Iurii Says: Phrases I live by

A handful of lines I keep coming back to.

Everyone fancies himself a strategist, watching the battle from the sidelines.

— Shota Rustaveli‘The Knight in the Panther’s Skin’ (12th century)

I am not rich enough to buy cheap things.

— Attributed to Baron RothschildAlso credited to couturier Madeleine Vionnet – origin disputed.

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

— After Mary T. Lathrap‘Judge Softly’ (1895)Not a verbatim line – distilled from across the poem; often mistaken for a Native American proverb.

Don’t go with the flow. Don’t go against the flow. Go where you need to go.

— Vladimir Savchenko‘Tupik’ (‘Dead End’, 1972)Epigraph to chapter one, credited in the book to Savchenko’s fictional aphorist ‘K. Prutkov-engineer’; translated from Russian. Often misattributed to Sun Tzu.

A terrible end is better than endless terror.

— Attributed to Ferdinand von SchillGerman proverb (‘Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende’) – popularized by Schill’s 1809 call to arms; origin disputed.

If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.

— Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks)‘A League of Their Own’ (1992)

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

— Theodore Roosevelt

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

— John A. Shedd‘Salt from My Attic’ (1928)

To score a perfect zero in a test, you have to know every right answer.

— After Miss Calleros (Natalie Morales)‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ (2018)Not a verbatim line – the film’s wording is ‘The only way to get all the answers wrong is to know which answers are right.’

If something can be measured, it can be improved.

Often credited to Peter Drucker (‘what gets measured gets managed’) – the attribution is disputed; the nearest documented source is Lord Kelvin (1883).

Give people a second chance, but not a third.

— H. Jackson Brown Jr.‘Life’s Little Instruction Book’ (1991)

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