"The hell of the living is not something that will be; If there is one, it is the one that is already here, the hell that we live in every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways not to suffer from it. The first is easy for many: to accept hell and become part of it to the point of never seeing it again. The second is risky and requires continuous attention and learning: to seek and know how to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and make it last, and give it space." - Italo Calvino, "The Invisible Cities"

"Without a purpose, no company, neither public nor private, can reach its full potential. Eventually, it will lose its license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute profits, and in doing so, it will sacrifice the investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures necessary for long-term growth." – Larry Fink, 2018 "Open Letter to CEOs," quoted by Simon Sinek, in "The Infinite Game"

"In a company that is sufficiently long-lived, methods can change constantly, but not values, culture and philosophies.
[...] Patagonia's corporate mission is not about profits. […] That said, a company needs to earn money to survive and to achieve other goals. […] And to set an example for American companies, we have to make money: if we don't make money, no company will respect us. Only the rich can afford to be eccentric. The others are just crazy." - Yvon Chouinard, "Let my people go surfing"

«Authentic leaders pay attention to the third meta-value: a sense of meaning. They know that people will work for money but will die for a cause." - Manfred Kets de Vries, "The Leader on the couch"

"But one of the main characteristics of human existence is the ability to rise above these conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.
[...] ... In this living lab and on this testing ground, we have observed and seen some of our companions behave like pigs, and others like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which of the two realizes depends on decisions but not on conditions." - Viktor E. Frankl, "Man in Search of Meaning"

"'Doing better', in the infinite game, is better than 'being the best'." - Simon Sinek, "The Infinite Game"
"Values are set aside not because they are not valid, but because they are not relevant. In a word, values have lost value. The bulimia of consumption has been associated with a serious anorexia of ideas and unfortunately also of behaviors once considered civil, moral." - Lamberto Maffei, "In Praise of Slowness"

"If you want to build a boat, don't gather men to chop wood, divide tasks and give orders, but teach them nostalgia for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Life has no meaning a priori. Before you live it, life itself is nothing; It is up to you to give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning you choose." - Jean-Paul Sartre

"A sense of duty without love makes you sulky.
Responsibility without love makes you implacable.
Justice without love makes you hard.
Sincerity without love makes one hypercritical.
Wisdom without love makes you fake.
Kindness without love makes one a hypocrite.
Order without love makes pedantics.
Competence without love makes one presumptuous.
Power without love makes one cruel.
Honor without love makes one arrogant.
Possession without love makes one miserly.
Faith without love makes fanatics.
The answer is always love." —Lao-Tzu

"I would like all scientific faculties to insist on one point: what you do when you practice the profession can be useful for the human race, or neutral, or harmful. Don't fall for suspicious issues. Within the limits that will be granted to you, try to know the end to which your work is directed. We know, the world is not only made of black and white and your decision can be probabilistic and difficult: but you will agree to study a new medicine, you will refuse to formulate a nerve gas. Whether you are a believer or not... If you are allowed a choice, do not let yourself be seduced by material and intellectual interest, but choose within the field that can make the journey of your companions and your posterity less painful and less dangerous. Do not hide behind the hypocrisy of neutral science: you are learned enough to know how to evaluate whether a dove or a cobra or a chimera will hatch from the egg you are hatching or perhaps nothing." - Primo Levi, "Hatching the Cobra"

"Collective nouns are used to create confusion: 'people, public...'. One fine day you realize that it is us. Instead, you believed it was the others." - Ennio Flaiano, "Night Diary"

"I wanted power. I wanted it to impose my plans, to try my remedies, to establish peace. I wanted it above all to be entirely myself, before I die. […] I was more interested in the end than the means: the essential thing is that the man, who came to power anyway, later showed that he deserved to exercise it." - Marguerite Yourcenar, "Memoirs of Hadrian"

"I am not afraid of an army of lions, if they are led by a sheep. I fear an army of sheep, if they are led by a lion." - Alexander the Great

"One cannot truly know the nature and character of a man until one sees him wielding power." —Sophocles

«As a leader, if you're seen to be strongly analytical, you have a 14% chance of being seen as a great leader. On the other hand, if you're seen as being strongly communicative and empathic, then you have a very similar 12% chance of being seen as a great leader. But critically, if you're seen to be good at both, then you have a massively elevated over 70% chance of being thought of as a really great leader. And only 1% of leaders fall into this category.» - Tara Swart, "The source"

«Velle non discitur.» - Seneca, "Letters to Lucilius"

«When your ability to tap into your emotions is impaired, your decision-making ability is ineffective, even though your logical thinking is intact.» - Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Antonio Damasio, "Emotion, Decision-making and the Orbitofrontal Cortex"

"Great leaders are those whose thinking goes beyond the opposition between 'short term' and 'long term'. They are the ones who know that it's not just about the next quarter or the next election: it's about the next generation." —Simon Sinek, "The Infinite Game"

"If you own or run a business and want to run it for another hundred years, you better love change." - Yvon Chouinard, "Let my people go surfing"

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege of being free." – Charles Hughes

"Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and a mouth, to be able to observe and hear twice as much as we can say." - Epictetus

"Be everything in everything.
Put as much as you are
in the least you do." - Fernando Pessoa

"What you do speaks so loudly that I don't hear what you're saying." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

«Greater self-awareness is the first step toward becoming more effective as a leader.» - Manfred Kets de Vries, "The Leader on the couch"

"Our emotions are not integrated and predefined at all, but composed of more fundamental parts. They are not universal, since they vary from culture to culture. They're not triggered at all, since you create them." —Lisa Feldman Barret, "How Emotions Are Made"

"To win without danger one triumphs without glory." - Pierre Corneille

"Don't put me next to those who complain without ever looking up,
to those who don't know how to say thank you,
to those who can't notice a sunset anymore.
I close my eyes, I move a step away.
They are something else.
I'm somewhere else." – Alda Merini

"Today is the best day of our lives, beloved Sancho; the greatest obstacles, our own indecisions; our strongest enemy, the fear of the Mighty One and of ourselves; the easiest thing is to make mistakes; the most destructive, lies and selfishness; the worst defeat is discouragement, the most dangerous defects, pride and resentment; the most grateful feelings, the good conscience, the effort to be better without being perfect, and above all, the disposition to do good and fight injustice wherever they are." - Miguel de Cervantes, "Don Quixote"

"Life is a storm, my young friend. In one moment you can warm yourself in the sun, in the next you will shatter against the rocks. What makes you a man is what you do, when that storm comes." - Alexandre Dumas, "The Count of Monte Cristo"

"There are two forms of courage: one is physical courage, the other is necessary courage, the courage that comes into play when you make the important decisions in life that will bring about great changes." – John Whitmore

"Living without reading is dangerous, one has to be content with life, and this involves considerable risks." - Michel Houellebecq

"Time," Aristotle suggested, "is the measure of change [...] The whole evolution of science indicates that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not that of permanence. Of happening, not of being. […] Thinking of the world as a set of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to understand it better. It is the only way compatible with relativity. The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events." - Carlo Rovelli, "The Order of Time"

«Sic fiet ut minus ex crastino pendeas, si hodierno manum inieceris.» - Seneca, "Letters to Lucilius"

"Thinking is very difficult. That's why most people judge.
Reflection takes time, so those who reflect already have no way of constantly expressing judgments for this reason." - Carl Gustav Jung

«Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus.» - Seneca, "De brevitate vitae"

"The general result is the fragmentation of time into episodes, each separated from its past and its future, each closed and concluded. Time is no longer a river, but a collection of puddles and pools." - Zygmunt Bauman, "The Society of Uncertainty"

«Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.» - Leo Tolstoy

"In reality, people need to hit rock bottom in order to change." —Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Directly observable phenomena are emphasized but too little attention is paid to those more hidden cognitive and emotional forces that vitally affect the success of any change project." - Manfred Kets de Vries, Danny Miller, "The Neurotic Organization"

"There is nothing more difficult to manage, more doubtful to succeed, nor more dangerous to handle, than to start a new order of things." - Niccolò Machiavelli, "The Prince"

"The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but it is dealing with it with the logic of yesterday." - Peter Drucker

«We all tend to recognize, rather than to know, because giving a known framework to the unknown reassures us.» - Giorgio Nardone, "The strategic dialogue"

"One way to realize what a big question can do is to recognize the danger of 'not knowing that you don't know'." - Hal Gregersen, "In the Questions Is the Answer"

«Why do so many teams fail to live up to their promise? The answer lies in the obstinate belief that human beings are rational entities.» - Manfred Kets de Vries, "The hedgehog effect"

«Convinced that behaviour in organizations concern only conscious, mechanistic, predictable, easy-to-understand phenomena, executives are often frustrated and disillusioned when they try to apply formulas to change human behaviour.» - Manfred Kets de Vries, "Coach and couch"

"And the biggest disappointment of the last twenty years was discovering that the phrase 'nothing will be the same as before' is intellectual costume jewelry if not even September 11 turned out to be true. The truth is that everything is always as before, just a little cleaner." - Alessandro Baricco, "What we were looking for"