Friday, October 20, 2023

WORDS OF WISDOM - B

 B

 

Baby steps are just that – baby steps. They aren’t going to take you too far.

 

Baby’s never getting anywhere with her back against the wall.

 

Bacteria are the only culture some people have.

 

Bad art is art that looks the same to you every time you see it.

 

Bad artists always admire each other’s work.

 

Bad decisions make good stories.

 

Bad decisions make you feel good in the short run.

 

Bad drama reinforces our prejudices.  Good drama appeals to the problems both universal and eternal which are insoluble.

 

Bad quality gets baked in. It sticks around like cigarette smoke. Don’t defer quality.

 

Bad intentions can yield good results.

 

Bad is stronger than good.

 

Bad numbers will get you every time.

 

Bad spirit is more contagious than good spirit.

 

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

 

Bag of wishes.

 

Baking is much stricter and more disciplined than cooking.

 

Bald from both ends – “kereah mikan umikan” – Talmud (pursuing two goals – accomplishing neither)

 

Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

 

Banner blindness (heat map)

 

Barks at the moon all night, shits in the well all day.

Bartleby’s Law posits that meetings waste 80% of the time for 80% of the people in attendance.

 

Baseball is built on failure. The best hitters miss 7 out of 10.

 

Baseball is the only place in life where a sacrifice is really appreciated.

 

Be a “learn-it-all”, not a “know-it-all”

 

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

 

Be better on Friday than Monday.

 

Be better than average.

 

Be careful not to impart your wisdom to a guest whose background you don't know.

 

Be careful of the toes you step on today; they may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.

 

Be careful what you pretend to be because it’s what you will become.

 

Be careful who you step on the way up, because you may have to lean on them on the way down.

 

Be confident, not certain. (Madeleine Albright)

 

Be curious, not judgmental. (Whitman)

 

Be difficult when it matters.

 

Be fearful when the world is greedy and be greedy when the world is fearful.

 

Be greedy when others are fearful. (Buffett)

 

Be here now.

 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. (Plato)

 

Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy.

 

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

 

Be nicer than you have to be.

 

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.   (Sh.12th night, 11, v)

Be prepared, be honest, and be on time.

 

Be quick, but don’t rush (Wooden)

 

Be reasonable: do it my way.

 

Be smart, but never show it.

 

Be smart enough to know when you shouldn’t trust yourself.

 

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

 

Be stubborn on vision, flexible on details.

Be sure that, the next time you hear a ringing declaration, no one is beating on your head.

 

Be sure that you’re staring at the same star.

 

Be the change that you wish to see in the world. (Ghandi)

 

Be the hunter who tracks straight to where the prey is actually hiding.

 

Be There. Be Useful. Be Quick. Be Easy.

 

Be very careful what you put into his head.  You'll never get it out.  [Talking about Henry VIII]

 

Be very careful what you wish for, you might get it.

 

Be wary.  Do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadows.

 

Be wary of a man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

 

Be your own caffeine!

 

Be yourself, everyone else is taken.

 

Beaten paths are for beaten men.

 

Beating the competition is relatively easy.  Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.

 

Beauty creates its own rules of conduct.

 

Beauty has always paid better than any other commodity and always will.

 

Beauty is not a passport, it’s a visa.

 

Beauty will not season soup.

 

Because he knows, he can’t understand.

 

Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one.

 

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret to success. (Henry Ford)

 

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out/And to whom I was like to give offense. (Robert Frost)

 

Before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth.

 

Before they made me, they broke the mold.

 

Before you borrow money from a friend, decide which you need more.

 

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

 

Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.

 

Beg forgiveness, not permission.

 

Beggars can't be choosers.

 

Begin doing what you want to do now.  We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake.

 

Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.

 

Beginning a war is like opening the door of a dark room.  One never knows what is hidden in the darkness.

 

Behind an able man, there are always other able men.

 

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

 

Behind every successful entrepreneur stands a surprised mother-in-law.

 

Behold I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

(I Corinthians 15:51)

 

Being a cheap bastard now means so much more freedom and choices later.

 

Being a critic is like being a meter maid.  All you do is bring pain into people’s lives.

Being a founder doesn’t mean killing what you hate, it means saving what you love.

 

Being a leader of one isn’t very comfortable. (Create followers)

 

Being a producer doesn’t necessarily mean that your arm is laced up to your elbow in Crisco.

 

Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.

 

Being alone is not the same thing as loneliness.

 

Being alone with yourself is increasingly unpopular.

 

Being an editor is a mouse training to become a rat.

 

Being an intellectual creates lots of questions and no answers.  You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely.  All you really have that really matters are feelings.

 

Being capable of single-mindedness about a thousand things at once.

Being courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance.  It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all.

 

Being current versus being timeless

 

Being fired affected my net worth, but not my self-worth. (J. Dimon)

 

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.  (Warhol)

 

Being honest is always interesting.

 

Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it'll always get you the right ones.

 

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn

 

Being in bed with a whore is like being a press secretary to a president. You believe his story even when you know it’s not true and you believe in his right to lie.  (that hooker loved me)

 

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important. (McCARTHY)

 

Being kind is more important than being right.

 

Being King is great.  There's pressure, but no peer group pressure.

 

Being lectured on civility from someone who works for President Trump is like taking chivalry lessons from Jack the Ripper.

 

Being obsessive is okay.  The first time you say "it," there's no impact.  The fifth time, they're skeptical.  The twenty-fifth time, they begin to listen a little bit.  The sixty-fifth time, they take you seriously.

 

Being on the tightrope is living.  Everything else is waiting.

 

Being president is like running a cemetery-you’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.

 

Being rich and famous is hard, but being poor and famous is hell.

 

Being rich is having money.  Being wealthy is having time.

 

Being self-involved and having the arrogance to think that you have something to say and somebody else should pay attention is a necessary component of an artist’s life.

 

Being shackled to a merry-go-round wheel of motion and action.

 

Being smart doesn’t mean you make all good decisions.  It means you learn from your bad ones, and make the best of all of them.

 

Being surrounded by people on the same path as you makes you up your game.

 

Being tough is being vulnerable and expressing yourself, even things that are really hard to say.

 

Being unreasonable is good.  It’s how things change.

 

Belching is not a constitutional right.

 

Beliefs don’t change facts. Facts, if you’re reasonable, should change your beliefs.

 

Beliefs formed on insufficient evidence seem tough to move

 

Believe and succeed.

 

Believe in better. Everything can always get better.

 

Believe in yourself and believe in your dreams.

 

Below the salt.

 

Beltway press is like a child of divorce. They save all their anger for Mom (Dems) because they're afraid if they display anger toward Dad (GOP), he'll stomp off and they'll never see him again.

 

Bend but never break.

 

Benford’s law (of controversy): Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

 

Best sales technique: show them that the competition is doing it.

 

Better a “fast second” than a “slow fifth”.

 

Better a friendly refusal than an unwilling promise.

 

Better a terrible end than terror without end.

 

Better an honest refusal than an insincere promise.

Better beans and bacon in peace than cake and ale in fear.

Better by far you should forget and smile.

Better counsel comes overnight.

Better face a danger once, than always be in fear.

 

Better far that you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.

 

Better has no endpoint only pauses along the way

Better is always better. Bigger is sometimes better.

Better is better than more.

Better late than never, but better never late.

Better not to leave here than to have to come back.

 

Better Nouveau than never.

 

Better to anticipate than to heal. (Mieux vaut prévenir que guérir.)

Better to be alone than accompanied badly.  (Mieux vaut être seul que mal accompagné.)

 

Better to be good than to be original.

Better to be strong and wrong than weak and right. (Bill Clinton)

 

Better to have little than nothing.

 

Better to lose with a wise man than win with a fool.

 

Between friends there are no debts.

 

Between kissing and severe biting, there is a whole continuum of inhibited biting, mock biting, playful gnawing and love bites.

 

Between lovers a little confession is a dangerous thing.

 

Between will and what will be.

 

Beware an old man in a hurry.

 

Beware the fury of a patient man.

 

Beware the lollipop of mediocrity.  Lick it once and you suck forever.

 

Beware the anger of a patient man.

 

Beyond the “fuck it” (BTFI) – Benjamin Zander

 

Beyond the mountains, more mountains. (Deye morne ginyin morne.)

 

Big hat, no cattle.

 

Big lies only work in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

 

Bigger is not better, but it’s better than small.

 

Bigger isn’t a proxy for better, but quantity not quality is how too many people today keep score.

 

Birds of a feather flock together.

 

Birds of prey never weep.

 

Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.

 

Bite off more than you can chew.  Then chew it.

 

Bits can put bites in bellies.

 

Bitterness and cynicism are the unprincipled despair which arises out of thwarted love.

Anyone worth anything wrestles with them and wins because he does not want to be limited to intelligence when a situation requires compassion.

 

Blackbird singing in the dead of night; Take these broken wings and learn to fly;
All your life; You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blame helps nothing.

 

Blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort.

 

Blame nobody / Expect nothing / Do something

 

Blessed is the mind with something to occupy it other than its own dissatisfaction.

 

Blind men in a pitch dark alley.

 

Blinded by their own habits.

 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. (Wordsworth)

 

Blockchain – A distributed trust engine methodology that requires no third party

 

Block-and-tackle grunt work.

 

Blood is thicker than water.

 

Blood will tell.

 

Bloom where you are planted.

 

Bluffing doesn’t work when you don’t follow through.

 

Blursday

 

Boldness becomes rarer, the higher the rank.

 

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.  Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it.

 

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

 

Boredom is the awareness of time passing. (Heidegger)

 

Born to be a willow or an oak. (toughness)

 

Born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.

 

Born with two brains.

 

Born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart.

 

Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.

 

Boxing: train hard; fight easy

 

Boxing is just show business with blood.

 

Boxing is the only jungle where the lions are afraid of the rats.

 

Bragging about being busy is a disease that covers up the real problem: a poor understanding of what matters in life.

 

Brain-picker

 

Brain plasticity diminishes over time.

 

Brand identity is what people say about you when you leave the room.

 

Brand loyalty is how we escape decision fatigue.

 

Branding is the process of attaching an idea to a product.

 

Brands are like quick-drying cement.  When they’re young, they’re stretchable and pliant, but over time they become more and more associated with a particular thing and harder to stretch.

 

Brands need to be authentic, trustworthy and generous.

 

Bravery means finding something more important than fear.

 

Break some glasses learning to load the dishwasher.

 

Brevity makes things easier to understand and signals directionality and confidence. It demonstrates that you are actually saying something.

 

Brothers from different mothers.

 

Brightness falls from the air

Queens have died young and fair.

 

Broad comedy is not necessarily dumb comedy.

 

Broken promises tend to rub on you after the adrenaline subsides, especially on nights alone with nothing to think of but regrets.

 

Brushed by the wind of the wing of madness (Baudelaire)

 

Brutality is an ideology, not just an impulse.

 

Build a shelter against a rainy day.

 

Build consensus but never slow progress.

 

Build on resolve and not upon regret.

 

Build on your strengths; don’t shore up your weaknesses.

 

Build one business at a time.

 

Build Your Business to Be Bought by a Big Guy

 

Building is an action, a choice, a decision to create and move. There is no fixed pie when it comes to building. It is shovels in the dirt with a motley crew of doers who get the job done because no one else will.

 

Building nice white picket fences and praying they’ll withstand 20 foot tidal waves.

 

Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.

 

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. When a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.

 

Bullshit will always be bullshit.

 

Bunny Boiler.

 

Bureaucrats have a problem for every solution.

 

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

 

Burger bars and fist food.

 

Business and anarchy don’t mix.

 

Business is as much fun as fist fighting.

 

Business is not a sport.  It's a war.

Business is war without bullets.

 

Business isn’t beanbag.

 

Business model complexity is directly proportional to business model risk.

 

Businesses are not paid to reform their customers.  They are paid to satisfy them.

 

Businesses become the behaviors they tolerate.

 

Businesses planned for service are apt to succeed; businesses planned for profit are apt to fail.

 

Businesses that were the hard-fought realizations of long-held dreams.

 

BUSY-NESS, not Business.

  

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,/ As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever.  (Whitman)

 

But I did not die in my fiftieth year.  There are few who know me now who do not regard that as a tragedy.

 

But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

 

But it was like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody's ear, and somehow we all dreamed it.

 

But it is never too late to change the future.

 

But life, of course, consists of final partings as well as first meetings.

 

But none of them entirely knew what they were doing. If they had, they might never have succeeded.

 

But that is the way people are.  They want talent, which is in itself something out of the ordinary.

But when it comes to the other oddities that are always associated with it, and perhaps are essential to it, they will have none of them and refuse them all understanding.  (Thomas Mann)

 

But these promises we make at night, oh that’s all they are, unless we fill them with faith and love, they’re as empty as the howlin’ wind.

 

But you get used to anything – Sooner or later it just becomes your life

 

But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp, deeming it kindness.

 

Butthole surfers.

Buy the ticket, take the ride. (Hunter Thompson)

 

Buying a house and buying a house on fire are two different things.

 

Buying Treasuries is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

 

Buying volume through discounts instead of earning it through brand development.

 

By and by.

 

By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble;

 

By seeing the seed of success in every failure, we remain hopeful.

 

By the inch, it’s a cinch; by the yard, it’s so hard

 

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.

By the time something becomes a trend, it is too late for many investors to reap benefits.

 

By the time you make ends meet, they move the ends.

 

By the time you're 80 years old you've learned everything. You only must remember it. - George Burns 

By this time, his breath was undoing my tie.

 

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

 

By your own soul, learn to live,

And if men thwart you, pay no heed,

If men hate you, have no care,

Sing your song. Dream your dreams.

Hope your hopes. Pray your prayers. 

By your own soul learn to live.