850 Quotations Found

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

Author: Andy Clark | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Reality is not how the present self parses the world but how the Russian nesting doll of selves we carry — all the people we have ever been, with all the experiences we have ever had — constructs the world before its eyes. Our sensorium is a simulation we ourselves are constantly running.

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

Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of … [ Read more ]

Author: Andy Clark | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society

We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.

Author: Katherine Anne Porter | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

While we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough. This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Consumerism, Life & Society, Material Possessions

The reality of life is not sensation but activity — I mean activity both in thought and in action. People who live by sensations are parasites, both materially and morally, in relation to those who work and create… who do not seek sensations [but] experience in fact much livelier, profounder, less artificial and truer ones than those who seek them.

[…]

The cultivation of sensations… leads … [ Read more ]

Author: Simone Weil | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

[Adam] Smith saw things differently. Trade is not zero-sum, he wrote. Rather, trade increases the size of the market, which allows for greater labor specialization. Specialized labor is more productive than non-specialized labor, so that a world of trade and specialization, in which many people focus on one task and exchange their produce with others in mutually beneficial trades, is one in which everyone is … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Insight, Life & Society

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships

Why does a crowd of the same kind of people in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, stand by, smitten to the heart and miserable, and by ostentatious outward signs pretend to enjoy a lynching? Why does it lift no hand or voice in protest? Only because it would be unpopular to do it, I think; each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval—a thing which, to the … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Race Relations

Those who preach love as the world’s solution often have an extraordinarily exaggerated notion about our abilities in the field.

Author: George Dennis O’Brien | Subjects: Concepts, Love

When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.

Author: Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

As … Viktor Frankl noted in his writings, we are motivated not so much by money or material objects as by a fundamental need for meaning in our lives, which may come from family, religion, our vocation or something else that acts as the modal force of who we are as individuals.

Author: Claudine Gartenberg | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.

Author: Maria Robinson | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they are 75.

Author: Benjamin Franklin | Subject: Life & Society

But with some personal experiences that lead you away into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering.

Author: Kenzaburo Oe | Subject: Life & Society

A wise man once said that all human activity is a form of play. And the highest form of play is the search for Truth, Beauty and Love. What more is needed? Should there be a ‘meaning’ as well, that will be a bonus? If we waste time looking for life’s meaning, we may have no time to live — or to play.

Author: Arthur C. Clarke | Subject: Life & Society