850 Quotations Found

Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.

Author: George Bernard Shaw | Subjects: Character, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

You can do the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons. Neither is satisfying, so always consider your reasons and your actions in tandem.

Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

There are three main elements that can influence the outcomes of [difficult] conversations: issues, interests and identity.

Author: Chengyi Lin | Source: Insead Knowledge | Subjects: Communication, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Relationships

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

The terrible three things in a relationship are insecurity, jealousy, the need to control.

Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships

Basic trust in the personal and in the physical world that surrounds him is the air that the child must breathe if he is to have roots for his own sense of identity and for the related sense of his place in the world. As he gradually differentiates the world of in here from the world of out there he is constantly testing the coherence, … [ Read more ]

Author: Helen Merrell Lynd | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Family & Friends, Life & Society

Because personality is rooted in unconscious and unquestioned trust in one’s immediate world, experiences that shake trusted anticipations and give rise to doubt may be of lasting importance… Shattering of trust in the dependability of one’s immediate world means loss of trust in other persons, who are the transmitters and interpreters of that world. We have relied on the picture of the world they have … [ Read more ]

Author: Helen Merrell Lynd | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Part of the difficulty in admitting shame to oneself arises from reluctance to recognize that one has built on false assumptions about what the world one lives in is and about the way others will respond to oneself… Shame over a sudden uncovering of incongruity mounts when what is exposed is inappropriate positive expectation, happy and confident commitment to a world that proves to be … [ Read more ]

Author: Helen Merrell Lynd | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

What makes shame most unbearable is this feeling of sudden expatriation from reality, which leaves trust — in oneself, in the world — dangerously jeopardized. Paradoxically, it is often not the darkest but the brightest in us that is most vulnerable to shame.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

One of the most important things I didn’t understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. “You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of mystery, in that opaque space beyond absolute knowledge and absolute empathy (which assumes knowledge of another’s experience), some of the most magical things in life come abloom. Those are the places we grow, and grow into — the … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Author: Victor Hugo | Subject: Life & Society

As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything. Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary… Under cultural tyranny internal values become … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Life is not just about peaks and valleys, about wins and losses. Life is about the journey. You hear that all the time. You’ve got to absorb that. You’ve got to know that. The journey has to become the destination because there is no true destination. There is no endpoint. There is no goal. All rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Assaiante | Subject: Life & Society

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.

Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

From my feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.

Author: Yvon Chouinard | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement

Whoever controls the rules can control the result.

Author: Jeff Blum | Subject: Life & Society

So many of life’s problems or difficulties are a result of a mismatch between what we really want and what we think we should want.

Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior