The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
Always cut the cards...and smile when you lose.
Interpretation
Embrace challenges with a positive attitude, even in defeat.
This quote emphasizes the importance of adopting a positive mindset when facing life's uncertainties and challenges. It encourages individuals to approach situations with grace and resilience, highlighting that winning isn't everything and that maintaining a cheerful demeanor is crucial when things don't go as planned.
In practice
During a speech about resilience in the face of challenges.
The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
An armed society is a polite society.
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
The point of the journey is not just healing. It's also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it's passing, to be in the moment. It's the hardest thing to do. You're either in the unknown future that you're working toward, or you're in the past that becomes a little abstract.
I think about death all the time. I think that's a good thing because we're all going to die, and the only thing we can control is how we are and what we're doing in the meantime.
A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.
Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping. In the cradle a child is screaming. An old man sits over his death, and anyone young enough talks to his love, breathes into her lips, looks into her eyes.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.