You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves

One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.

You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.