My Favourite Advice in Quotes

About a decade ago, I decided I’d like to be the type of person who collects wisdom and advice using a list of favourite quotes. I intermittently review them when I need to share advice with others — or myself when I wind up not heeding the advice within. Here are some of my favourites I’ve found myself returning to repeatedly.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

— Steve Jobs

There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don’t even know about? It’s true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.

— John Gardner, from Personal Renewal.

I know no better aim for life than to be broken on something great and impossible

— Nietzsche

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

— George S. Patton, Jr.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

— Spinoza

It takes courage to admit that you have been doing something wrong, to admit that you have something to learn, that there is a better way.

— W. Edwards Deming

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

— Winston Churchill

And finally, while it’s not exactly a quote in the form of a pithy aphorism, here’s some advice based on the work of Bronnie Ware expressed in the most common deathbed regrets from The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

In other words …

1. Avoid lying to yourself.
2. Don’t live to work, work to live.
3. Be brave enough to share your feelings.
4. Stay in touch with your friends.
5. Allow yourself to be happy.