Quips & Quotes

Design

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fiftyfive minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.
— Albert Einstein

If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.
— Dr. Ralf Speth, Chief Executive Officer, Jaguar Land Rover

Design used to be the seasoning you’d sprinkle on for taste; now it’s the flour you need at the start of the recipe.
— John Maeda, Designer and Technologist

Labor at your work until people cannot imagine what you have designed existing any other way.
— Alan Moore, Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything

Everything is designed. Few things are designed well.
— Brian Reed

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Life

Do the thing and you shall have the power.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not rise to the level of our goals but we fall to the level of our systems.
— James Clear

1% better every day.
— James Clear

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
— James Clear

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
— Aristotle

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
— John A. Shedd

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
— Mae West

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
— Seneca

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.
So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor.
Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
— Mark Twain

Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever
— Mahatma Gandhi

There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little.
— Jackie French Koller

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Not all those who wander are lost.
— J.R.R. Tolkien

Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.
— Fitzhugh Mullan

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
— Albert Einstein

No matter where you go, there you are.
— Gordon Furbish

Minimalism

Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.
— Dalai Lama

It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
— Bruce Lee

Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own
― Bruce Lee

Travel

The world is a book and he who doesn’t travel only reads one page.
— St. Augustine

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
— Mark Twain

Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.
— Jack Kerouac

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float; to gain all while you give; to roam the roads of lands remote; to travel is to live.
― Hans Christian Andersen

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
— Freya Stark

Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.
— Unknown

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
— Lao Tzu

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
― Pico Iyer