The practical difference between risk and uncertainty is that in the former the distribution of the outcome in a group of instances is known, while in the case of uncertainty, this is not true because the situation dealt with is in high degree unique.

– Frank Knight

Under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That’s why we train so hard.

– A Navy SEAL on why training matters

We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details. In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough.

– Jeff Bezos

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.

– Henry David Thoreau

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

– Aristotle

Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

– Yuval Noah Harari

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

– James Madison

We will never again understand nature as well as Greek philosophers did. A general explanation of common phenomena in terms of a few all-embracing principles no longer satisfies us. We know too much.

– John Pierce

In investing, there is no degree of difficulty. If something is staring you right in the face and the easiest decision in the world, the payoff can be huge. And we get paid, not for jumping over 7-foot bars, but for stepping over 1-foot bars.

– Warren Buffett