These are daily quotes, with each selection chosen at random. Subscribe to the RSS feed to receive a new quote each day.
The daily quote for Monday April 28, 2025
As a dancing partner Rose Tuttle was not a bargain. She was equipped for it physically and she had some idea of rhythm, that wasn’t it; it was her basic attitude. She danced cheerfully, and of course that was no good. You can’t dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art’s sake, but it can’t be cheerful.
Rex Stout, 1958 from Champagne for One
The daily quote for Sunday April 27, 2025
The two texts present us with an obvious dilemma. Both the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claim to outline universal and eternal principles of justice, but according to the Americans all people are equal, whereas according to the Babylonians people are decidedly unequal. The Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, would retort that he is right, and that the Americans are wrong. In fact, they are both Wrong. Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.
Yuval Noah Harari, 2015 from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
© 2015 Yuval Noah Harari
The daily quote for Saturday April 26, 2025
A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.
Albert Einstein, 1896-09-18 from The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein
The daily quote for Friday April 25, 2025
If you’re picking colors based on a Pantone book, you’re limited to a certain number of choices. If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.
Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit. The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.
Rick Rubin, 2023 from the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being
The daily quote for Thursday April 24, 2025
You mean to tell me you’d try to kill the John Doe movement if you can’t use it to get what you want? Well, that certainly is a new low. You sit there with your big cigars and think of deliberately killing an idea that has made millions of people a little bit happier. Why look, I’m just a mug and I know it – but I’m beginning to understand a lot of things. Why, your types are as old as history! If you can’t lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pocket, you slap it down! Like dogs, if you can’t eat something – you bury it! Why, this is the one worthwhile idea that’s come along! People are finally finding out that the guy next door isn’t a bad egg. That’s simple, isnt it? And yet a thing like that has got a chance to spread till it touches every last doggone human being in the world – and you talk about killing it! Well, when this fire dies down what’s going to be left? More misery! More hunger and more hate! And what’s to prevent that from starting all over again? Nobody knows the answer to that one. The John Doe idea may be the answer though, it may be the one thing capable of saving this cockeyed world, yet you sit back there on your fat hulks and tell me you’ll kill it if you can’t use it! Well, you go ahead and try – you couldn’t do it in a million years with all your radio stations, and all your power.
– Down-and-out pitcher Long John Willoughby to industrialist D.B. Norton
Robert Riskin, 1941 from the film Meet John Doe
The daily quote for Wednesday April 23, 2025
Prior to Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, there was a decent centralized usability team equipped with those fancy rooms with one-way mirrors and video cameras. I’m certain these folks did significant work, but when Jobs returned, he shut it down and he cast the design teams to the wind. Each product team inherited part of the former usability team.
Now, I arrived after this reorganization occurred, so I don’t know the actual reasoning, but I do know I never saw those usability labs used once and I would argue that in the past decade Apple has created some of the most usable products out there. My opinion is that the choice to spread the usability design function across the engineering team was intended to send a clear message: engineer and designer need to party more… together.
I can’t imagine building a team responsible for consumer products where engineers and designers weren’t constantly meddling in each other’s business. Yes, they often argue from completely opposite sides of the brain. Yes, it is often a battle of art and science, but engineering and design want exactly the same thing. They want the intense satisfaction of knowing they successfully built something that matters.
Michael Lopp, 2007 from the book Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
The daily quote for Monday April 21, 2025
Overall the secret to Nordic success is not complicated. Nordic societies have simply taken the job of government seriously. They make mistakes and have their troubles, but they keep tweaking their systems in search of improvements, and they work hard to balance the books. They prove that there is nothing inherent in government that automatically makes it less efficient for arranging social services than the private sector.
Anu Partanen, 2016 from the book The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life
The daily quote for Sunday April 20, 2025
Swing — the dance and the music — bespeaks the flexible nature of American life. In jazz, the bass walks a note on every beat. The drummer rides the cymbal or plays brushes on every beat. And everybody else invents melodies and sounds that sway with, against, and upside every beat. Every beat requires musicians to reassess their relationships to one another. This is what makes swinging so challenging. You are forced to be constantly aware of other people’s feelings.
Wynton Marsalis, 2008 from the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life
© 2008 Wynton Marsalis Enterprises
The daily quote for Saturday April 19, 2025
If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.
The daily quote for Friday April 18, 2025
It’s an unfortunate fact that the United States remains astonishingly backward compared to almost all other advanced Western countries when it comes to education, because in America, what predicts how well a child will do in school is not a child’s aptitude or hard work, but the status of the child’s parents – which is to say, their own levels of education and wealth. Other countries suffer from this condition too, but the United States is especially anachronistic. And it’s getting worse: The influence of this wealth predictor in the United States today has only been growing stronger in recent years.
Anu Partanen, 2016 from the book The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life
The daily quote for Thursday April 17, 2025
Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They multiply and spread from one host to another, occasionally weakening the hosts and sometimes even killing them. A cultural idea – such as belief in Christian heaven above the clouds or Communist paradise here on earth – can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading that idea, even at the price of death. The human dies, but the idea spreads. According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think). Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.
Yuval Noah Harari, 2015 from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
© 2015 Yuval Noah Harari
The daily quote for Wednesday April 16, 2025
We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.
John Maynard Keynes, 1930 from the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”
The daily quote for Tuesday April 15, 2025
Many biologists and social scientists have noted that with the development of human culture, the biological evolution of Homo sapiens was usurped by socio-cultural evolution. The construction of artificial environments and social structures created new criteria for selection, and biological fitness was replaced by ‘cultural fitness’, which is often different for different cultures and is generally not measured by the number of offspring. Moreover, the mechanism of socio-cultural evolution is different from the model of biological evolution that was proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and refined by many others. In essence, socio-cultural evolution is ‘Lamarckian’ in nature – it is an example of acquired inheritance, as described by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) – because humans are able to pass on cultural achievements to the next generation.
Jürgen Klüver, 2008-07-09
The daily quote for Friday April 11, 2025
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike, 1989 from Self-Consciousness: Memoirs
The daily quote for Thursday April 10, 2025
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
Henry Miller, 1964 from the book Henry Miller on Writing
The daily quote for Wednesday April 9, 2025
Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell’d. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs – of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history – deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.
The daily quote for Tuesday April 8, 2025
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841 from the essay “Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”
The daily quote for Monday April 7, 2025
Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question. The stakes feel very high, and the odds very long, and the trends very ominous.
Bill McKibben, 2019 from the book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
The daily quote for Sunday April 6, 2025
It’s never been more essential for CEOs to have a consistent voice, a clear purpose, a coherent strategy, and a long-term view. Your company’s purpose is its north star in this tumultuous environment. Putting your company’s purpose at the foundation of your relationships with your stakeholders is critical to long-term success.
Larry Fink, 2022 from the letter “Letter to CEOs from Larry Fink in 2022”