Tim Bray Quotes

My day goes from one embarrassing moment to the next.

I think God gave every one of us a cell phone, we just dropped it.

I think interactive television is doomed. It's a dead end.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

Amazon makes mistakes, including launching a smartphone in 2014 that was a flop and to which I gave a poor review.

I literally cringe every time I see someone trying to trash talk. Some people just don't have it and they try, and I find that funny.

I remember the first joke that I made, which went over terribly. I was at my cousin's birthday party in Brooklyn. I was a little kid and she was a little older. They were going around introducing themselves; I was probably four, and I was very eager to impress all of these older New York kids. They went down the line and were like, "I'm Jake," "I'm Jane," "I'm Silvia," and I said, "I'm hungry," because I thought that was really going to bring the house down.

Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure.

To me, failure is not fatal unless you quit; getting knocked down is not embarrassing unless you allow it to keep you down.

You pretty much have to be bad at it [stand-up] for several years to get good at it, so there's no avoiding embarrassing yourself.

Divorce is an embarrassing public admission of defeat.

I fail sometimes, I succeed sometimes, so that's fair enough. It's a package deal. It comes with that package: failures and success.

Sorry excuses for hunters and friends. Both of us.

...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.

Twenty-two years ago Judge [then-Senator Stephen] Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.

If you believe it will work out , you'll see opportunities. If you believe it won't you will see obstacles.

In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies.

Most success springs from an obstacle or failure.

There's a fine line between eccentrics and geniuses. If you're a little ahead of your time, you're an eccentric, and if you're too late, you're a failure, but if you hit it right on the head, you're a genius.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work. If you're passionate about an idea that's stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn't work.

Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.

There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

I truly believe that everything happens for a reason. So you asked, ‘When things get really, really difficult in your life, what keeps you going?’ For me, it’s always that the most difficult moments in my life, the moments in which I believe I’ve completely failed or hit bottom, I can actually directly link them to something later that is either a true success or a dream come true. So, I do believe that if you can maintain that everything happens for a reason, you can find the strength and the lesson in those difficult moments and grow stronger.