We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.