Paul Graham Quotes

Tweets that repeat the same sentence over and over almost always seem to be mistaken. Perhaps because you can make a better case for the truth than merely repeating it.

In practice I think it’s easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty.

One sign that determination matters more than talent: there are lots of talented people who never achieve anything, but not that many determined people who don't.

It's a novel thing, and not in a good way, to hear the US government sounding like the dictators we used to ridicule in past decades. This is a decline that transcends the battle between left and right. No previous administration has sounded like this.

If you look at the dominant technologies today, you’ll find that most of them grew organically.

Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.

The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.

I've never met a more consistently Darwinian group of people than nature guides. Supposedly rapacious business types are pollyannas by comparison.

If you have a mocking personality, people won't bring you new ideas.

It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple’s next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people?6 These things don’t scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it’s concentrated in one individual.

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from.

In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

It's a mistake to treat investors' reasons for rejecting you as a guide to what you need to focus on, for three separate reasons: (a) much of the time they're lying, (b) when they're not, they're often mistaken, and (c) fundraising is not the primary goal anyway.