Top 300 Tim Ferriss Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Aristotle had it right, but he was missing a number: “We are what we do repeatedly.”

— Tim Ferriss

152. “Refuse to accept partial completeness.”

— Tim Ferriss

153. “1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. 2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.”

— Tim Ferriss

154. “The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

— Tim Ferriss

155. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.” – Colin Powell.”

— Tim Ferriss

156. “Not Dead, Can’t Quit.”

— Tim Ferriss

157. “One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. – BRUCE LEE.”

— Tim Ferriss

158. “Everything popular is wrong. – OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest.”

— Tim Ferriss

159. “Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. After all, conscious thinking is largely asking and answering questions in your own head. If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.”

— Tim Ferriss

160. “I overhear Bobby Flay say, “Take risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.” I.”

— Tim Ferriss

161. “If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” –Colonel David Hackworth.”

— Tim Ferriss

162. “As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.”

— Tim Ferriss

163. “With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?”

— Tim Ferriss

164. “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” – James Cameron “If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” – Colonel David Hackworth “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” – Polish proverb.”

— Tim Ferriss

165. “The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.”

— Tim Ferriss

166. “Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done.”

— Tim Ferriss

167. “More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice.”

— Tim Ferriss

168. “If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources.”

— Tim Ferriss

169. “Losing makes you think in ways victories can’t. You begin asking questions instead of feeling like you have the answers. Questions open up the doors to so many possibilities.”

— Tim Ferriss

170. “Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.”

— Tim Ferriss

171. “In other words, you can spend all day undermining other people, and even if you’re right, who cares? Anybody can talk about why something’s bad. Try doing something good.”

— Tim Ferriss

172. “Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.”

— Tim Ferriss

173. “What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt – it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.” – Hal Boyle.”

— Tim Ferriss

174. “The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” – Lin Yutang.”

— Tim Ferriss

175. “Strauss, Neil: “‘The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.’ – Norman Vincent Peale.”

— Tim Ferriss

176. “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’ by Jim Dator. Also, ‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right’ by Alvin Toffler. Both are famous futurists. These quotes remind me that world-changing ideas will seem absurd to most people, and that the most useful work I can be doing is to push the envelope of what is considered possible.”

— Tim Ferriss

177. “If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow. Ben.”

— Tim Ferriss

178. “There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens. – YVON CHOUINARD,7 founder of Patagonia.”

— Tim Ferriss

179. “Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed. – VIDA D. SCUDDER, The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets.”

— Tim Ferriss

180. “I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering.”

— Tim Ferriss

181. “Did you eat half an Oreo cookie? No problem. If you’re a 220-pound male, you just need to climb 27 flights of stairs to burn it off.”

— Tim Ferriss

182. “If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason.”

— Tim Ferriss

183. “To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.”

— Tim Ferriss

184. “People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. – JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth.”

— Tim Ferriss

185. “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” –Niels Bohr.”

— Tim Ferriss

186. “Mastery is a journey, not a destination. True masters never believe they have attained mastery. There is always more to be learned and greater skill to be developed.”

— Tim Ferriss

187. “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” – Pierre-Marc-Gaston.”

— Tim Ferriss

188. “It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.”

— Tim Ferriss

189. “You don’t need more recipes. You need to learn to cook without them.”

— Tim Ferriss

190. “Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?”

— Tim Ferriss

191. “Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen.”

— Tim Ferriss

192. “Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend. Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.”

— Tim Ferriss

193. “Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence.”

— Tim Ferriss

194. “Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.”

— Tim Ferriss

195. “Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress – stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.”

— Tim Ferriss

196. “Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. – ALBERT EINSTEIN.”

— Tim Ferriss

197. “Don’t save it all for the end. There is every reason not to.”

— Tim Ferriss

198. “And if you say you’re not creative, look at how much you’re missing out on just because you’ve told yourself that. I think creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we’re born with that some people don’t cultivate, that they don’t realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives.”

— Tim Ferriss

199. “The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.”

— Tim Ferriss

200. “Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”

— Tim Ferriss