Martin Svoboda
@quick, member from April 4, 2011
“You can achieve anything in life. It just depends on how desperate you are to achieve it.”
The Race of My Life: An Autobiography Milkha Singh (2013)
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Attributed on the internet but not found in print prior to an attribution in Aero Digest, Vols. 58–59, 1949, p. 115 https://books.google.com/books?id=q2ofAQAAMAAJ&dq=%22Life+is+simple%22+but+we+insist+on+making+it+complicated&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22Life+is+simple%22+
Misattributed, Not Chinese
“Pooh, how do you spell love?' 'You don't spell love Piglet, you feel it”
Variant: How do you spell love?
You don't spell it, you feel it.
“Love is so short and forgetting is so long.”
Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido.
"Tonight I Can Write" (Puedo Escribir), XX, p. 51.
Variant: Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Source: Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924)
“Love should not be polluted with friendship.”
Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Variant: A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
“Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value.”
As quoted by LIFE magazine (2 May 1955)
1950s
Variant: Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
“The head talks to the heart and the heart talks to the feet.”
“If you are first you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.”
“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.”
“Follow your heart but take your brain with you.”
“If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”
Source: Song Man in the Mirror
Context: I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change
“We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
Source: debate at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, Mass., 9 September 2009
“Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.”
Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa (2003)
Also attributed to Chester Bennington (singer of Linkin Park)
“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”