Top 100 Scott Meyer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The day we stop learning is the day we stop living.”

— Scott Meyer

2. “Tell me, what do you know about giant squid?”

— Scott Meyer

3. “One of the first lessons any modern person learns when they go to live in the distant past is that everyone, including the domestic servants, are much more hard-core than you will ever be.”

— Scott Meyer

4. “Brooke said, “Mom, did you know that the movie Frozen is really about pooping?” Mrs. Estabrook said, “What?” “Yeah,” Brooke continued. “See, Elsa makes ice. It just comes from her body naturally. She can’t help it. Sometimes it happens by accident. And her parents tell her to never let anyone see it happen.”

— Scott Meyer

5. “Shooting yourself in the foot has the same effect whether you do it to get out of the army or to kill a mosquito on your shoe.”

— Scott Meyer

6. “There are some mistakes you can never make up for. There are things you can do wrong you can never do right. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. You should, but if it becomes clear that you won’t succeed, drop it. To force the issue just tortures the people you wronged in the first place. Once you’ve made your feelings clear, it’s better to leave and get on with your life.”

— Scott Meyer

7. “Nobody has all the answers, because all the best answers generate more questions.”

— Scott Meyer

8. “Besides, it ain’t an accident that gangs are made up of young men who have nothing. We value our lives little enough to risk them for a little money or a lot of fun.”

— Scott Meyer

9. “That’s what makes reality reality, the fact that it just keeps being true no matter how much you argue with it.”

— Scott Meyer

10. “Honor’s face turned bright red. Her knuckles went white. “Yes,” Honor said. “I understand, Mister Gibbons.” Gibbons nodded, making the common mistake of thinking that understanding and agreeing were the same thing.”

— Scott Meyer

11. “You need an education, practical experience, and certifications to practice medicine. To be president, all you need is the confidence of most of the people who bothered to vote.”

— Scott Meyer

12. “Occasionally, ignorance works in one’s favor.”

— Scott Meyer

13. “To confuse knowledge for wisdom is a mistake often made by the knowledgeable but seldom made by the wise.”

— Scott Meyer

14. “Everybody lies to children, even their parents. The day a child realizes that is the day they start becoming an adult.”

— Scott Meyer

15. “Oh, he’s not stupid, just a slow learner. Stupid people are useless. Slow learners are tremendous fun to jerk around.”

— Scott Meyer

16. “For a smart person to argue with a dumb person, they have to dumb down their logic on the fly, while the dumb person thinks in dumb logic naturally, giving them an advantage.”

— Scott Meyer

17. “So, if you’re fully satisfied, may I please give you magical powers?”

— Scott Meyer

18. “He looked at Phillip and said, “I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it!” Phillip said, “Ghostbusters.” He smiled, part out of admiration, part because he was delighted to get a pop culture reference for once.”

— Scott Meyer

19. “Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.”

— Scott Meyer

20. “I find that stubbornness often beats intelligence eventually. Stubbornness will beat anything eventually. That’s the whole point of stubbornness.”

— Scott Meyer

21. “It is often said that the most majestic tree starts as a mere sapling. It is less commonly noted that when viewed by an insect, the sapling was majestic in its own right.”

— Scott Meyer

22. “He sailed through work like the Flying Dutchman. The ship was moving, but nobody was at the helm.”

— Scott Meyer

23. “Fix what? The timeline? The space-time continuum? Gnarly, unfillable plot holes?”

— Scott Meyer

24. “You see, faith doesn’t have to make sense. If it did, it wouldn’t be faith, it would be logic. As wizards, faith is our most important tool.”

— Scott Meyer

25. “Main purpose of PowerPoint is to slow communication down so the ideas are easier to catch.”

— Scott Meyer

26. “The guys from Norway, Magnus and Magnus, had little bits of fur on their robes as trim, which wasn’t necessary, as the shell made sure they were never cold. They were from the late nineties, and had both chosen their names to honor the world’s strongest man, Magnus Ver Magnusson. Their interests included Vikings, heavy metal, and fulfilling stereotypes.”

— Scott Meyer

27. “Oh, Martin, is that it? I seem too nice and too harmless, so I must be hiding some sinister secret, like we’re nothing but two-dimensional characters in some bad novel?”

— Scott Meyer

28. “You know, the less you talk, the more people assume that what you’re not saying is important.”

— Scott Meyer

29. “Near as I can tell, all of popular culture and most of the English language gets taken over sometime in the early nineties by something called The Simpsons.”

— Scott Meyer

30. “There’s nothing a showoff hates more than a competing showoff.”

— Scott Meyer

31. “Dumb and decent can often look the same. It’s depressing, but the truth often is. It’s just as well. You’re still in a safety mode. If you had tried to kill me, you’d have been knocked unconscious, and I don’t think I need to tell you where, when, and in what state of dress you’d have woken.”

— Scott Meyer

32. “People talk about New York and Los Angeles when they discuss terrible traffic, but those people are dilettantes. Any true connoisseur of terrible traffic knows that Seattle is something special. In fact, Rutherford suspected that a big part of the reason there were so many environmentalists in Seattle was that the city itself was designed to make you hate your car.”

— Scott Meyer

33. “One guy was wearing a loincloth and a hat made of a wolf’s skull, which he insisted was his dress ensemble. Later, Martin worked up the nerve to ask him a few questions. It turned out his name was Richard, and he was from Portland, Oregon, in the year 2003. “Yeah, that’s where you’re from originally,” Martin said. “But where do you live?” Richard said, “Portland, in the year two thousand and three. I own a food truck.”

— Scott Meyer

34. “There’s more to innovation than just putting other people’s ideas together like LEGO bricks.”

— Scott Meyer

35. “As long as people are sure you’re doing something, they don’t worry too much about what.”

— Scott Meyer

36. “The advantage that religion has over magic or science is that man’s inability to understand is built into the system, so if an explanation is confusing or unsatisfying, it strengthens the point.”

— Scott Meyer

37. “He drove to work, his car a sunny little island of calm in the middle of the swollen river of misery that was the morning commute.”

— Scott Meyer

38. “I didn’t call you a liar, I just pointed out that you’re lying.”

— Scott Meyer

39. “Sometime around 1:30 in the morning, Martin learned the best thing about wizard parties, which is that because wizards can teleport, they can sleep in their own beds no matter how drunk they get or how far away the party was. Unfortunately, they still were susceptible to hangovers.”

— Scott Meyer

40. “A film festival, during which all three Star Wars prequels and the fourth Indiana Jones movie were all screened back to back, in the name of getting it over with.”

— Scott Meyer

41. “Trust is a person believing that someone won’t do any of the thousands of awful things that any of us can do to each other.”

— Scott Meyer

42. “If I use it, and you know what it means, it a word.”

— Scott Meyer

43. “That’s a big part of why I hate him. If he were wrong about everything I could just dismiss him as a moron, but he’s not. He’s smart, probably smarter than I am, so I have to take him seriously.”

— Scott Meyer

44. “Religion is no more inherently evil than science is. It’s just a matter of who’s using it and how.”

— Scott Meyer

45. “Yes,” Gary agreed, “and if less is more, then logically, more must be even more than that.”

— Scott Meyer

46. “I’m delighted at the prospect of all the marvelous things you’re not going to say in the future! You know, the less you talk, the more people assume that what you’re not saying is important.”

— Scott Meyer

47. “Okay,” Martin shouted. “So I’m meddling! I’m doing it for his own good. Isn’t that what friends do?” Jeff said, “In theory, absolutely not. In practice, yeah, usually.”

— Scott Meyer

48. “Sure, as a teenager he’d experimented with the whole pose, but found that rebelling against everything all the time was just too exhausting.”

— Scott Meyer

49. “He just got another bright-red hatchback. The sport model. It had a stripe, got to seventy-five miles per hour an eighth of a second faster, and the tires wore out faster while only costing twice as much to replace.”

— Scott Meyer

50. “He tried to come up with a word that meant “witch,” that didn’t have any insulting or demeaning overtones. He couldn’t. In fact, after some thought, he couldn’t think of a word that meant female that men hadn’t imbued with some belittling shade of meaning. Finally, after a much longer silence than he had intended, he simply said, “I can understand why.”

— Scott Meyer