Secret of Amazon’s Success
We don’t have one big advantage so we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.
— Jeff Bezos
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
— Søren Kierkegaard
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements but moral acts:
— Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight
Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Listen to that still, quite voice in the back of the mind. It might be your destiny trying to get your attention.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
— Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)