112 Quotations Found

Optimism is a prediction that everything’s going to end well. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.

Author: Fred Krupp | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Insight, Personal Improvement

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Insight, Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

Author: Joseph Brodsky | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

All great truths are obvious truths, but not all obvious truths are great truths.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Intelligence | Knowledge

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Author: William Butler Yeats | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

Anger is often what pain looks like when it shows itself in public.

Author: Krista Tippett | Subjects: Insight, Pain & Suffering, Psychology | Behavior

The world loves talent, but pays off on character.

Author: John Gardner | Source: PBS | Subjects: Character, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Be interested. Everyone wants to be interesting, but the vitalizing thing is to be interested… As the proverb says, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Author: John Gardner | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Personal Improvement

Living by inspiration is living. Living by intellect — by comparisons, calculations, schemes, concepts, ideas — is all a structure of pride in which there is not beauty or happiness — no life.

Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The measure of your life is the amount of beauty and happiness of which you are aware.

Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

…for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. […] All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate … [ Read more ]

Authors: Hannah Arendt, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Insight, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

People who have been single too long are the hardest to love. They have become so used to being single, independent and self-sufficient that it takes something extraordinary to convince them that they need you in their life.

Author: Sara Naveed | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

Author: Bill Watterson | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Insight, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

It’s interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others.

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.

Author: George Monbiot | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Literature | Arts

Life is made up of patterns. Patterns of eating, thirst, sleep, and fight-or-flight are crucial to our individual survival; patterns of courtship, sex, attachment, conflict, play, creativity, family life, and collaboration are crucial to our collective survival. Wisdom is our ability to perceive these patterns and to shape them into coherent chapters within the longer narrative of our lives.

Author: Dacher Keltner | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

We rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst.

Author: Dacher Keltner | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice, a structure, which produces beggars, needs restructuring.

Author: Martin Luther King Jr. | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy