Quotes are essentially heuristics or abstractions — short sentences that encapsulate deeper, more complex ideas. Someone spent a lot of time understanding some truth about human behaviour, science, or war, and distilled it into something the rest of us can use immediately. These are the ones I keep coming back to.
Mindset “Never Sacrifice who you could be for who you are today.” — Unknown
“Tough times never last, but tough people do.” — Unknown
“If you do what everybody else does, you will end up where everyone else ends up, nowhere.” — Unknown
“Ab nahi to kab.” — Izzy's Indian friend “When you are winning, you're not as good as you think you are. When you are losing, you're not as bad as you think you are.” — Unknown “Conquer yourself and the world lies at your feet.” — Unknown
“Do the hard work especially when you don't feel like it.” — Hamza
Stoicism “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” — Unknown
“There's no light without dark, no joy without pain, you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.” — Unknown
“Weak men try to convince the world they are not weak. Strong men try to convince the world of nothing.” — Unknown
“If you have to say you are something then you are not that thing.” — Unknown
Philosophy “Give a man a purpose and the ability to achieve it and he will crawl over broken glass with a smile.” — Unknown “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” — Albert Camus, A Happy Death
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“Everyone has sufficient justification for suicide.” — Jordan Peterson “The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so.” — Roman Poet
“No one does anything wrong given their view of the world.” — Unknown
Engineering “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” — Donald Knuth
Misc “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.” — Paul Morphy
“In the Darkness only ambition will guide you.” — Character in The Old Republic
“A man can have anything if he is willing to suffer.” — Character in The Old Republic
“Things always have to get worse before they get better. Nothing ever just starts great and ends up greater, that's just not real life.” — Star Wars Theory