Max Levchin Quotes

Style, I think, is panache. Who are you? What did you do today? And what are you worth to me? What do you have to offer the world? How did you spend your time today on this planet? How are you spending your time every second? What are you doing now? Are you alive, or are you somnambulant?

When you're getting older, you think about what you have to offer, and what's the point of your life.

It's really not a question of how long you have on this earth; it's about what you do with it.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

As I've moved along - not only my life, but my career and things like that - you look at yourself and start going, 'Oh, man, are you still doing what you set out to do? Are the ideals you had still the same?' Sometimes you measure up and sometimes you don't.

I have a more developed sense of my priorities. Life has so much more meaning now.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

If you have only one life, you can't altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

If your focus in life is on being productive, when things are not happening... one has to ask oneself, 'Is this worth a grown man's time?'

Turning 30 changed me in ways I didn't expect. For the very first time, I felt like my life is valuable. Not my life because I'm putting something good into the world or I'm well-respected in my field, but my life as a human being on this planet for a limited amount of time.

At some point in your life, you need to sit down and say, 'What do I want to do? How do I want to be remembered? What's my legacy? And what's important to me?'

I'm just interested in carving out a meaningful life.

You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.

And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning. I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly, as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me, as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer, an evil, was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life; but I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life—a life of indulgence of desires—was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, “Life is evil and an absurdity,” referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now high time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.

Your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

The best way to judge a life is to ask yourself, "Did I make the best use of the time I had?

This is your life and the clock is ticking.

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative.

If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.

Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me?

Instead of asking, “what do I want from life?,” a more powerful question is, “what does life want from me?

Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.