It’s hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don’t underestimate this task. And don’t feel bad if you haven’t succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you’re discontented, you’re a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you’re surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they’re lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Being there is better than being better.

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems…

Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

You cannot be objective about your own choices. Being your own teacher means forgoing an objective perspective; it often means being unaware of what you are missing… There is more to being a good student than being good at learning. One of the responsibilities of a good student is to seek out excellent teachers.. I will not say that the man who is his own teacher has a full for a student. Instead, I will suggest that the man who does not limit himself to any one teacher - himself included - is a very wise student.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.

Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.

[Happiness is] knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about.

I have a motto: it’s never too late to give up. It’s never too late to give up what you are doing, and start doing what you realize you love.

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use — do the work you want to see done.

The Secret: do good work and share it with people.

Courage is really important because you stumble on something, ok, which you are still not confident. You feel, ok, sort of you feel secure within your own research area and what you are doing. If you are doing something new, you always can be considered as a fool, inventing the wheel, as I said. Or, you can just be wasting your time. So, the courage is not social courage. The courage is about, ok, investing your time into something which might turn out like a blip.

We live in a world of increasingly networked knowledge. And it’s a world that allows us to appreciate what has always been true: that new ideas are never sprung, fully formed, from the heads of the inventors who articulate them, but are always — always — the result of discourse and interaction and, in the broadest sense, conversation.

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!