“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

- Gustave Flaubert

“Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time. It’s why, after ten years, my first response to anyone just getting started online is to start, and maintain, a blog.”

- Andy Baio

“There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline.”

- Beatrice Ward

“Frutiger was just twenty eight when he designed Univers, and it displays signs of being an intellectual exercise. By the time he created Frutiger, he was in his fifties, surer of his place in the world, his hand more relaxed. His new font had a more humane feel, with a few details that have no mathematical logic, but just please the eye. Considering its predominant use on information boards, it is unusually warm and welcoming.”

- Simon Garfield (Just My Type)

“E. B. White was amused to learn from a farmer friend that many electrified fences don’t have any current running through them. The cows apparently learn to stay away from them, and after that you don’t need the current.

If you’re a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. One is that you don’t know anything about business. The other is that you’re afraid of competition. Neither of these fences have any current in them.”

- Paul Graham

(Source: alistapart.com)

“Creativity isn’t magic. It starts out simply enough — you’re copying and then you’re fiddling with whatever you’ve copied, and then you’re merging whatever you copied with something else. It’s only over time, with years of practice, that you start to get results that are breakthrough.”

“The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

- Plato

“I like to move on to new things…If you stop when you’re on top, people appreciate what is left. People think they want a third, fourth and fifth series but they don’t really; they don’t know what’s best for them.”

- Ricky Gervais

(Source: Daily Mail)

“All I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them”

- John Maeda

“Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”

- Albert Camus

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never create anything original”

- Sir Ken Robinson

“To be around books and stuff taped up on the wall, that’s when things start to happen.You’re surrounded by your stuff, you start to create a world. I think there’s a sense of warmth about it, a familiarity, it’s comfort, it’s home, it’s the womb.”

- David Millar

“Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering you’re going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you’ve something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

- Steve Jobs

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

- Emo Philips

“Ability is a poor man’s wealth.”

- John Wooden