolved that people spend too much of their time looking over their shoulders instead of looking ahead.
- There are many who believe Steve Jobs was a creative genius. I think it would be more accurate to say he was a genius who loved creativity.
- When process is king, ideas will never be.
- Work is hard. That’s why they call it work.
- People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
- being complicated is easy. It’s Simplicity that requires serious work.
- To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
- One of the biggest insights we [had] was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.
- the ship had to be moving forward every day. If you weren’t helping, that’s when you got in trouble.
- what looks so effortless requires a lot of hard work. Once again, it’s the curse of Simplicity—it looks deceptively simple.
- It’s a rare idea in business that doesn’t run into some form of opposition
- Simplicity allows people to focus on one thing. Conversely, focusing on one thing helps achieve Simplicity.
- You’ll probably achieve better results if you believe more in the talent of people to work miracles than in those who are quick to provide negative answers.
- Remember, when your idea’s life is on the line, the last thing you want is a fair fight. Use every available weapon.
General George S. Patton
- A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters (Richard Rumelt)
- The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
- Simply being ambitious is not a strategy.
- A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.
- Unlike a stand-alone decision or a goal, a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge.
- The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.
- A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of its design.
- Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.
- Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.
- When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance.
- Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favor of others.
- universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.
- diagnosis is a judgment about the meanings of facts
- strategy works by harnessing power and applying it where it will have the greatest effect.
- A good strategy draws power from focusing minds, energy, and action. That focus, channeled at the right moment onto a pivotal objective, can produce a cascade of favorable outcomes.
- An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem—one that is solvable.
- To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of.
- One of the tasks of the interviewer is to listen for what is not said.
- humans have put more effort, over more time, into thinking about war than any other subject.
- It is hard to show your skill as a sailor when there is no wind.
- Successful strategies often owe a great deal to the inertia and inefficiency of rivals.
- A great deal of human thought is not intentional—it just happens.
- A good strategy is, in the end, a hypothesis about what will work. Not a wild theory, but an educated judgment.
- Attention, like a flashlight beam, illuminates one subject only to darken another.
- “Mr. Carnegie,” Taylor said, “I would advise you to make a list of the ten most important things you can do. And then, start doing number one.”
- Making a list is a basic tool for overcoming our own cognitive limitations. The list itself counters forgetfulness. The act of making a list forces us to reflect on the relative urgency and importance of issues. And making a list of “things to do, now” rather than “things to worry about” forces us to resolve concerns into actions.
- Being strategic is being less myopic—less shortsighted—than others.
- To guide your own thinking in strategy work, you must cultivate three essential skills or habits. First, you must have a variety of tools for fighting your own myopia and for guiding your own attention. Second, you must develop the ability to question your own judgment. If your reasoning cannot withstand a vigorous attack, your strategy cannot be expected to stand in the face of real competition. Third, you must cultivate the habit of making and recording judgments so that you can improve.
- Trying to destroy your own ideas is not easy or pleasant. It takes mental toughness to pick apart one’s own insights. In my own case, I rely on outside help—I invoke a virtual panel of experts that I carry around in my mind. This panel of experts is a collection of people whose judgments I value. I use an internal mental dialogue with them to both critique my own ideas and stimulate new ones. I try to do this before putting my ideas before others.
- Being independent without being eccentric and doubting without being a curmudgeon are some of the most difficult things a person can do.
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
- It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
- Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
- the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape.
- There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know.
- When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.
- Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
- So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.
- Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven’t even got a shovel yet.
- When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
- “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”
- shrewdness is a limitation on the mind. Shrewdness tells you what you must not do because it would not be shrewd.
- it’s nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world.
- People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
- Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life—so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do.
- Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
- Show me the man who isn’t interested in discussing himself
- there are techniques of the human mind whereby, in its dark deep, problems are examined, rejected or accepted. Such activities sometimes concern facets a man does not know he has.
- It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.
- There’s nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can’t see or hear or touch a man, it’s best to let him go.
- Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.
- A miracle once it is familiar is no longer a miracle
- everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one.
- All great and precious things are lonely.
- The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.
- they were silent, for it was too late to say hello and too early to begin other things.
- It’s hard to give people things—I guess it’s harder to be given things, though.
- Sometimes the barrier is so weak it just falls over when you touch it.
J’ai débranché:Comment revivre sans internet après une overdose (Thierry Crouzet)
- Les addicts ont pour point commun de ne pas se contrôler, de poursuivre une activité de manière compulsive, même à leur détriment, nous explique Marion. En piratant le système de distribution de la dopamine, les drogues nous donnent un plaisir immédiat sans que nous produisions le moindre effort.
- Pour les addicts, la modération est impossible. La seule façon d’en sortir, c’est d’arrêter totalement.
- À la fin d’un marathon, le vainqueur a encore la force de lever les bras alors que les autres concurrents s’écroulent. Il n’est pas moins épuisé qu’eux. La victoire provoque une décharge de dopamine qui procure du plaisir et un surplus d’énergie. Il se passait la même chose chaque fois que tu consultais tes messages. Tu recevais des shoots. Ils te tenaient debout.
- on conseille aux acheteurs compulsifs de plonger leur carte de crédit dans un verre d’eau et de le mettre au congélateur. Quand ils veulent assouvir leur compulsion, ils sont obligés d’attendre que la carte décongèle et leur désir s’étiole.
è Mes yeux, mes oreilles, mon nez, ma peau ne se connectent pas à heure fixe. À chaque centième de seconde, ils avalent des informations sans craindre l’indigestion. Ils ne se tendent pas parce que quelque chose se passe. C’est parce qu’ils se tendent en permanence qu’ils découvrent les choses qui se passent. Chacun de mes sens développe un comportement compulsif. Simplement, mon cerveau n’en souffre pas.
- Sherry Turkle affirme que le Net encourage une sensibilité qui a besoin du feedback. Dès que nous exprimons quelque chose, nous exigeons une validation, une réaction, nous déprimons si personne ne nous répond.
- La déconnexion est un processus. Elle se décide, puis elle se vit.
- Les décisions irréversibles nous rendraient plus heureux que les réversibles.
- Depuis toujours les hommes ont élaboré des raisons de vivre : mythes, dieux, croissance… pour seconder l’idéal défaillant d’une joie première et inépuisable. La joie est à inventer, elle ne jaillit pas d’elle-même.
Pierre Rabhi
- Nous donnons très peu de place à ce qui est indispensable, à ce qui amène véritablement la joie. Et nous ne mettons aucune limite au superflu.
Mok Oh
- our work is all about trying to efficiently prove or disprove a hypothesis. In order to get there efficiently, my general philosophy is that once it’s proven or gotten to a point where it’s proven enough, then we can start working with other groups. But until then, we need to have the freedom to fail as fast as we can.
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
- Il y a de ces choses qui semblent tellement impossibles qu’on n’a pas même l’idée de les tenter et qu’on les évite d’instinct.
- peut-être le Génois était-il comme ces gens d’esprit qui ne savent jamais que ce qu’ils doivent savoir, et qui ne croient que ce qu’ils ont intérêt à croire.
- ne vous en tenez pas à une première expérience : comme en toute chose, il faut habituer les sens à une impression nouvelle, douce ou violente, triste ou joyeuse.
The Four Hour Philosopher: The Essential Letters from a Stoic (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
- When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.
- It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
- It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough.
- No good thing renders its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss
Walter Iooss Jr.
- Michael Jordan is the type of man that could get you to jump off a bridge, or at least think about it for a few seconds… He has such a will, to accomplish a mission, that everyone follows.
Battlestar Galactica
- Look, you wanna know the truth? I don’t really care about the stats or the cup or the trophy or anything like that. Um, in fact, even the games aren’t that important to me, not really. What matters to me is the perfect throw, ok? Making the perfect catch, the perfect step and block. It’s perfection. It’s what it’s about. It’s about those moments when you… when you can feel the perfection of creation, the… the beauty of physics, the wonder of mathematics, you know… the… the elation of action and reaction. That is the kind of perfection I wanna be connected to.
Kaamelot
- À solliciter trop souvent la patience des gens, on finit par agacer.
- Quand on veut être sûr de son coup, on plante des carottes, on joue pas les chefs
- On ne devient pas chef parce qu’on le mérite. On devient chef par un concours de circonstances. On le mérite après.
- Les grands chefs ont un point commun : ils ne se battent que pour la dignité des faibles
- C’est ça, gouverner : il y a un problème, on le règle. Même si on n’y connaît rien.
- Pour le Graal, j’ai bâti une forteresse, moi. Kaamelott, ça s’appelle. J’ai été chercher des chevaliers dans tout le royaume. En Calédonie, en Carmélide, à Gaunes, à Vannes, aux Pays de Galles. J’ai fait construire une grande table, pour que les chevaliers s’assoient ensemble. Je l’ai voulue ronde, pour qu’aucun d’entre eux ne se retrouve assis dans un angle, ou en bout de table. C’était compliqué, alors j’ai essayé d’expliquer ce qu’était le Graal, pour que tout le monde comprenne. C’était difficile, alors j’ai essayé de rigoler pour que personne ne s’ennuie. J’ai raté, mais je veux pas qu’on dise que j’ai rien foutu, parce c’est pas vrai.
The office
- Not everything is a lesson. Sometimes, you just fail.
- I’m about to do something, I think, ‘Would an idiot do that?’ And if they would, I do not do that thing.
Jason fried
- Most people don’t know what they’re doing. They just guess. And if It doesn’t work, they try something else.
Christopher Froome
- La solitude vous apprend à être auto-suffisant
Bertrand Burgalat
- Si j’écoute peu de choses ce n’est pas par dédain mais par concentration.
Mahatma Gandhi
- A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.
Carmine Gallo
- The secret to success is to find something you love to do so much you can’t wait for the sun to rise to do it all over again
Tim Kreider
- It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself into the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be without getting the hell out of it again.
Bobby McFerrin
- If you want to be good at something, do it every day.
Jonathan Ive – Telegraph interview
- Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that’s a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That’s not simple
Eric Depalo – 3/GO magazine 2012
- Endurance starts as a mindset first; it exists as a state of being before it becomes a state of the body.
Rocé – On s’habitue
- On lit des livres qui parlent d’un autre monde sur un autre ton.
Alexandre Astier – Interview Allocine 2012
- On ne peut pas tout anticiper. C’est une fois sur les lieux, au milieu des acteurs, imprégné du projet, qu’on sait le mieux ce qu’il faut faire.
Reif Hoffman – Wired 2012
- The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
- An entrepreneur throws himself off a cliff and assembles an aeroplane on the way down.
Paul Graham – Blog
- Defaults choices are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.
- The most valuable truths are the ones most people don’t believe. They’re like undervalue stocks. If you start with them, you’ll have the whole field to yourself.
- I’m told there are people who need structure in their lives. This seems a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them what to do. I believe such people exist. There’s plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the majority.
- Here’s the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that’s missing in your own life, and supply the need — no matter how specific to you it seems.
James Stockdale
- You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the disicipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.
Seth Sternberg – Founder of Meebo
- Strategy means listening, synthesizing and communicating.
François Bayrou – Philosophie magazine 2012
- Contrairement à ce que l’on croit souvent, l’écriture n’est pas la traduction de la pensée mais son élaboration : la pensée s’accouche en même temps qu’elle se couche sur le papier.
Vaclav Havel
- Les impatients en politique sont comme ces enfants qui, pour faire pousser les arbres plus vite, tirent sur leurs feuilles.
Asian proverb
- Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
Nicholas Carr
- The stream of new information plays to our natural tendency to overemphasize the immediate. We crave the new even when we know it’s trivial.
Wired
- Here’s the paradox of curiosity: I only want to know more about that which I already know about.
Lee J. Colan and David Cottrell – Quit managing your time and start managing your attention
- Most of us are so connected that we forget what it’s like to be alone with our own thoughts.
Jeff Bezos
- You learn different things from grandparents than you learn from parent. I would encourage anybody to try to spend time not only with their parents but with their grandparents.
- I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have smoething meaningful that motivates you.
- Stress primarly comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So, if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me. What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it.
- When you’re working on a novel, you are really counting on yourself. If you don’t finish that novel, there aren’t a whole bunch of people counting on you. To me, that is incredibly stressful, because of the amount of self-discipline required to have the follow through to do that, even though nobody will a single negative word if you just give up.
- One of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life, and trying to make sure you’ve minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions. That works for family decisions.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Flow
- Happiness is not something that happens. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness is a condition that must prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy. Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look at it directly.
- To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely withing each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present.
- The most important step in emancipating oneself from social control is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders.
- The traits that mark an autotelic personality are most clearly revealed by people who seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Lost in Antartica of confined to a prison cell, some individuals succeed in transforming their harrowing conditions into a manageable and enjoyable struggle, whereas most others would succumb to the ordeal. Many people in difficult situations survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. They followed the blueprint of flow activities. First, they paid close attention to the most minute details of their environment, discovering in it hidden opportunities for action that matched what little they were capable of doing, given the circumstances. Then they set goals appropriate to their precarious situation, and closely monitored progress through the feedback they received. Whenever they reach their goal, they upped the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges for themselves.
- Studies on flow have demonstrated repeatedly that more than anything else, the quality of life depens on two factors: how we experience work, and our relations with other people.
- Friendships rarely happen by chance: one must cutivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a job or a family.
- The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a very rare gift.
- Only when a person’s actions are appropriately matched with the present opportunities does he truly become invovled.
- Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate.
Samuel Johnson
- When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Kimto
- Le savoir-faire n’est que la somme du travail et du temps.
REM – Monty got a raw deal
- Heroes don’t come easy.
Battlestar galactica, season 4
- Sometimes, doing the right thing is a luxury.
- Sometimes, it’s better to settle for what you’ve already got.
- Sometimes, lost is where you need to be. Just because you don’t know your direction doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
Seth Godin
- It takes the guts to break some ingrained habits, ones that the people around you might even be depending on.
Merlin Mann
- We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do. And by a dedication to getting better, even when it’s inconvenient and may not involve a handy bulleted list.
Henri guaino – médias, 2010
- Il existe un décalage entre la rapidité de l’évolution technologique et la façon dont notre esprit évolue, dont nos comportements, notre éthique s’adaptent.
Alexandre Astier
- Je ne crois pas à la vitesse. Lent, rapide, ça n’existe pas. C’est rythmiquement juste, ou rythmiquement faux.
- On ne s’inspire pas du rouge pour faire du rouge. On ne s’inspire pas de gens qui font la même chose que soi.
Pharrell Williams, Interview Magazine
- Curiosity illuminates the correct path to anything ni life. If you are not curious, that’s when your brain is starting to die.
Louise Attaque – Sean Penn Mitchum
- Dans ma tête, difficile de se détendre, de s’allonger.
Jonathan Coe – The terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim
- Mankind has become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid each other.
- It’s not exactly an oasis, but I suppose any green space to which you can beat a retreat is to be valued these days.
- It was like those boxes you have to tick when buying something online, agreeing to the terms and conditions which nobody bothers to read. You have no choice but to agree. Or at least, you’re given the illusion of choice, but that’s all. Maybe that’s how things usually are.
- There was still a limit to how much human company I could tolerate in one day.
- She doesn’t forget. She deliberately doesn’t remember.
- I really like the way you can drive into almost any city nowadays and be sure of finding the same shops and the same bars and the same restaurants. People need consistency in their lives, don’t they? Consistency, continuity, things like that. Otherwise everything just gets too chaotic and difficult.
- You always expect the defining, most precious experiences in your life to be stamped indelibly on the memory; and yet for some reason, these often seem to be the first ones to fade abnd blur.
- Children need patterns; they need routine. Well, so do grown-ups, actually.
Leading Change (John P. Kotter)
- Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles
- Vision refers to a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future. In a change process, a good vision serves three important purposes. First, by clarifying the general direction for change, by saying the corporate equivalent of “we need to be south of here in a few years instead where we are today,” it simplifies hundreds or thousands of more detailed decisions. Second, it motivates people to take action in the right direction, even if the initial steps are personally painful. Third, it helps coordinate the actions of different people, even thousands and thousands of individuals, in a remarkably fast and efficient way.
- Effective visions seem to have at least six key characteristics (which are summarized in exhibit 3 on the following page). First, they describe some activity or organization as it will be in the future, often the distant future. Second, they articulate a set of possibilities that is in the best interests of most people who have a stake in the situation: customers, stockholders, employees. In contrast, poor visions, when followed, tend to ignore the legitimate interests of some groups. Third, effective visions are realistic. They aren’t pleasant fantasies that have no chance of realization. Ineffective visions often have a pie-in-the-sky quality. Good visions are also clear enough to motivate action but flexible enough to allow initiative. Bad visions are sometimes too vague, sometimes too specific. Finally, effective visions are easy to communicate. Ineffective visions can be impenetrable.
John Steinbeck – Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
- I am impatient with those who think themselves kind when their only thought is to preserve themselves from the discomfort of observed pain.
- History is not formless, but a long view and a philosophic turn of mind are necessary to see its pattern.
- It is always amazing to me how we forget failures. [...] In the forgetting, it is not vainglory that bothers me but simply that things neglected as not done well slip away as though they never had happened.
- One of my very worst habits is the anticipation of difficulties and vicariously to go through them in advance. Then, if they happen, I have to do it twice, and if they don’t happen, I have done them unnecessarily.
- Amateurs have the authority of ignorance, and that is something you simply cannot combat.
- The human mind is nothing but a muscle.
- If a man could see his whole life, he would never live it. He would kill himself instantly. Something like this happens on the week-end days when I do not work. I lift my eyes out of the details of the little day’s work and a panic crashes on me. The size and the difficulty rise up and smack me. And yet it is necessary to look at the whole thing now and then. It’s like swimming with your head down or up. It cuts your speed to raise your head but at least you know where you are going.
- A trip described becomes better the greater the time between the trip and the telling.
- If you can know a man’s plans, you know more about him than you can in any other way.
- Most people doubt their instinctive knowledge.
- If you are determined to finish even if you have to work at night, you usually find that you don’t have to work at night.
- Refrain is one of the most valuable of all form methods. Refrain is return to the known before one flies again upwards.
- Being sure what one would do in a situation one hasn’t experienced is rather silly.
- The minds rebels against working, but once working, it rebels just as harshly against stopping.
- A golfer will not be any good at it unless striking a little ball is the most important thing in the world.
Seth Godin – Blog 2012
- Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.
Sun Zi – L’art de la guerre
- Rien n’est plus souple et faible au monde que l’eau. Pourtant, pour attaquer ce qui est dur et fort, rien ne la surpasse.
- Être libre, c’est être maître de soi-même. Ce n’est pas faire tout ce qui nous passe par la tête mais s’émanciper de la contrainte des afflictions qui dominent l’esprit et l’obscurcissent. C’est prendre sa vie en main, au lieu de l’abandonner aux tendances forgées par l’habitude et à la confusion mentale. Ce n’est pas lâcher la barre, laisser les voiles flotter au vent et le bateau partir à la dérive, mais au contraire barrer en mettant le cap vers la destination choisie, celle qu’on sait être la plus souhaitable pour soi-même.
Memory – Elizabeth Loftus
- We fill up the lowlands of our memories from the highlands of our imaginations.
- Memory has a superiority complex. We have a tendency to think we knew all along how a given situation would turn out, despite the fact that in many cases the outcome was totally unexpected.
- Attention wanders, and memory suffers.
Leo Babauta – Blog Zen habits
- If you find yourself swimming with all the other fish, go the other way. They don’t know where they’re going either.
- You can’t motivate people. The best you can hope for is to inspire them with your actions.
Lao-Tseu – Tao-te-king, le livre de la voie et de la vertu
- On pétrit de la terre glaise pour faire des vases. C’est de son vide que dépend l’usage des vases.
- Le grave est la racine du léger. Le calme est le maître du mouvement.
- Tous les êtres fruient le calme et cherchent le mouvement.
- Dans l’univers, il y a bien peu d’hommes qui sachent instruire sans parler.
- Il n’y a pas de plus grand malheur que de ne pas savoir se suffire.
- Plus l’on s’éloigne et moins l’on apprend. C’est pourquoi le sage arrive où il veut sans marcher ; il nomme les objets sans les voir, sans agir, il accomplit de grandes choses.
- Celui qui est vertueux, le saint le traite comme un homme vertueux. Celui qui n’est pas vertueux, le saint le traite aussi comme un homme vertueux. C’est là le comble de la vertu.
- Celui qui sait fonder ne craint point la destruction.
- Le sage commence par des choses aisées, lorsqu’il en projette des difficiles.
- Celui qui excelle à commander une armée n’a pas une ardeur belliqueuse. Celqui qui excelle à combattre ne se laisse pas aller à la colère. Celui qui excelle à vaincre ne lutte pas.
- Lorsqu’on veut tailler le bois à la place du charpentier, il est rare qu’on ne se blesse pas les mains.
Eureka Street – Robert McLiam Wilson
- Sometimes, the concept that change lives arrives unheralded.
- She couldn’t remember having said yes.She couldn’t remember having been asked.
Saint-François de Sales
- Le bruit ne fait pas de bien, le bien ne fait pas de bruit.
One Day (David Nicholls)
- Sometimes it seems that she can chart her life by what she worries about at three a.m.
- ‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at . . . something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (Walter Isaacson)
- Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.
- In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.
- At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him. He had some evidence for this.
- Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion”
- Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
- The best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company
- Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do
- People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
- Less but better
- Simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”
- ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
- ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development.
- People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Autoportrait de l’auteur en coureur de fond (Haruki MURAKAMI)
- je suis le genre d’homme qui aime faire les choses – quoi que ce soit – tout seul.
- l’heure durant laquelle je cours me permet de conserver mon temps de silence, le temps qui m’appartient, à mon sens indispensable pour me maintenir en bonne santé mentale.
- Je cours dans le vide. Ou peut-être devrais-je le dire autrement : je cours pour obtenir le vide.
- Devenir vieux représente pour moi – et pour n’importe qui, du reste – une expérience nouvelle
- Les blessures émotionnelles représentent le prix à payer pour être soi-même.
- il faut avoir des priorités dans la vie, savoir répartir son temps et son énergie. Si l’on ne parvient pas à établir un système de ce type à un certain âge, on n’a plus de concentration et la vie s’en trouve déséquilibrée.
- Les muscles sont comme des animaux au travail, dotés d’une bonne mémoire. Si l’on augmente progressivement leur charge, ils apprennent à l’accepter. Tant qu’on leur explique ses attentes, qu’on leur montre concrètement des exemples de la quantité de travail qu’ils doivent encaisser, les muscles obéissent et s’endurcissent insensiblement.
- En vieillissant, on apprend à être heureux avec ce que l’on a. C’est l’un des bons côtés (un des rares) de l’avancée en âge.
- dans certaines situations, prendre son temps signifie emprunter un raccourci.
- la course est pénible physiquement, et parfois il y a des moments où le moral en prend un coup. Pourtant, il semble bien que la « peine » soit la condition préalable à ce genre de sports. Si la souffrance n’entrait pas en jeu, qui diable s’embêterait à participer à des disciplines telles que le triathlon ou le marathon, qui réclament autant de temps et d’énergie ? Ce qui nous procure le sentiment d’être véritablement vivants – ou du moins, en partie –, c’est justement la souffrance, la souffrance que nous cherchons à dépasser. Notre qualité d’être vivant ne tient pas à des notions comme le temps que l’on réalise ou le rang, mais à la conscience que l’on acquiert finalement de la fluidité qui se réalise au cœur même de l’action.
- On obtient souvent les choses qui ont une véritable valeur au moyen d’actes apparemment improductifs. Même les actions qui semblent infructueuses ne sont pas forcément stupides.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – HBR, 2012
- A good work ethic trumps lazy talent every time.
- Being prepared, having a good understanding of your own strengths and limitations, and having a good game plan: those are essential elements of success.
SJ Watson – Before I go to sleep (2011)
- Tomorrow, you won’t remember that memory. That’s the problem. You have no foundation on which to build.
- What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?
- We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough, we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.
- It’s so difficult to see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something. It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.
François Cluzet, interview 2011
- Tout est une question de puissance et d’intensité.
Sébastien Japrisot, « Piège pour Cendrillon »
- A un certain degré d’abattement, être assommée, être calme, c’est un peu la même chose.
David Lynch, « Catching the big fish »
- If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time. You don’t just start painting. You have to sit for a while and get some kind of mental idea in order to go and make the right moves.
- Desire for an idea is like bait. When you’re fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in — those ideas.
Shunryu Suzuki – « Esprit zen esprit neuf »
- L’enseignement écrit est une sorte de nourriture cérébrale. Il est évidemment nécessaire de prendre quelque nourriture cérébrale, mais il est plus important d’être vous-même en pratiquant le juste mode de vie.
- La liberté parfaite ne se trouve pas sans quelques règles.
- Le vrai calme devrait se trouver dans l’activité même.
Jose Saramago – « L’aveuglement »
- Si tu ne me dis rien, je comprendrais mieux.
- Donnez du temps au temps et il se charge de résoudre les problèmes.
- Les réponses ne viennent pas toujours quand elles le devraient, et il arrive même souvent que la seule réponse possible soit de rester simplement à les attendre.
Henri Stern – « Précepte de vie du Mahatma Gandhi »
- Il ne s’agit pas de prévoir l’avenir. Il s’agir de prendre en charge le présent. Dieu ne nous donne pas le contrôle du moment suivant.
- On a toujours raison de son propre point de vue.
- Celui qui s’abstient d’agir échoue. Celui qui renonce à la récompense de son action s’élève.
- Ne vous inquiétez pas de ce que la méthode de la non-violence semble un processus extrêmement lent. C’est, en fait, la plus rapide, car c’est la plus sûre.
- La force ne tient pas à une capacité physique. Elle repose sur une volonté indomptable. C’est ainsi qu’un petit groupe d’esprits déterminés, habités d’une foi infinie dans leur mission, peut changer le cours de l’histoire.
- Cette voix en moi, qui jamais ne me déçoit, me dit aujourd’hui : « Tu dois tenir tête au monde entier, même si tu dois le faire seul, même si le monde entier te regarde avec des yeux injectés de sang. »
- La capacité de refus ne naît pas en nous subitement. Il faut d’abord cultiver une attitude mentale, puis réorganiser notre vie le plus rapidement possible en accord avec ce nouvel état d’esprit.
Philippe Bilger – Blog 2012
- Il n’y a jamais à tourner en dérision une confiance absolue en son destin, non pas abîmée mais nourrie par les échecs. Il y a un moment, peut-être, où le sort se lasse et où la volonté fait la différence.
- il faut prendre garde à la tentation qui guette les mouvements situés entre les extrêmes, dans un milieu équilibré et raisonnable : celle de se contenter de donner des leçons sur la méthode, les pratiques et les comportements. Celle de juger et de noter les autres pour faire l’économie de l’affirmation de soi.
Ron Johnson – HBR 2011
- You can’t follow the customer. You’ve got to lead your customers — anticipate their needs and meet those needs, even before they know what they want.
- Everyone has a passion or a mission in life that, if matched with the right job, will allow them to flourish.
Meilcour/Versac – Blog 2011
- Le manque de temps, c’est l’excuse d’une absence de priorités, et celle de ceux qui ne veulent pas choisir.
Rajendra Nath Poudyal
- Les occidentaux voyagent beaucoup à l’extérieur de leur pays. Les orientaux voyagent beaucoup à l’intérieur d’eux-mêmes.
Siddartha – Herman Hesse
- Peut-être que tu cherches trop ? Que c’est à force de chercher que tu ne trouves pas ? Quand on cherche, il arrive facilement que nos yeux ne voient que l’objet de nos recherches ; on ne trouve rien parce qu’ils sont inaccessibles à autre chose, parce qu’on ne songe toujours qu’à cet objet, parce qu’on s’est fixé un but à atteindre et qu’on est entièrement possédé par ce but. Qui dit chercher, dit avoir un but. Mais trouver, c’est être libre, c’est être ouvert à tout, c’est n’avoir aucun but déterminé. Tu es peut-être un chercheur ; mais le but que tu as devant les yeux et que tu essaies d’atteindre, t’empêche justement de voir ce qui est tout proche de toi.
- Le savoir peut se communiquer, pas la sagesse.
Will Smith
- There’s no reason to have a plan B, because it distracts from plan A.
- He who says he can, and he who says he can’t, are both usually right.
Jeff bezos – wired 2011
- Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us
Eliette – Blog Nepal 2011
- Il y a toujours des solutions à tout dans ce pays… peut-être parce qu’il y a toujours des soucis !
Philippe Bilger – Blog 2011
- L’intelligence, si elle n’est pas vagabonde et curieuse, se dénature.
Wall Street Journal, 2011
- There are people who want only free stuff, and others would rather pay and be free.
Xavier Gorce, Le Monde, 2011
- Toute ma vie, je me suis dit qu’une fois à la retraite, je pourrai me consacrer à ma vraie passion. Et c’est ce qui est bien dans le boulot : croire qu’on a une passion.
George Lucas
- Working hard is very important. You’re not going to get anywhere without working extremely hard.
- Everybody has talent and it’s just a matter of moving around until you »ve discovered what it is. A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in.
Leo Babauta
- To become good at something, you have to keep doing it.
Paul Graham – Blog
- The more anomalies you see, the more easily you’ll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had all figured it out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They’re just mistaken.
- The main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.
- Essayer is the French verb meaning « to try » and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet.
Amélie Nothomb
- Le moment du combat est moins effrayant que le moment qui précède le combat.
Audiard
- Vivement qu’on ne souvienne plus de rien. J’ai la mémoire en horreur.
- Les comédiens sont des êtres inquiets, toujours en quête de conseils. La meilleure façon de ne pas leur en donner de mauvais est de ne pas leur adresser la parole.
Napoléon
- L’art de la guerre consiste, avec une armée inférieure, à avoir toujours plus de forces que son ennemi sur le point qu’on attaque.
Seth Godin – Blog 2011
- The simple two-step process Step one: Open all doors. Learn a little about a lot. Consider as many options as possible, then add more. Step two: Relentlessly dismiss, prune and eliminate. Choose. Ship. The problem most people run into is that they mix the steps and confuse them. During step one, they aren’t open enough, aren’t willing enough to consider the impossible. And then, in step two, fear of shipping kicks in and they stay open too long, hold on to too many options and hesitate. Simple doesn’t always mean easy.
David Allen, conférence chez Google
- To get things done, you have to know what done means and what doing looks like.
- In a strange way, when you’re in a crisis, you get to relax, because you don’t have to think.
Paul Auster – La solitude du labyrinthe
- Quel chemin prend-on pour devenir soi-même ?
- Au fur et à mesure de la vie, on accumule les expériences, les idées, les pensées, mais il est de plus en plus difficile de comprendre les choses.
- L’art d’écrire est toujours aussi difficile. Avoir une oeuvre derrière soi n’aide absolument pas. Mes livres déjà écrits n’aident en rien celui que je prépare actuellement.
- Chacun traverse, à un moment ou à un autre de sa vie, des moments de crise. Ces moments sont rares. Ils permettent que la vie change du tout au tout, subitement et durablement.
Joe Simpson – Touching the void
- You’ve got to keep making decisions, even if they’re wrong decisions. If you don’t make decisions, you’re stuffed.
La ligne rouge
- -Do you ever get lonely ?
- Only around people.
David Allen
- It’s hard to say no when you’re not aware of everything you’ve said yes to.
Circa Diem – Tout s’efface vite
On n’est jamais seul, jamais ensemble. On est tous seuls ensemble.
TaiChi
- Les heures passent pas, et les années passent trop vite.
La Clef – Guillaume Nicloux
- Comment font les gens ? Ils oublient.
Tom Bihn
- All the bad days have two things in common: you know the right thing to do, but you let someone talk you out of it.
Booba – Temps mort
- j’dois sortir vainqueur d’une défaite
- on connaît rien nous et y’a plein d’trucs à prendre, et puis t’apprends vite avec les coups, reviens avec tes couilles, tes potes, frappe avec les coudes.
- fais pas ton nid sur la branche d’un aigle
Lost
- Do not mistake fate for coincidence.
Stephen King – Under the dome
- People can be slow to catch up with the new deal when the old deal changes.
- In time of crisis, folks are apt to fall back on the familiar for comfort.
- Like most talented demagogues, he never underestimated his target audience’s willingness to accept the absurd.
- In the end, there were only two rules for living with fear (he had come to believe conquering fear was a myth), and he repeated them to himself: I must accept those things over which I have no control. I must turn my adversities into advantages.
- – You’re a brave girl.
- I don’t feel brave.
- Brave people never do.
Kaamelot, Saison 1, livre 2, épisode 12
- – C’est une connerie, ces histoires de doléances.
- Comment ça, Sire ?
- Vous dites aux gens : « Venez, vous pouvez venir vous plaindre au roi ». Les mecs, ils sont pas cons, ils viennent, et ils se plaignent.
Tali Sharot – Time, 2011
- The core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future — to enable us to prepare for what has yet to come. The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events. It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.
Henry Kissinger – Time 2011
- Every solution is an admission ticket to another problem.
Dan Ariely – The upside of irrationality
- One of the big problems with blindness is a slowing of everything. You’re so busy figuring out where you are in your travels that you have to pay strict attention all the time. It seems that everyone is whizzing by you. And then, one day, you realize that slowness isn’t so bad, that paying more attention has its rewards.
Natalia Vodianova – Elle, 2011
- La vie, c’est aussi beaucoup ce que, radicalement, on refuse.
Aznavour – Emission TV, 2011
- On oublie beaucoup de choses. Trop.
Patrick Buisson – Le Point, 2011
- Il est fertile d’être intellectuellement minoritaire.
Aznavour – « J’avais vingt ans »
- Je gaspillais le temps en voulant l’arrêter / Et pour le retenir, même le devancer / Je n’ai fait que courir et me suis essouflé
Steven Pressfield – Interview 2011
- You just have to start. And then keep going.
Jeff Bezos – Answer to a shareholder, 2011
- We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
- Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive, there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right? But if you hold back and you say, ‘No, we believe in this vision,’ then you just stay heads down, stay focused and you build out your vision.
David McCullough, USA Today 2011
- – I still write on a second-hand Royal typewriter that was built in 1940, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
- But don’t you know you could write faster on a computer?
- Yes, I do. But I don’t want to write faster. I want to go slow. The quality will improve.
Renier Lemmens, PayPal EU
- Be the change you want to see around you.
Steve Jobs – 2005, discours Standford
- You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Bullets – Tunng
- Green hills and enemies These things they make us sentimental inside
- So sweet to lose a friend You leave the church and taste The air in your lungs
L’été meurtier – Japrisot
- Je crois que je suis plus ou moins comme tout le monde, et nous sommes de drôles d’animaux.
Duncan Olby (PayPal), 2011, quoting a shogun quoting Sun Tzu
- Strategy is choosing a battleground where investing your resources will make you beat your opponents
Seth Godin – Blog 2011
- You don’t need more time; you just need to decide.
- Most of all, I think we train ourselves to associate certain places with certain outcomes. There’s a reason they built those cathedral. Pick your place, on purpose.
Tom Sharpe – Wilt 1
- C’était si simple. Tu racontais aux gens ce qu’ils avaient envie d’entendre, et ils te croyaient aussi sec.
Jonathan Tropper – Plan B
- It took me a few years to realize than nothing was happening to me. Nothing doesn’t happen all at once. It starts slow, so slow that you don’t even notice it. And then, when you do, you banish it to the back of your mind in a hail of rationalizations and resolutions. You get busy, you bury yourself in your meaningless work, and for a while you keep the consciousness of Nothing at bay. But then something happens and you’re forced to face the fact that. Nothing is happening to you right now, and has been for some time.
- It was like one of those posters with a hidden illusion that you can only see out of the corner of your eye. Once you looked directly at it, the illusion was gone.
- I guess one of the drawbacks to doing nothing with your life is that you’re never quite sure when you’ve accomplished it.
- You know how to make god laugh? Make a plan.
- Time was switching from a jog to a sprint and we weren’t even in the race.
- Until you found your way out of the woods, it was reassuring to find other people lost in them with you.
John Sculley
- The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do.
Lionel Jospin – Lionel raconte Jospin
- Diriger, c’est orienter, donner un sens.
- C’est toujours dur d’affronter l’irréversible.
Robinson Crusoë – Daniel Defoe
- La crainte du danger est dix mille fois plus effrayante que le danger lui-même, et nous trouvons le poids de l’anxiété plus lourd de beaucoup que le mal que nous redoutons.
- Que de fois, quand nous sommes en suspens, dans le doute ou l’hésitation du chemin que nous avons à prendre, un vent secret nous pousse vers une autre route que celle où nous tendions, où nous appelaient nos sens, notre inclination et peut-être même nos devoirs ! Nous ressentons une étrange impression de l’ignorance où nous sommes des causes et du pouvoir qui nous entraînent : mais nous découvrons ensuite que, si nous avions suivi la route que nous voulions prendre et que notre imagination nous faisait une obligation de prendre, nous aurions couru à notre ruine et à notre perte.
Louise Attaque
- Nous, les rêves, on les multiplie.
Steve Pavlina – Blog (2010)
- If you give your attention to items you can’t control, you’re wasting your time.
Leo Babauta – « Focus »
- When you’re going uphill, change course.
Robert Rossi
- Toute ma vie j’ai eu de la chance.
- La chance m’a toujours souri.
Paul Graham – Essay (2005)
- If you put people in a position of independence, they develop the qualities they need. Throw them off a cliff, and most will find on the way down that they have wings.
- If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
- People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that’s compellingly mysterious.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon – L’ombre du vent
- Le monde qui palpitait au-dehors perdait la mémoire sans s’en rendre compte, jour après jour, se croyant plus sage à mesure qu’il oubliait.
Lewis Carroll
- If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Ricardo Semler – Maverick!
- The desire for rules and the need for innovation are, I believe, incompatible. Rules freeze companies inside a glacier; innovation lets them ride sleighs over it.
- Where does persistence end and obsession begin?
- It’s so much easier to throw the stone than to be the window.
- Persistence is a virtue only when it is pointed in the right direction.
- Our advances in technology have far outstripped our advances in mentality.
- Start being proud of not being aware of everything.
- Thinking is difficult. It requires concentration and discipline. Give it the times it deserves.
Jonathan Tropper – This is where I leave you
- There is nothing sadder that sitting in a car, and having absolutely nowhere to go.
- Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
- When does it all happen? In increments, so you can’t watch out for it, you can’t fix it. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.
- You learn not to think about what might have been, and just appreciate what you have.
- – I need to get my own place.
- So why don’t you?
- Brain injury. There are things I can’t do.
- Like what?
- Like remembering what the fuck it is I can’t do.
- I had simply forgotten. The way you forget in dreams. The way you wish you could forget in real life, but, of course, you can’t. In real life, you don’t get to choose what you forget.
- Even under the best circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.
- That’s the thing about life. Everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.
- Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it agains what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.
Help myself – Gaetan Roussel
- Nous ne faisons que traverser des océans, des déserts.
Des hommes et des dieux, 2010
- Les fleurs des champs ne se déplacent pas pour trouver du soleil.
Fred Brooks – Interview Wired, 2010
- Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.
- The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource.
Clay Shirky – Interview Wired, 2010
- Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.
Seth Godin – Linchpin
- Working without a map involves both vision and the willingness to do something about what you see.
- The most difficult type of emotional labor is staring into the abyss of choice and picking a path.
- The power of choice is just that. Power. The only thing we have to do is remember that we control the harnessing of that power. We choose. Don’t let your circumstances or habits rule your choices today. Become a master of yourself and use your willpower to choose.
Paul Auster – « Invisible »
- Odds don’t count when it comes to actual events, and just because a thing is unlikely to happen, that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Ed Catmull, Pixar CEO (interview The Economist event, 2010)
- Fundamentally, successful companies are unstable.
- The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.
- We want to have honesty, but honest is a buzzword. Its one of these things we hear, everyone nods their head on, ‘it’s all true’, [but] the gap between the abstractions and where people actually do it is enormous. And people fill it in with all sorts of crap.
Gwyn ap Harri, CEO de Smart Assess (interview 37signals, 2010)
- You have to keep saying the same things until people believe in you. You are what you do, and if you consistently keep doing great things, you become great.
Seth Godin – Tribes
- Leadership is about creating change that you believe in.
- In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarly win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.
- Ultimately, people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along.
- Change isn’t made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.
- Magic only happens in a spectator’s mind. Everything else is a distraction… Methods for their own sake are a distraction. You cannot cross over into the world of magic until you put everything else aside and behind you – including your own desires and needs – and focus on bringing an experience to the audience. This is magic. Nothing else. Substitue « leadership » for « magic » and there you are.
- A big part of leadership is the ability to stick with a dream for a long time. Long enoug that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another… so they follow.
Maciej Ceglowski
- What habits help creativity? Running up hills!
Steve Jobs (Wired, 1996)
- Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
- To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.
- Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
- Most people get far more information than they can assimilate.
- When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic!
William Montgomery, CEO of TEN
- There are a lot more people who can take a hill than there are people who can accurately predict which hill it would be best to take.
The Wire – Saison 3 épisode 9
- A life is the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.
37signals (blog Signal vs noise)
- The problem with blindly following experts: They’re experts on the past. No one is an expert on the future.
Joel Spolsky (blog Joel on Software, 2002)
- the key to productivity: just getting started.
Watchmen
- Toi, le type le plus puissant de l’univers, tu n’es qu’un pantin qui suit un scénario ?
- Nous sommes tous des pantins. Moi, je vois mes ficelles, c’est tout.
The Bloom Brothers
- When you’re done with something, blow it off.
Peter Drucker – Havard Business Review 1999
- It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
Jospin, université des jeunes socialistes, 2006, à propos du 21 avril 2002
- J’ai vu que certains disaient : il nous a abandonnés en pleine campagne. Ecoutez, il ne faut pas confondre la guerre et la démocratie. Quand vous êtes battu dans une élection, c’est douloureux, c’est désagréable, mais ce n’est pas un combat physique sur le terrain, où des hommes perdent leur vie. Cette rhétorique guerrière – quelqu’un qui aurait abandonné ses troupes dans le combat – est absurde. Mais je la retiens un instant. Si on se préoccupe de l’art de la guerre, vous avez déjà vu beaucoup d’armées devant mener une deuxième bataille qui partent avec un général vaincu ? J’ai pensé que si je marquais nettement les conséquences du vote qui s’était exprimé, si je le respectais totalement tout en agissant comme un individu libre, si je prenais sur moi, finalement, symboliquement, physiquement et tristement le choc de cette défaite, alors peut être, contrairement à ce que je vois certains dire, vos chances en étaient augmentées pour la bataille des législatives et non pas affaiblies
A l’origine (film de Xavier Giannoli, 2009)
- Je ne veux pas que tu me mentes. Il n’y a rien de plus humiliant.
- C’est que tu n’as pas été beaucoup humilié, alors…
Alain Bashung – « Résidents de la République »
- Un jour, je parlerais moins… jusqu’au jour où je ne parlerais plus.
Kimto Vasquez (interview France Culture, décembre 2009)
- Être haineux, c’est à la portée de tout le monde.
Dieter Rams (interview Financial Times, Novembre 2009)
- Good design has the task of being quiet and helping people generate a level of calm that allows them to be themselves.
Phil Jackson – « Sacred hoops »
- The first rule of learning is the desire to learn, which veterans players often lose.
- I compare this temporary amnesia to a trip to the dentist. You know the drill is going to be unpleasant but you don’t remember exactly how unpleasant until it’s administrated. Suddenly the memory of the past experiences rushes to the surface.
Emmanuel Bove – « Mes amis »
- Je n’aime pas à quitter une personne avec qui je me suis entretenu, sans savoir son adresse ni où la revoir. Lorsque, malgré moi, cela arrive, je vis pendant plusieurs heures dans une sorte de malaise. La pensée de la mort, que d’habitude je chasse rapidement, me hante. Cette personne, en s’allant pour toujours, m’a rappelé, j’ignore pourquoi, que je mourrai seul.
- Les gens ne croient pas au hasard, surtout dès que celui-ci est seul pour excuser.
- C’est curieux comme, dans la mémoire, les endroits où l’on a été malheureux deviennent agréables.
- Je chante rarement les chansons de mon enfance pour ne pas émousser les souvenirs qu’elles m’évoquent.
- J’aime à garder dans mon cerveau une provision de souvenirs. Je sais qu’elle y est. Cela me suffit.
- Lorsque je sors de chez moi, je compte toujours sur un évènement qui bouleversera ma vie. Je l’attends jusqu’à mon retour. C’est pourquoi je ne reste jamais dans ma chambre. Malheureusement, cet évènement ne s’est jamais produit.
- Les évènements ne s’étaient pas passés, comme, la nuit, je me l’étais imaginé. Il en est toujours ainsi. Je le sais et j’ai beau me contraindre et ne pas faire de suppositions, mon imagination prend chaque fois le dessus.
- Certains hommes forts ne sont pas seuls dans la solitude.
Patricia Cornwell – « Sans raison »
- Les détails sont exagérés au fur et à mesure que le temps passe.
A few good men, film de Rob Reiner
- You want answers?!
- I want the truth!
- You can’t handle the truth!
Seth Godin – Blog, december 2009
- It’s far easier to mix up a Rubik’s cube than to solve one.
Sept & Lartizan – Désintégration
- On balance des répliques quand faudrait savoir s’taire
Lartizan – Blog
- On ne fait jamais le top des gens les plus banals, forcément.
Seth Godin – Permission marketing
- Muhammad Ali did not become heavyweight champion of the world by punching twenty people one time each. No, he became the champ by punching one guy twenty times.
- According to a poll, more than 85 percent of the people consider themselves smarter than average.
Raymond Domenech, interview L’express, novembre 2009
- Vous êtes rancunier ? Non, j’ai juste de la mémoire.
- J’écris surtout pour ne pas oublier. Presque tous les soirs, je m’installe à mon ordinateur afin de retranscrire à chaud les événements tels qu’ils se sont réellement passés.
Kanye West – « Say you will »
- Don’t say you will. Unless you will.
« Jusqu’à toi »
- This suitcase holds a lifetime of memories. The memories of all the trips we did not do.
Heat – Michael Mann
- I’m alone, I am not lonely
Jonathan Tropper – The book of Joe
- I’ve recently developed the sneaking suspicion that underneath it all I am one sad, lonely son of a bitch, and have been for some time.
- Time doesn’t heal as much as it buries things in the undergrowth of your brain, where they lie in wait to ambush you when you least except it.
- As I drive through the town for the first time in seventeen years, I realize that all I’ve had are superficial recollections, cardboard stand-ins for real memories that are only now finally emerging. The corporeal experience of returning is the trigger to long-dormant memories, and as I gaze around my hometown, I’m stunned by the renewed clarity of what I’d buried in my subconscious. Memories that should have long since crumbled to dust from seventeen years of attrition turn out to have been hermetically sealed and perfectly preserved, now summoned up as if by posthypnotic suggestion. There is a sense of violation in learning that, unbeknowst to me, my mind had maintained such a strong connection with the town, as my brain’s been sneaking around behind my back.
- I’m troubled by the notion that while I wasn’t looking, I seem to have become an asshole.
- Quality is a twentieth-century concept. Here in the twenty-first, being the low bidder is all that counts.
- – I have a problem with commitment.
- How’s that?
- Nobody wants me to commit.
- Maybe it’s not about speed exactly ; maybe it’s about time, and trying to catch it, to overtake it and just slow everything the fuck down for a little while.
- Carly spent the first half hour of homeroom every morning scribbling copiously in a worn leather-bound journal. She was terribly concerned with the general transcience of things and the imperfect, random nature of memory. It was the one compulsion in her otherwise laid-back disposition, this notion that particular feelings and thoughts could be irretrievably lost to the vagaries of time and distance. « This is the age when we’re the purest form of ourselves we’ll ever be. We haven’t been complicated by everything yet. I want to keep a clear record of who I am, so that down the road I’ll be able to see who I was. Maybe I can avoid losing myself completely ».
- I’m here to tell you that, at the end of the day, nothing else matters but the things that trully matters. This is nothing you didn’t know before, but even though you know it, it doesn’t mean you really know it. Because if you really knew it, you’d act on it, man.
- Cheating death is a milestone, I think, a springboard for untold possibilities.
- – Did you really forget that night in the field?
- I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’d forgotten it, or just hadn’t thought about it in so long that it felt that way.
- We all try to hold on to the the good things from our past. Especially when the here and now doesn’t measure up.
- I’ve been teaching basketball for going on fifty years. When you teach anything for so long, you get so used to teaching, you kind of forget how to learn.
Leo Babauta – Minimalist blog
- It’s easy to consume information, so much that we forget about creating and building.
- Easy is nice, but it leads to consequences that we might not want. It leads to excess, to debt, to information overload, to getting fat, to having too much, to never having enough time for what’s truly important.
Stephen King – « La tour sombre » (BD, tome 1)
- Rien ne ravive les souvenirs mieux que les odeurs.
Bruce Moeller – CEO of DriveCam
- An introvert is someone who seeks solitude to get his batteries recharged.
Bob Parsons – CEO of Go Daddy
- If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.
Philippe Gabilliet, professeur à l’ESCP Europe, s’adressant à ses élèves du MBA
- La chance, c’est une compétence. Une compétence qui se travaille.
- Avoir de la chance, c’est avoir la capacité à gagner les concours de circonstances.
Maggie Jackson – Distracted
- The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
- No one is going to write « dark age » on our walls, at least not in plain, clear script. We’ll have to see for ourselves.
- The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook (in The principles of pyschology, by William James)
- Memory in all its glorious layering evolved in humans not just as a rearview mirror on life, but as a kind of predictor of the future, since whoever could remember the placement of a bear’s cave or a fishing hole survived to shape the future.Ghostly, mysterious, and inextricably linked to attention, memory is a key player in the eternal background between past and future. To understand how, consider why we are built with a need not just to remember, but to forget.
Seth Godin – Purple cow
- The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: the leader is the leader because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable is now taken – it’s no longer remarkable when you do it.
- The Japanese have invented some truely useful words. One of them is otaku. Otaku describes something that’s more than an hobby but a little less than an obsession.
Seth Godin – Blog
- It’s very easy to surrender to the moment and walk over to the next hill. It’s more productive to climb this hill instead.
Memory of love
- Tu dois te souvenir. Moi, je peux oublier.
(mari qui pousse sa femme amnésique à revoir son amant, avec qui elle a eu son accident)
Dexter – Saison 2, épisode 12
- How can you be so calm? I’m good at compartimentalization.
Anthony, Koh Lanta 9
- Quand on est seul, on ne parle pas, on réfléchit
David Allen – « Making it all work »
- Huge numbers of people are increasingly experiencing greater amounts of stress, a sense of loss of control, and an inability to focus sufficiently. In response to that situation, a recognition of the need for regaining our equilibrium is growing wolrdwide.
- We have a desperate need to learn how to manage – not information but rather what things mean and how they relate to each other.
- The mind is a great servant, but a terrible master.
- There are only two things you need to do to achieve positive and productive engagement with the commitments you face: get organized and get focused.
- Most of us live in a world in which we’re not even sure what all our options are, much less which one would serve us best.
- In the world of « knowledge work », the toughest task is actually defining what your work is.
- Much of the energy in propelling a rocket is spent in course correction
- Knowing when to refocus from another view-point, and when to sacrifice a system that has begun to constrain expansion and expression, is a sign of mastership.
- Many people are resistant to dealing with some in-depth areas because they tend to want to have the answers before they’re willing to acknowledge that they have the questions. They want to know how to achieve something before they admit there’s something to achieve.
- Our minds have a seductive way of convincing us that what we’re thinking about, while we’re thinking about it, is so clear and obvious that we’ll never forget it and will have easy access to it exactly when we need it.
- The vast majority of all performance improvement is systemic. Additional motivation and intelligence make only a negligible difference in the long run.
- If you review your life, you may discover that you indeed have had some sort of direction all along, but it probably wasn’t clear-cut and obvious as you were moving down the path.
Claude Moisy (Automne 2009, Médias)
- La malédiction de la condition humaine. Le mal est dans le bien. Le recul est dans le progrès. Chaque invention des hommes comporte autant d’inconvénients que d’avantages, et l’on ne peut profiter des uns sans souffrir des autres. Et l’inventeur est toujours dépassé par son invention. Car l’homme, dans son inépuisable génie, oublie toujours que sa dernière et plus merveilleuse trouvaille sera à la fois la meilleure et la pire des choses. C’est le mythe du roi Midas qui obtint des dieux le pouvoir de transformer tout en or pour s’apercevoir que cela lui rendait la vie impossible.
« Le dernier pour la route »
- J’ai le vertige d’un type assis sur une chaise, et qui s’aperçoit que la chaise est vide.
- Un clown ne meurt jamais.
Dexter – Saison 2, episode 7 (Lundy to Deb)
- The truth speaks to me from a peaceful place. Gotta set the stage to hear it.
Jason Fried (37signals blog)
- There’s a lot of talk about change being hard, but sometimes it’s harder to keep your mind than change your mind.
Jacques Audiard, à propos de l’absence de son père (Inrockuptible, 25 août 2009)
- Le côté irrémédiable de la mort est chiant
37signals, à propos de leur business, (sur leur blog, 2008)
- We think our biggest competitor is habit—people using the phone, email, paper, pencils, post-it notes, and fax machines
Denis Dercourt, à propos de son film Demain dès l’aube (interview Première, août 2009)
- Les films de cape et d’épée sont un genre qui demande beaucoup d’adresse et une grand mémoire corporelle. Or, cette mémoire de corps est le lien entres les combats d’escrime et la musique. C’est la clef de voûte du scénario.
- Lorsqu’on apprend à lire, on ne se demande pas si c’est agréable ou non. Le plaisir vient ensuite.
- A l’heure de l’info instantanée, il nous manque le long terme et la réflexion.
« Là-haut »
- It may seem boring but, I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most
La bible, ecclésiaste, chapitre 3
- Il y a un moment pour tout et un temps pour toute chose sous le ciel [...] Un temps pour enfanter, et un temps pour mourir / Un temps pour détruire, et un temps pour bâtir / Un temps pour déchirer, et un temps pour coudre / Un temps pour parler, et un temps pour se taire
Marcel Proust
- Quelquefois l’avenir habite en nous sans que nous le sachions, et nos paroles qui croient mentir dessinent une réalité prochaine
Ernest Hemingway
- Nous devons nous y habituer : aux plus importantes croisées des chemins de notre vie, il n’y a pas de signalisation.
Placido Domingo – Interview Télérama (1998)
- Chacun porte un destin proportionnel à sa carrure. Mes épaules sont larges.
- Je dois gérer jusqu’à mes temps de concentration. Le repos devient une discipline.
Marguerite Duras
- La meilleure manière de filmer l’été c’est de filmer l’hiver ; car c’est dans le manque que l’objet désiré se révèle le plus fortement.
Charles Pasqua – « Ce que je sais… Tome 2. Un magnifique désastre 1988-1995″
- Ce qui parait inéluctable n’est jamais certain.
- D’un moyen susceptible, à certaines conditions, d’aider à atteindre les objectifs fixés, ils ont fait un objectif !
- Mobiliser les énergies, susciter la créativité, développer la combativité, refuser ce que les autres considèrent comme inéluctable : voilà quels sont les moyens !
Jonathan Tropper – « Perte et fracas »
- Personne n’a envie de jouer au con avec l’éternité
- On se raccroche si désespérément aux souvenirs qu’à force, ils se souillent, se gâtent.
- Parfois, la seule vérité que les gens soient prêts à admettre est celle avec laquelle ils se réveillent le matin.
- Je ne détruis rien, je rectifie mes erreurs, nuance. Le processus a beau sembler être le même pour l’observateur ignorant, je t’assure que l’objectif visé est très différent.
- Si les choses étaient simples, personne n’aurait besoin de moi.
Agnès Desarthe – « Un secret sans importance »
- Le problème avec les gens, c’est qu’ils finissaient toujours par disparaitre.
- Je ne suis pas folle, j’accepte simplement de voir des choses que n’importe quel enfant voir et que les adultes font semblant d’ignorer.
- Elle se demanda ce qui chez elle la poussait si tôt à capituler. Elle avait l’impression d’être un château de sable constamment menacé par une marée montante.
- Si l’on ne commence pas par oublier, on ne peut rien apprendre.
- C’est comme si la croyance et le savoir se logeaient dans des parties imperméables l’une à l’autre.
- On dit que j’ai la main verte. C’est faux. Mes mains n’ont rien à voir avec les plantes. Les fleurs poussent parce que je connais les règles et que je les respecte. N’importe quel imbécile, s’il applique à faire ce qu’on lui dit, peut reproduire les jardins de Versailles en miniature sur son balcon. Il n’y a aucun art là-dedans. Il faut s’en tenir à la loi de la nature.
Jorge Luis Borges – « L’autre »
- « En fin de compte, quand on se souvient, on ne peut que se retrouver avec soi-même. »
- « - Comment se porte votre mémoire ?
- La plupart du temps elle ressemble à l’oubli, mais elle retrouve encore ce qu’on lui demande. »
Jorge Luis Borges – « Ulrica »
- « Mon récit sera fidèle à la réalité ou, du moins, au souvenir que je garde de cette réalité, ce qui revient au même. »
Jorge Luis Borges – « Le Congrès »
- « J’ai remarqué que les voyages sont moins longs au retour qu’à l’aller »
- « Il y a un plaisir mystérieux dans le fait de détruire »
Jorge Luis Borges – « There are more things »
- « J’avais prévu l’échec de ma démarche, mais il y a une différence entre prévoir une chose et la voir se réaliser. »
Jorge Luis Borges – « La nuit des dons »
- « Apprendre c’est se souvenir, ignorer n’est en fait qu’avoir oublié »
Lewis Caroll – « De l’autre côté du miroir »
- « C’est en vain qu’ont passé les ans, ma mémoire défie le temps… »
- « - Jamais, au grand jamais, dit le Roi, je n’oublierais l’horreur de cette minute.
- Oh, que si ! dit la Reine, vous l’oublierez si vous n’en prenez pas note. »
- « C’est toujours ainsi lorsqu’on vit à reculons. Au début, cela vous fait tourner la tête, mais cela présente un grand avantage : la mémoire opère dans les deux sens. »
Dean Koontz – « False memory »
- « In the real world as in dreams, nothing is quite what it seems »
- « Longer than I can remember, I’ve been afraid of everything. Getting up, going to bed, and everything in between. »
- « Seeing her like this a second time was more terrifying that the first episode. Once could be an aberration. Twice was a pattern. In patterns could be seen the future. »
- « Love grows deeper and stronger when we both have the wisdom to say what must be said and the wisdom to know what never needs to be put into words. »
Herbert Simon
- « A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention »
Merlin Mann – 43Folders.com
- « If you’ve crossed the river, you should quit carrying the boat. »
- « If you aren’t rejecting or dumping things every single day, you don’t know your priority. You’re making things up. If you think you have 35 priorities, then yes: you also think you have 35 arms. Is it any wonder you’re feeling awkard and unsure? »
François Bayrou – Emission « On n’est pas couché »
- « Plus on a d’idées d’équilibre, plus il faut être tranchant. »
J.J. Abrams – Magazine « Wired »
- « That is to say, the experience—the setup for a joke’s punch line, the buildup to a magic trick’s big flourish—is as much of a thrill as the result. There’s discovery to be made and wonder to be had on the journey that not only enrich the ending but in many ways define it. »
Daniel Tammet – « Je suis né un jour bleu »
- « Mes souvenirs de cette époque sont très forts en dépit de leur petit nombre – comme si de minces rayons de lumière traversaient le brouillard du temps. »
Philippe Bilger – Blog
- « Il y a quelque chose de presque jouissif à aller en territoire inconnu pour tenter de demeurer soi. »
- « Il y a des êtres qui nous sauvent des structures. »
Conan Doyle – « Le signe des quatre »
- « Tandis que l’homme pris isolément est un puzzle insoluble, il devient, au sein d’une masse, une certitude mathématique. »
Conan Doyle – « Etude en rouge »
- Le cerveau est comme un petit grenier d’abord vide. Notre affaire est de le garnir de meubles de notre choix. L’étourdi l’encombre de tout le fatras qu’il trouve sur son chemin ; et pour faire de la place, il se débarrasse des connaissances qui auraient pu lui être utiles ; au mieux il les entasse pêle-mêle avec quantité d’autres et il ne peut plus mettre la main dessus quand il en a besoin. Au contraire, le travailleur intelligent choisit avec discernement ce qu’il range dans sa cervelle. Il ne s’occupe que de choses utiles ; mais il en possède une grande variété, qu’il tient en ordre. L’erreur est de s’imaginer que ce petit grenier a des murs élastiques indéfiniment extensibles. Soyez sûrs qu’à un moment donné chaque nouvelle acquisition prend la place d’une ancienne. Il importe donc beaucoup de ne pas laisser les connaissances superflues évincer celles dont on a besoin. »
David Allen – Interview by Merlin Mann (43folders.com)
- « Widgets are lot easier to crank than to decide which widgets to crank. »
- « One way of creating security: don’t worry about screwing up. »
- « The mind is for having ideas, not for holding them. »
- « Procrastination is not about not doing. It’s about not doing and feeling crappy. »
Suzuki Roshi – « Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind »
- « In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few. »
Albert Einstein
- « Dans la complexité, trouvez la simplicité. Dans la discorde trouvez l’harmonie. Au milieu de la difficulté se trouve l’opportunité. »
Ursula K. LeGuin
- « It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. »
Phil Jackson – « Sacred hoops »
- « In basketball – as in life – true joy comes from being fully present in each and every moment, not just when things are going your way. »
- « Above all, trust your gut. This is the first law of leadership. »
Michael Connelly – « Le poète »
- « J’essayais d’épuiser mon corps dans l’espoir que mon esprit l’imiterait. »
- « Au fond de moi, je me disais que c’était juste une étape. Je me disais ça depuis dix ans maintenant, peut-être plus. »
- « J’étais stupéfait par l’emprise de certains souvenirs, la précision et la force avec lesquelles ils pouvaient revivre. »
- « - Quand tu étais enfant, il fallait toujours que tu détruises tout. Tu t’en souviens ? Tous ces jouets que tu as cassés !
- Pourquoi est-ce que tu parles de ça, maman ? Il s’agit de…
- Ce que je veux te dire, c’est que lorsque l’on casse des choses, on ne peut pas toujours les réparer après. Et qu’est-ce qu’il reste ensuite ? Rien du tout, John, il ne reste plus rien. »
Richard, insomniaque (vu dans Sept à Huit, 12 avril 2009)
- « Mon futur se conjugue au présent. »
- « A ceux qui se demandent que je raconte, je leur dis : essayez de ne pas dormir trois jours. Au bout de trois jours, regardez dans quel état vous êtes. Imaginez ce que ça donne au bout de huit ans, de ne pas dormir. Des nuits blanches qu’on enfile comme des perles. »
John Lennon
« Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making over plans »
Martin Winckler – « Les trois médecins »
- « C’est la sensation épouvantable que l’on éprouve en prenant conscience que tant de choses sont à conjuguer au passé, et qu’on ne sait plus exactement quand on s’est mis à changer de temps. C’est la sensation déprimante que même si les gens que l’on a aimés ne sont pas morts, ce que nous avons partagé avec eux, hier ou avant-hier, est devenu imaginaire, car le souvenir lui-même s’estompe, se transforme, se dilue. »
- « L’essentiel, ce n’est pas le nombre de gens qu’on soigne, ou la manière dont on les soigne. L’essentiel, lorsqu’on soigne quelqu’un, c’est de s’en occuper à cent pour cent. »
- « On oublie. On n’oublie pas tout le monde, mais on oublie beaucoup de gens. »
- « Ce serait plus simple si on ne passait pas son temps à garder tous ces papiers, toutes ces photos, toutes ces lettres, toutes ces traces. »
« Gone baby gone »
- « I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. »
- « When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. « You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves. »"
Sempé – Interview Télérama 2009
- « De ce qui se passe autour de moi, je ne vois pas grand-chose, parce que j’ai la tête ailleurs, je pense toujours à autre chose. C’est mon défaut depuis que je suis tout gosse : en quelque endroit où je me trouve, même si je veux m’intéresser à ce qui se passe, même si j’ai l’air intéressé par ce qui se passe, ce n’est pas vrai, je ne suis pas vraiment là. »
- « La mélancolie fait partie de la vie. Parce qu’on se rend compte que tout est fragile : les relations humaines, l’existence, la lumière même… C’est lié au temps qui passe, ou au temps qu’il fait. »
Steve Krug – « Don’t make me think »
- « We’re all beginners under the skin. Scratch an expert and you’ll often find someone who’s muddling through – just at a higher level. »
Ken Follett – « Code to zero »
- « It was like a nightmare, except that waking up brought no sense of relief. »
- « Accessing the memory is not like opening the refrigerator, where you can see the content at a glance. It is more like using a library catalogue – you have to know what you are looking for. »
- « There was a smile in his voice. »
K.C. Teis (PayPal)
« The quality of the design depends on the quality of the discussions that the designers have »
Don Norman – « The design of everyday things »
- « I prefer to remember things by writing them on a pad of paper rather than spending hours of study on the art of memory. »
- « The ability of conscious attention is limited: focus on one thing and you reduce your attention to others. »
- « The technical term for this process is « hill-climbing », analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill – or at least at a local peak. »
- « Knowledge in the mind is ephemeral: here now, gone later. We can’t count on something being present in mind at any particular time, unless it is triggered by some external event or unless we deliberately keep it in mind through constant repetition (which then prevents us from having conscious thoughts). Out of sight, out of mind. »
- « Ah, the foibles of memory »
Leo Babauta
- « The answer to the problem of darkness has always been the light. »
- « The way you do anything is the way you do everything. »
Rakim
« I got a love for dedication. Because even myself, I fight that batttle to try to stay dedicated to whatever I do. It’s hard to be dedicated. If it’s sports, if it’s music, if it’s anything, when I see somebody who’s dedicated, my heart goes out to him… because it’s hard to stay focus. »
François Ozon
- « Il y a tout un travail de résistance dans le processus créatif. C’est perturbant, mais cela permet de se recentrer sur l’essentiel. »
Jacques Brel
- « Le talent, c’est avoir l’envie de faire quelque chose. »
- « Avoir envie de réaliser un rêve, c’est le talent. Et tout le restant, c’est de la sueur, c’est de la transpiration, c’est de la discipline. »
- « Il faut s’entendre sur le mot réussir. Je crois qu’on ne réussit qu’une seule chose : on réussit ses rêves. On a un rêve, et on essaye de structurer son rêve. Dans ce sens-là, il est exact que j’ai travaillé pour réussir mes rêves. »
- Il y a des moments où il vaut mieux être honnête vis-à-vis des gens que faire plaisir aux gens, je crois. Je même suis sûr de ça.
- « Ce qu’il y a de plus dur pour un homme qui voudrait quitter Vilvoord et qui veut aller vivre à Hong-Kong, c’est pas d’aller à Hong-Kong, c’est de quitter Vilvoord. »
- « Je connais un million de types qui vont écrire un livre. Des types qui disent : je vends des bretelles encore pendant deux ans, et ensuite j’écris un livre. Et si on les rencontre deux ans plus tard, ils diront : moi, je continue à vendre mes cornichons, tu comprends, je vis de mes cornichons, j’ai une femme, j’ai deux enfants, j’ai une petite amie, ma voiture est vieille… Je vends des cornichons encore deux ans, et après j’écris un livre. Moi, je crois que, bretelles ou cornichons, quand on a envie de faire d’un truc, il faut plonger comme un fou et le faire, quitte à se tromper. Et tu sais pourquoi les gens n’écrivent pas de livre ? Parce qu’ils font autre chose à la place. Ce n’est que ça. C’est le coup d’aller à Hong-Kong, je reviens là-dessus. Il faut s’obliger, il faut se botter le cul, ça n’arrive pas comme un oeuf de Pâques. C’est du travail, c’est de la discipline. »
- « La bêtise, c’est de la paresse. C’est un type qui dit : « Je vis, je vais bien, et ça me suffit. » Il ne se botte pas le cul tous les matins en se disant : « Ce n’est pas assez. Tu ne sais pas assez de choses, tu ne vois pas assez de choses, tu ne fais pas assez de choses ». La bêtise, c’est une espèce ce graisse autour du coeur, autour du cerveau. »
- « La peur est un phénomène imaginatif, et l’imagination est nourrie par des choses extrêmement précises, extrêmement techniques. Quand on lit Rimbaud, on est plus riche que la veille, mais on sait aussi qu’on écrit beaucoup moins bien qu’on ne croyait écrire la veille. »
- « La fuite, c’est la résignation. C’est dire : « Ah, j’ai pas eu de chance. » Mais qui a eu de la chance ? Je connais pas bien, la chance, je sais pas bien ce que c’est… La chance, elle se viole tout le temps, elle va se chercher, on se bat. La chance, c’est qu’un jour, il y a un examen, et voilà qu’on est prêt. Mais c’est parce qu’on est prêt qu’on réussit cet examen. »
Jeff Bezos
- « In the old world, you devoted 30% of your attention to building a great service and 70% to shouting about it; in the new world, that inverts. »
- « There’s an old Warren Buffet story, that he has three boxes on his desk: in-box, out-box, and too hard. Whenever we’re facing one of these too-hard problems, where we get into an infinite loop and can’t decide what to do, we try to convert it into a straightfoward problem by saying, « Well, what’s better for the costumer? »
- « Every two years, employees do two days of customer service. Everyone has to be able to work in a call center. »
- « One useful habit is to ask the question: why not? »
- « It’s important to be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details. »
- « Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove, we’ll settle for intense. »
- « There is no contradiction between being intense and having fun. »
« If you think life’s a vending machine where you put in virtue and take out happiness, you’re going to be disappointed. »
Six feet under – Ep. 5.05
IAM – « Demain, c’est loin »
- « S’évanouir, devenir un souvenir »
REM – « Man on the moon »
- « Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk. »
Ridan – « Le rêve »
- « A quoi ça sert une vie sans rêve ? A quoi ça sert une vie sans risque » ?
Jean-Marie Le Clézio
« Le monde est riche et la mémoire est un trésor inépuisable »
Steven Pressfield – « The war of art »
- The hill is a sonofabitch but what can you do? Set one foot in front of another and keep climbing.
- The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.
- It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it.
Jonathan Coe – « The closed circle »
- « Perhaps I’m someone who only feels happy inside herself when she’s halfway up a hill. »
- « Remember that we’re talking about a conversation that took place probably about twenty-five years ago, so my memory of it is hardly going to be very clear; but on the other hand, I haven’t thought about it since then – not once – which means that it hasn’t had the chance to get distorted and rewritten in my head. »
- « He knew it was time to stop. But didn’t. »
Mark Hurst – « Bit literacy »
- « There’s a time to save, and time to erase. »
The harder you try, the luckier you get
Robert M. Pirsig – « Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance »
- The truth knocks on the door and you say « Go away, I’m looking for the truth », and so it goes away. Puzzling.
- We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
- In a laboratory situation,when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can’t made head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one.
- It’s a problem of our time. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely amon them has to forego closeness with the people around him. The lunchtime her-and-now stuff is a specialty too.
- You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
- You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
- To the untrained eye, ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustement. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks, his talks is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here, but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will « here ». What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all round him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
- You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree.
- The difference between a good mechanic and bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is the ability to select the good facts from the bad ones. He has to care!
- The solutions are all simple – after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.
- You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it.
- You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley. You’ve got to cross it by yourself. No one else can cross it for you. You’ve got to cross it by yourself.
- The Ancient Greeks saw the future as something upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong.
Seth Godin – Seth Godin’s blog
« Carving out time to initiate is more important than ever. »
« 99% of the time, in my experience, the hard part about creativity isn’t coming up with something no one has ever thought of before. The hard part is actually executing the thing you’ve thought of. »
Tim Ferris :
- La plupart du temps, on n’est ni productif, ni relaxé, on est entre les deux
- Quand on essaye de se défaire d’une habitude, on se retrouve face à un vide, ce qui facilite la rechute. On préfère étirer ses tâches (et être improductif) plutôt que s’ennuyer pendant une heure.
« La chance, on croit toujours que c’est ce qu’on n’a pas. »
– Adèle – « La fille sur le pont »
« Everybody knows that the plague is coming. »
– Leonard Cohen – ‘Everybody knows’
Pat Riley – « The winner within »
- « Every now and then, somewhere, some place, sometime, you are going to have to plant your feet, stand firm, and make a point about who you are and what you believe in. »
- « Just remember what I taught you. There will come a time. And when that time comes, you go out there and kick somebody’s ass. This is that time. »
« Plus le désert gagne, plus les oasis sont précieux. »
– Pierre Nora – Magazine « Médias » n°17 – 2008
« Some people are so far behind in the race that they actually believe they’re leading. »
– Corrado « Junior » Soprano – « The Sopranos » saison 2, épisode 6 – 2000
« Oh lord , please don’t let me be misunderstood » Nina Simone
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