Top 300 Tim Ferriss Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Lifestyle Design is thus not interested in creating an excess of idle time, which is poisonous, but the positive use of free time, defined simply as doing what you want as opposed to what you feel obligated to do.”

— Tim Ferriss

252. “There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

— Tim Ferriss

253. “Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse.”

— Tim Ferriss

254. “If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply ‘go with the flow’ and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.”

— Tim Ferriss

255. “Herbs? Herbs are from the leaves and stems of plants. Spices, on the other hand, are from the root, bark, and seeds.”

— Tim Ferriss

256. “In cooking – as in business and war – hope for the best but plan for the worst.”

— Tim Ferriss

257. “Seeing progress in changing numbers makes the repetitive fascinating and creates a positive feedback loop. Once again, the act of measuring is often more important than what you measure. To quote the industrial statistician George Box: “Every model is wrong, but some are useful.”

— Tim Ferriss

258. “To “fix” someone’s problem, you very often just need to empathically listen to them. Even.”

— Tim Ferriss

259. “Look creatively at your resume, work experience, physical habits, and hobbies and compile a list of all the groups, past and present, that you can associate yourself with.”

— Tim Ferriss

260. “We want to pick big. Infinity is our friend. Infinity is safe. Infinity gives us a place to hide. So, I want to encourage people instead to look for the small. To be on one medium in a place where people can find you. To have one sort of interaction with one tribe, with one group where you don’t have a lot of lifeboats.”

— Tim Ferriss

261. “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you, just measure it in inches.” – Andy Warhol.”

— Tim Ferriss

262. “Though you can upgrade your brain domestically, traveling and relocating provides unique conditions that make progress much faster. The different surroundings act as a counterpoint and mirror for your own prejudices, making weaknesses that much easier to fix. I.”

— Tim Ferriss

263. “18. Notice how I take “you” out of the sentence to avoid finger-pointing, even though it’s implicit. “Normally, you make priorities clear” sounds like a backhanded insult. If this is a significant other, you can skip this formality, but never use “you always do X,” which is just a fight starter.”

— Tim Ferriss

264. “The Purpose of Life Is a Life of Purpose.” This is Stan’s answer to “If you could put a billboard anywhere and write anything on it, what would it say?” It is a quote from Robert Byrne.”

— Tim Ferriss

265. “It’s a short reminder that success can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations we are willing to have, and by the number of uncomfortable actions we are willing to take. The most fulfilled and effective people I know – world-famous creatives, billionaires, thought leaders, and more – look at their life’s journey as perhaps 25 percent finding themselves and 75 percent creating themselves.”

— Tim Ferriss

266. “Time is wasted because there is so much time available.”

— Tim Ferriss

267. “When I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking to myself: What can I do to be ready for that moment, which is coming? That propels me out of bed.”

— Tim Ferriss

268. “The first ten minutes of sorting through clothing was like choosing which child of mine should live or die.”

— Tim Ferriss

269. “Most good chefs believe there is no such thing as too much garlic.”

— Tim Ferriss

270. “Hard feelings pass. Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.”

— Tim Ferriss

271. “How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9–5 is arbitrary.”

— Tim Ferriss

272. “As Bruce Lee said, “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

— Tim Ferriss

273. “Using people to leverage a refined process multiplies production; using people as a solution to a poor process multiplies problems.”

— Tim Ferriss

274. “I’ve realized that instead of following the trends, you want to identify the trends but not follow them. It’s good to recognize trends, but if you follow them, you get sucked into them, and then you also fall with the trend.”

— Tim Ferriss

275. “Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.”

— Tim Ferriss

276. “Follow your intellectual curiosity over whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.”

— Tim Ferriss

277. “Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.”

— Tim Ferriss

278. “Becoming a member of the NR is not just about working smarter. It’s about building a system to replace yourself.”

— Tim Ferriss

279. “To quote the industrial statistician George Box: “Every model is wrong, but some are useful.”

— Tim Ferriss

280. “So much of the job is more emotion and ‘heart work’ than it is ‘head work.’ The head comes in after, to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place, and it’s not the head, and it’s not an intellectual activity.”

— Tim Ferriss

281. “The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. – VIKTOR FRANKL, Auschwitz survivor and founder of Logotherapy, Man’s Search for Meaning.”

— Tim Ferriss

282. “To find the right things, we’ll need to go to the garden.”

— Tim Ferriss

283. “What will the people who don’t hold you in highest regard say about you?”

— Tim Ferriss

284. “Even if you are predisposed to being overweight, you’re not predestined to be fat.”

— Tim Ferriss

285. “Simon received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his contribution to organizational decision making: It is impossible to have perfect and complete information at any given time to make a decision.”

— Tim Ferriss

286. “Lose an hour in the morning, chase it all day.” – a Yiddish saying, author unknown.”

— Tim Ferriss

287. “Realistic goals, goals restricted to the average ambition level, are uninspiring and will only fuel you through the first or second problem, at which point you throw in the towel. If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort.”

— Tim Ferriss

288. “I’m not going to worry about losing one friend if I have a hundred, but if I have two friends I’m really going to be worried. I’m not going to worry about losing my job because my one boss is going to fire me, because I have thousands of bosses at newspapers everywhere. One of the ways to not worry about stress is to eliminate it. I don’t worry about my stock picks because I have a diversified portfolio. Diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress.”

— Tim Ferriss

289. “I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.”

— Tim Ferriss

290. “As a builder, as an entrepreneur, how can you create something for someone else if you don’t have even enough glancing familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?”

— Tim Ferriss

291. “I have had so many spectacular failures, but looking back, I can see how each of them led me a little closer to doing what I actually wanted to do. Years before I was ready to write a book of my own, I bungled two opportunities to co-write cookbooks with other people. These mistakes haunted me, and I was sure I’d never get to write another book. But I waited, and I persisted, and after 17 years I wrote the book I’d always dreamt of.”

— Tim Ferriss

292. “I eventually learned to cook by focusing on two principles. Both of them apply to all learning and will be your constant companions throughout this book: failure points and the margin of safety.”

— Tim Ferriss

293. “A Lonely Place Is an Unmotivated Place.”

— Tim Ferriss

294. “The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom. With.”

— Tim Ferriss

295. “It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. – PAUL THEROUX, To the Ends of the Earth.”

— Tim Ferriss

296. “The concept of lifestyle design as a replacement for multi-staged career planning is sound.”

— Tim Ferriss

297. “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” –Annie Dillard.”

— Tim Ferriss

298. “What problem do you face every day that nobody has solved yet?” or “What is a great company no one has started?” I will.”

— Tim Ferriss

299. “Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there and.”

— Tim Ferriss

300. “No one is qualified to tell you how you experience the world.” Vlad Zamfir.”

— Tim Ferriss