Charles Handy Quotes

Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's important.

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

One can give advice comfortably from a safe port.

Whatever it is that you're passionate about... try to figure out a way to make money at it and give it a shot.

Presumption first blinds a man, then sets him a running.

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

There's nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.

Let the risen Jesus enter your life, welcome him as a friend, with trust: he is life! If up till now you have kept him at a distance, step forward. He will receive you with open arms. If you have been indifferent, take a risk: you won’t be disappointed. If following him seems difficult, don’t be afraid, trust him, be confident that he is close to you, he is with you and he will give you the peace you are looking for and the strength to live as he would have you do.

And maybe that was love. Being so vulnerable and allowing someone else in so far they could hurt you, but they also give you everything.

The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer's nerve and wits. It is exhilarating to live by one's nerves or toward the summit of one's wits.

Practically everybody (1) overweighs the stuff that can be numbered, because it yields to the statistical techniques they’re taught in academia, and (2) doesn’t mix in the hard-to-measure stuff that may be more important. That is a mistake I’ve tried all my life to avoid, and I have no regrets for having done that.

It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth

It gives me some kind of chance to survive the night." "How are those better odds? If you come back with me, you're guaranteed to survive the night." "No," Reacher said. "If I come back with you, I'm guaranteed to die of shame.

When we give ourselves in love we become our most vulnerable. We are never safe. We become open to disappointment and hurt.

Curiosity is its own suicide.

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it.

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.

To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

The way to get people's votes is to say that all their problems are caused by other people, and that you will stop those other people from giving them trouble. But if you really want to help, then you can tell them the truth and risk losing their votes.

Give me an adventure. I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old." "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

Personally I give us . . . one chance of three.

Reality is what trips you up when you walk around with your eyes closed.