Reader > Reader's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“There are too many famous Steve Jobs anecdotes to count, but several of them revolve around one theme: his unwillingness to leave well enough alone. His products had to be perfect; they had to do what they promised, and then some. And even though deadlines loomed and people would have to work around the clock, he would regularly demand more from his teams than they thought they could provide. The result? The most successful company in the history of the world and products that inspire devotion that is truly unusual for a personal computer or cell phone.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force. If”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“You must be able to explicitly say who you are building your thing for. You must know what you are aiming for—you’ll miss otherwise. You need to know this so you can make the decisions that go into properly positioning the project for them. You”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“For any project, you must know what you are doing—and what you are not doing. You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: THIS and for THESE PEOPLE. In”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Free and cheap helps.” So does making the entire process as easy and seamless as possible. The more you reduce the cost of consumption, the more people will be likely to try your product. Which means price, distribution, and other variables are not only essential business decisions, they are essential marketing decisions.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“The more you do, the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“creating more work is one of the most effective marketing techniques of all.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Working on improving your product until it screams “Share me with everyone you know”—that’s less fun than buying a back-page ad that everyone (who still reads newspapers) will see.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Principles are better than instructions and “hacks.” We can figure out the specifics later—but only if we learn the right way to approach them.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Knowing what your goal is—having that crystal clear—allows you to know when to follow conventional wisdom and when to say “Screw it.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen and it’s harder than it looks. —Peter Thiel”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Phil Libin, the cofounder of Evernote, has a quote I like to share with clients: “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest—which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest: We made it. The way to balance that conflict of interest is to bring in people who are objective.”
― Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

“Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

“We don't understand the power of nature and the world because we don't live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.”
― Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why