smonteiro

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

March 31, 2011, 7:05pm

“Abe Maslow said long ago something you’ve heard before, but you didn’t realize it was him. He said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” We’ve been fooled by our tool. Excuse that expression. (Laughter) We’ve been fooled by our tool. GDP has been our hammer. And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success. And yet, 64 percent of the world’s GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service, the service industry, the industry I’m in. And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture. So maybe it’s time that we get a bigger toolbox, right. Maybe it’s time we actually get a toolbox that, doesn’t just count what’s easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible.”

— Chip Conley: Measuring what makes life worthwhile | Video on TED.com

March 09, 2011, 8:33pm

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

— Albert Einstein

March 04, 2011, 1:38pm

“I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.) The powerful natures dominate, it is a necessity, they need not lift one finger. Even if, during their lifetime, they bury themselves in a garden house!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche. Nachlass, Fall 1880 6 [206]

January 27, 2011, 9:20pm

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

— Teddy Roosevelt

January 03, 2011, 1:20pm

“Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.”

— Fred Brooks

December 01, 2010, 5:03am

“The Great Man … is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without respect and without the fear of “opinion”; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and “respectability”, and altogether everything that is the “virtue of the herd”. If he cannot lead, he goes alone. … He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar. … When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.”

—

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power”

(via a0)

November 16, 2010, 10:57pm

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

(Source: quotationspage.com)

November 08, 2010, 10:20am

“I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

November 05, 2010, 9:18pm