Seth quotes:

As far as you are concerned the present is your point of action, focus and power, and from that point of volition you form both your future and past. Realizing this, you will understand that you are not at the mercy of a past over which you have no control.

You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time.

The world of comic book collecting is not a pretty place. For a bunch of guys who like good-over-evil stories, you sure meet a lot of morally bankrupt assholes.

Life is a buzzer box. Poke it.

If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it.

As I get older and I see all my friends starting to have children, I see them have different reactions to the material that was probably not of great interest to them when they were younger, because they're re-experiencing it through their kids.

Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you'd rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And after you've done that, to do it again the next day

Marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization.

If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.

Wouldn't it be great to be gifted? In fact It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You're not born this way, you get this way.

People claim that love is the deepest feeling, but don't you believe it. Loneliness is the most affecting of human emotions. Nothing makes life more vivid. If you wish to live in the moment, I recommend intense loneliness.

Cosmo Girl with a passion for fashion and a magic flask.

You can spend your time on stage pleasing the heckler in the back, or you can devote it to the audience that came to hear you perform.

There's a huge difference between the shallow pleasure of instant applause and the long-lasting impact of true connection.

I came to the big city and I started to get involved in the punk scene and stuff, and I wanted to sort of brand myself. I made a pretty conscious effort to be a different type of person.

The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset.

I believe that all creativity and consciousness is born in the quality of play, as opposed to work, in the quickened intuitional spontaneity that I see as a constant through all my own existences, and in the experience of those I know.

I don't care how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. Those are not actual friends or truly followers. I care about how many people will miss you if you're not back here again tomorrow.

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

If you become so frightened of realities that are not your own, if you take upon yourselves tragedies that do not exist in your reality, in your moment, then you weaken your position and weaken the position, of those you think you are helping. You look about you and you see only hopelessness and helplessness. You organize your reality according to the tragedies of the newspapers!

You want something, you dwell upon it consciously for a while, you consciously imagine it coming to the forefront of probabilities, closer to your actuality. Then you drop it like a pebble into Framework 2, forget about it as much as possible for a fortnight, and do this in a certain rhythm.

I come here because it is fun. I have fun when I come here. I do not come here because I feel that I have any great responsibility for your beings or welfare. Who am I to set myself against the innate wisdom of your own individual being, or to take upon my invisible shoulders the great privilege or joyful responsibility for your behavior and destiny?

It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.

When you delight the weird, the overlooked and the outliers, they are significantly more likely to talk about you and recommend you.

It is not understood that before life an individual decides to live. A self is not simply the accidental personification of the body's biological mechanism. Each person born desires to be born. He dies when that desire no longer operates. No epidemic or illness or natural disaster - or stray bullet from a murderer's gun - will kill a person who does not want to die.

It's sad and upsetting when you see somebody crying hysterically, but at the same time it's real funny.

For me, the very last great strip is 'Peanuts.' After 'Peanuts,' there are a very few strips that I enjoyed for different reasons, but I don't think they were great. I don't think anything's come along since Charles Schulz - and I mean since 1950 - that I think rises above the professional or the eccentric into that realm of greatness.

I think obviously there's a core of who you are, and as you get older, you become more aware of what behavior is immutable. For a long time, I felt there was a deep separation between the person I was as a teenager and the person I was in my 20s and early 30s .

I've certainly seen a lot of my cartoonist friends embrace 'Little Lulu' in a much deeper way because their kids love it so much. But that's not gonna be happening for me. There are no kids coming.

I don't think it's a coincidence that comic books appeal so strongly to children. Not that it negates any of their power for adults, but there is something about comics that makes them a perfect storytelling system for children."

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

A generation that hates war will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace.

A good job is largely anonymous and forgotten (but still important). A personal job, on the other hand, is humanized. It brings us closer together. It might not be remarkable, but it stands out as memorable because (however briefly) the recipient of the work was touched by someone else. Often, remarkable work is personal too, but personal might just be enough for today.

Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.

Alas, there isn't a pain-free way to achieve your goals.

An artists is someone who does something for the first time, something human, something that touches another.

And when you realize that you form the events of your life in the same way, you will learn to take hold of your entire consciousness in whatever aspect it shows itself in this life. Through all of this you must realize that you are not powerless. Remember, also, that this life is a dimension of experience and reality even if it is, in contrast, a dream in a higher level of reality in which you have your larger consciousness.

Anyone who takes responsibility for getting something done is welcome to ask for the authority to do it.

As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring.

As I have told you before, in a manner of speaking you are given the gifts of gods. Your beliefs become reality. What you believe is, and becomes real in your experience. There is no area in your life to which this does not apply.

Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.

Consciousness is, among other things, a spontaneous exercise in creativity.

Consciousness is, among other things, a spontaneous exercise in creativity. You are learning now, in a three-dimensional context, the ways in which your emotional and psychic existence can create varieties of physical form. You manipulate within the psychic environment, and these manipulations are then automatically impressed upon the physical mold.

Correct is fine but it is better to be interesting

Courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.

Creating ideas that spread and connecting the disconnected are the two pillars of our new society, and both of them require the posture of the artist

Desire is action. In the inner world, your desires bring about their own fulfillment, effortlessly. That inner world, and the exterior one, intersect and interweave. They only appear separate. In the physical world, time may have to elapse, or whatever. Conditions may have to change, or whatever, but the desire will bring about the proper results. The feeling of effortlessness is what is important.

Do not personally give any more conscious consideration, either of you, to events that you do not want to happen. Any such concentration, to whatever degree, ties you in with those probabilities, so concentrate upon what you want, and as far as public events are concerned, take it for granted that sometimes even men are wiser than they know.

Do not place the words of ANYONE above the feelings of your own being. You can learn much from others, but the deepest knowledge must come from within yourself.

Don't try to change someone's worldview is the strategy smart marketers follow. Don't try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don't have enough time and you don't have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of that worldview and you win.

Don't try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.

Don't try to please everyone. There are countless people who don't want one, haven't heard of one or actively hate it. So what?

Don't worry about your stuff. Worry about making meaning instead.

Either you're going to tell stories that spread, or you will become irrelevant.

Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.

Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.

For at no time are any events predestined. There should be no such word in your vocabulary, for with every moment you change, and every heartbeat is an action, and every action changes every other action.

Forget the cringing selves you sometimes are and remember, instead, the magic essence of your own being that sings even now through your fingertips. That is the reality which you are seeking. Experience it fully.

Freedom isn't the ability to do whatever you want. It's the willingness to do whatever you want.

Giving your team cover for their cowardice is foolish. Give them a platform for bravery instead.

Hatred of war will not bring peace. Only love of peace will bring about those conditions.

Hope without a strategy doesn't generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won't follow you if they don't believe you can get to where you say you're going.

Ideas that spread win. Ideas don't have to be selfish to win, in fact, it turns out that the more generous the interactions an idea produces, the more likely it is to spread.

If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.

If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you'll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness. And make better decisions, too.

If you are in poor health, you can remedy it. If your personal relationships are unsatisfactory, you can change them for the better. If you are in poverty, you can find yourself surrounded by abundance... Each of you, regardless of position, status, circumstances, or physical condition, is in control or your own experience.

If you are love with the perfect, prepare to see it swept away. If you are able to dream of the impossible, it just might happen.

If you do not have a loving concern for the environment... it will no longer sustain you - you will not be worthy of it. You will not be destroying the planet, you see. You will not be destroying the birds, or the flowers, or the grain, or the animals... they will be destroying you.

If you want to know what you think of yourself, then ask yourself what you think of others and you will find the answer.

If you'd rather be a chooser, enter a market or a transaction where you have something to trade, something of value, something to offer that's difficult to get everywhere else. If all you have is the desire to get picked, that's not sufficient.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

If you're considering word of mouth, stability and lifetime value, it's almost always true that the easier it is to get someone's attention, the less it's worth.

I'm not sure there's any number of Facebook likes that can replace a hug.

In a world of free, everyone can play.

In basic terms, civilization is dependent upon the spontaneity and fulfillment of the individual. Your civilization is in sad straits. Not because you are allowed spontaneity or fulfillment to individuals, but because you are denied it, and because your institutions are based upon that premise.

In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours.

In your system of reality you are learning what mental energy is, and how to use it. You do this by constantly transforming your thought and emotions into physical form. You are supposed to get a clear picture of your inner development by perceiving the exterior environment. What seems to be a perception, an objective concrete event independent from you, is instead the materialization of your own inner emotions, energy, and mental environment.

It certainly seems too simple to say what I am going to say, yet it is almost as if you would be better off turning the entire rational approach upside down, taking it for granted that all of its assumptions were false, for they are indeed more false than true.

It doesn't matter if you're right, it matters if you are understood.

It is not virtuous in any way to put yourself down, or to punish yourself, because you do not feel you have lived up to your best behavior at any given time.

It is very important that you express your idealism actively, to what ever extent you can, for this increases your sense of worth and power...

It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means.

It's better to make a decision, even the wrong one, than to be in limbo.

It's easier to love a brand when the brand loves you back.

It's never too late to redefine self-control, to change long-ingrained habits, and to do the work you're capable of.

It's unlikely that you'll create something scarce without doing something risky to get there.

Just because you're winning a game doesn't mean it's a good game.

Knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.

Leaps look good in the movies, but in fact, success is mostly about finding a path and walking it one step at a time.

Marketers need to spend less time making promises and more time keeping them.

Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.

Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.

Micro trends matter more than macro ones, but most of all, people matter. Individual human beings with names and wants and interests.

More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of our selves, reminders of who we are or would like to be. Great marketers don't make stuff. They make meaning.

More time on the problem isn't the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won't do.

My life is mine and I form it. Tell yourself this often. Create your own life now, using your beliefs as an artist uses color.

My mother-in-law is obsessed with clowns.

Now: For those of you who are lazy I can offer no hope: death will not bring you an eternal resting place. You may rest, if this is your wish, for a while. Not only must you use your abilities after death, however, but you must face up to yourself for those that you did not use during your previous existence...

On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.

On the other hand technology brings within your reach the great therapy of music; this activates the inner living cells of your body, stimulates the energy of the inner self and helps to unite the conscious mind with the other portions of your being.

Ordinary thinking and ordinary effort are almost never enough to generate leadership.

Organize your reality according to your strength; organize your reality according to your playfulness; according to your dreams; according to your joy; according to your hopes - and then you can help those who organize their reality according to their fears.

People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.

Physical reality springs from the imagination, which follows the path of your beliefs

Powerful advertising is anticipated, personal, and relevant.

Rather than simply interrupting a television show with a commercial or barging into the consumer's life with an unannounced phone call or letter, tomorrow's marketer will first try to gain the consumer's consent to participate in the selling process.

Realize that your physical experience and environment is the materialization of your beliefs. If you find great exuberance, health, effective work, abundance, smiles on the faces of those who you meet, then take it for granted that your beliefs are beneficial. If you see a world that is good, people like you, take it for granted again, that your beliefs are beneficial. But if you find poor health, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of abundance, a world of sorrow and evil, then assume your beliefs are faulty and begin examining them.

Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, it's invisible.

Ship small art. Then, ship medium art. Then, ship world-changing, scary, change-your-underwear art.

Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing.

Stop advertising and start innovating.

Take a chance on your own abilities clearly, neither exaggerating them nor under-assessing them.

The art of moving forward lies in understanding what to leave behind.

The basic idea of karma is not punishment. Karma presents the opportunity for development; to make use of opportunities that were not taken advantage of, to fill in gaps of ignorance, to enlarge understanding through experience, to do what should be done.

The best experiences and the biggest ideas don't fit into a category. They change it. They don't get filed away, they transform us.

The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.

The connection economy rewards the leader, the initiator, and the rebel.

The dreamer creates his dreams for his own purposes, selecting only those symbols which have meaning to him.