James Surowiecki Quotes

You're all right, as long as you don't believe your own hype.

Some of the best advice I was ever given was: 'Don't believe your own hype.'

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that's when something snaps up and bites you.

Without insecurities, I think one becomes a little bit of an idiot.

You can't prepare for something that you can't prepare for.

The man who is cocksure that he has arrived is ready for the return journey.

I don't wake up each morning saying, 'Oh, wow, it's me. I think I'm the cat's meow. I'm the best.'

They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors.

A lot of my best parts I've been the second choice for, so you never get too egotistical about anything.

When you start believing you're something special, then you're not going to be striving to move forward.

When I did the film 'Hear My Voice' a few years ago, I disappeared fully up my own backside for a while. Because I thought my career was taking off, I became a bit of an egomaniac and a pain in the neck. I thought I was God's gift to mankind and the greatest Irishman since George Best.

I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.

I cannot count the times I've been defeated, humiliated, or physically injured immediately after saying the words, 'Hey, how hard can it be?' But that never seems to stop me from saying them again.

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.

Were I to flatter myself with the possibility of success in such combat, it would indeed be presumption.

Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

I got by on talent. That was my fatal mistake.

To me, my biggest fear is getting a big head, and that is when I get the hammer. Because it's very easy in this game to believe you're something special.

I said I was 'The Greatest,' I never said I was the smartest!

If my ego was out of whack and I believed I could carry anything off, that would be a stupid risk. But so far there's been no reason not to try anything.

I've learned how to stay humble. I don't want to get in over my head because when you do that it takes you off your game.

If I was sharp in every area, I might be too big-headed or something.

The man who voyages strange seas must of necessity be a little unsure of himself. It is the man with the flashy air of knowing everything, who is always with it, that we should beware of.