Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.
Interpretation
Taking action, even in difficult situations, leads to progress and success.
In this quote, Ray Bradbury emphasizes the importance of taking steps forward in life, regardless of the challenges and fears we may face. He suggests that progress is achieved through action, and that overthinking without taking risks will not lead to victory; instead, it is necessary to confront fears and uncertainties head-on to truly move forward.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!)
I never went to college, so I went to the library.
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour.
The first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health.
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work.
Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort.
Once I slow down because I think I have reached my peak, then my skills will go nowhere but down
When two men step into the ring, one and only one deserves to win. When you step into the ring, you gotta know you deserve to win. You gotta know destiny owes you victory , cause you trained harder than your opponent. You sparred harder. You ran farther.
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