The gems I’ve found were forged in the struggle.

It has never been easier to create content self-published, but it has never been harder to get the attention you want, or need, to really put something into orbit.

If we let the storms pass and choose to reflect, we come out better than ever.

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.

Thinking is mostly just asking yourself questions and answering them.

Information without emotion isn’t retained.

Don’t get angry, don’t get even – focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.

Indiscriminate action is a form of laziness.

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

“Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)” 

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.” 

“My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first” 

“The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.” 

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.” 

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”

“If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.” 

“Life is wasted on the living.” 

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” 

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

“I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.” 

“Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.”