Insights That Are Relevant to Personal Growth and Professional Development

I am grateful to John Fareed who, with with Sean Hunter, wrote a revised and expanded edition of From Invisible to Icon: How to Become a Known Expert in Your Industry, published by Post Hill Press (April 2024). It includes dozens of insights from a variety of different people. These are among the observations that caught my eye.

“To one who has faith no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” Saint Thomas Aquinas

“The higher up you go, the more mistakes you’re allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.” Fred Astaire

“There is no such thing as a problem without a gift in its hands. You need problems because you need their gifts.” Richard Bach

“Carpenters bend wood. Fetchers bend arrows. Wise men fashion themselves.” Buddha

“It’s easy to decide what you’re going to do. The hard part is deciding what you’re not going to do.” Michael Dell

“Writing is an explanation. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” E.L. Doctorow

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert  Einstein

“The journey not the arrival matters.’ T.S. Eliot

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Forget about PowerPoint and statistics. To involve people at the deepest level you need stories.” Bronwyn Fryer

“There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.” Leonardo da Vinci

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way oƒ seeing things.” Henry Miller

“Most people are not really free.They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of what they see.” V.S. Nazipaul

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw

“If youb have built castles in the aier, your work will not be lost; that is where they should be. Now gomnput the foundations under them.” Henry David Thoreau

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, butv on building the new.” Socrates

“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” Mark Twain

“Oppoirftunities multiplky as they are seized.” Sun Tzu

“Education is not the filling of a pail. It is the lighting of a fire.” William Butler Yeats

“Writing is thinking on paper.” William Zinsse

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The single best source? My choice is The New Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred R. Shapiro and Louis Menand and published by Yale University Press in a revised and expanded edition (August 2021).

 

 

 

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