Quotes, thoughts, and philosophy — a treasury of extraordinary ideas.

A collection for those who don’t just read words, but seek to truly understand them.

yoice.net is a growing treasury of quotes, ideas, and reflections — for people who want to explore, question, and be inspired.

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"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life." Muhammad Ali
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"The things you did wrong are not regretted as much as the things you never even tried." Unbekannt
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"Boldness is the beginning of action, but fortune controls how it ends" Democritus
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"The first step toward all greatness is courage." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one." Mark Twain
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"Ingenious people start great works, diligent people complete them." Leonardo da Vinci
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"You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great." Zig Ziglar
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"Those who act while others are still talking are a great step ahead in life." John F. Kennedy
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"The law of nature is: Do the thing, and you shall have the power, but they who do not the thing have not the power." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would have never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings, and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"It is not enough to know — one must also apply. It is not enough to will — one must also act." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"It’s not the size of the first step that matters, but the direction it takes." Unbekannt
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"The important thing is that you've got to have ideas in the first place. And you need to have the passion to implement them." Luciano Benetton
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"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Anyone who achieves all their goals has set them too low." Herbert von Karajan
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"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there" Lewis Carroll
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"The aimless person suffers their fate — the purposeful one shapes it." Immanuel Kant
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"High performers don’t plan in the context of high dynamics. Because there, planning is of no use at all." Gerhard Wohland
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"Only those who go their own way can never be overtaken by anyone." Marlon Brando
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"Pressure is something you feel when you don't know what the hell you're doing." Peyton Williams Manning
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"Tennis can be a very frustrating sport. There is no way around the hard work. Embrace it. You have to put in the hours because there is always something you can improve. [Y]ou have to put in a lot of sacrifice and effort for sometimes little reward but you have to know that, if you put in the right effort, the reward will come." Roger Federer
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"You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." Martin Luther King Jr.
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"Success does not mean not making mistakes, but learning from them and coming back stronger." Unknown
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"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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"Pursue your goals until you achieve them or your goals will haunt you for life." Unbekannt
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"If you want to change your life, change your mindset." Michael James "Mike" Ross
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"A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are." Ara Raoul Parseghian
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"Let us try for once to place ourselves decidedly on the side of the positive, in every matter" Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern
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"Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss." Benjamin Button
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"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain
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"I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions." Stephen Richards Covey
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"The greatest moments are those when we’ve done things we never thought we were capable of." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
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"All I can advise women is not to duck their heads at the first boo. Stick your chest out, keep going!" Stella Nina McCartney
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"Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant." Peter Ferdinand Drucker
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"No goal, no matter how small, can be achieved without proper training." Ōno Taiichi
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"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." Carl Sagan
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"There is an alien presence on earth now." Monsignore Corrado Balducci
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"Very soon the nations will look to Aliens for their salvation. [...] contemporary societies will soon see extraterrestrials as the saviors of mankind [...] Jesus might be the son of a star child." Guy Consolmagno
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"Very soon we will not have to deny our Christian faith...but there is information coming from another world, and once it is confirmed it is going to require a re-reading of the Gospel as we know it." Jesuit Pater Giuseppe Tanzella Nitti
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"In Science, we always say that you make observations you have a theory you make more observations and it’s a very very tedious process… WRONG! Nobody that I know of in my field, uses the so-called Scientific Method. In our field, it’s by the seat of your pants, it’s leaps of logic, it’s GUESSWORK." Dr. Michio Kaku
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"Usually in science, if we're off by a factor of 2 or a factor of 10, we call that horrible. We say, something's wrong with the theory. We're off by a factor of 10! However, in cosmology, we're off by a factor of 10 to the 120th. That is one with 100 and 20 zeroes after it. This is the largest mismatch between theory and experiment in the history of science." Michio Kaku
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"In fact, it seems that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial 'Fiat lux' Let there be light uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies ... Hence, creation took place in time, therefore, there is a Creator, God exists. Although it is neither explicit nor complete, this is the reply we were awaiting from science, and which the present human generation is awaiting from it." Papst Pius XII
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"I'm a fan of what Mark Twain said, he said; Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." Neil deGrasse Tyson
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"Some have asked me where scientists turn after science has yielded no clear solution. I tell these people what my grandfather Charles Darwin told me: roll back your eyes, contort your body, and let the dark lord Satan show you the way" Neil deGrasse Tyson
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"You can beat 40 scholars with one fact, but you can't beat one idiot with 40 facts" Rumi
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"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." Mark Twain
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"The state of emergency will tend to be extended more and more. Dangerous situations will be artificially prolonged. States and governments will begin to get used to this power. They will start to like it. The surveillance states that are currently being established will outlast the coronavirus!" Edward Snowden
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"...the strongest analogy is to medicines, and you know is there something to worry about with medicines that is - might some of them have side effects? do we need safety testing,,i mean we´re taking things that are, you know, genetically modified organisms. and we´re injecting them in little kids´arms. we just shoot it right into the vein..." Bill Gates
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"Freedom can never be completely safeguarded by rules and laws. It is as much dependent on the courage, integrity, and responsibility of each of us as it is on these qualities in those who govern. Every trait in us and our leaders which points to passive submission to mere power betrays democratic freedom. In our American system of democratic government, three different powerful branches serve to check each other, the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. Yet when there is no will to prevent encroachment of the power of one by any of the others, this system of checks, too, can degenerate." Joost A.M. Meerloo
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"There is another important weapon the totalitarians use in their campaign to frighten the world into submission. This is the weapon of psychological shock. Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval. They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another." Joost A.M. Meerloo
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"he who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind." Joost A.M. Meerloo
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"When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals" Edward Snowden
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"Name me a country where journalists and politicians get along, and I'll tell you there's no democracy." Hugh Carleton Greene
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"When people choose to believe a lie, their thinking becomes distorted and twisted because they have to distort the facts to fit their beliefs. Their thinking is blocked. And part of them knows that they have chosen a lie, creating deep tension within them as they try to hide from themselves that they have chosen the lie. The truth then becomes a terrible threat to the false personality built on the lie, and the anger and force with which they attack is proportional to their fear of self-exposure." Henry See
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"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system–ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society." Dwight D. Eisenhower
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"This is the psychology of people who, when a country has become a dictatorship, cry out, ‘I'm not to blame! I only wanted the government to control prices, wages, profits, industry, science, health care, the arts, education, television, and the press! I was never in favor of a dictatorship!’" Ayn Rand
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"Then, when the crisis is over, some may find that their country has suddenly been transformed into a place where they no longer want to live." Klaus Schwab
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"Legal bankruptcy is the inability of a legal system to provide justice to those subject to the law. An institution, especially a legal institution, reveals legal bankruptcy, for example, when it allows liars to rise to the top, makes graffiti artists into clerks, fraudsters into cashiers, forgers into recorders, impostors into assessors, and blackmailers into legal supervisors. Under such circumstances, the only promise of improvement lies in a complete return to generally accepted values (e.g., truth, freedom) and legal principles (e.g., pacta sunt servanda, prohibition of arbitrariness, competition, etc.)." Gerhard Köbler