I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

– Rabindranath Tagore

Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.

– Leonard Da Vinci

Don’t be the best. Be the only.

– Keven Kelly

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

– Annie Dillard

You must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

– Richard Feynman

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.

– Yogi Berra

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.

– Nietzsche

Doing is wiser than you are prone to believe – and more rational.

– Nassim Taleb

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

– Rabindranath Tagore

Become who you are by learning who you are.

– Pindar (Greek poet, 2600 years ago)

Economists are like plumbers; we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience, and a bunch of pure trial and error.

– Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Acquire wordly wisdom and adjust your behaviour accordingly. If your new behaviour gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group… then to hell with them.

– Charlie Munger

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 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 and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the 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 he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

– Theordore Roosevelt

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not… a very easy subject compared wiht the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject, at which very few excel. The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts …. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.

– John Maynard Keynes