Comparison […] is the cardinal sin of modern life. It traps us in a game that we can’t win. Once we define ourselves in terms of others, we lose the freedom to shape our own lives.
Author: Jim Collins | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.
Author: Steve Maraboli | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The natural tendency to produce an imbalance between supply and demand is the source of Buddhistic “sorrow.”
Author: Garrett Hardin | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering
Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.
Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. […] May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?
Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
A good cause is often injured more by ill timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.
Author: Thomas Jefferson | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Feeling threatened overwhelms our perception. When we react to a situation, we revert to our primitive behaviour without flexibility or compassion.
Author: Iffet Türken | Source: Insead Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s … [ Read more ]
Author: Ezra Klein | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.
Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
If the best way to predict the future is to invent it, the second-best way is to finance it.
Author: John Doerr | Subjects: Business, Change, Concepts, Life & Society
Language is always a placeholder for a culture’s evolving understanding of itself, the space in which we work out our concepts as we learn how to think about them in learning how to speak of them.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Language, Life & Society
And yet, within these narrow parameters of being, nothing appeals to us more than the notion of freedom — the feeling that we are free, that intoxicating illusion with which we blunt the hard fact that we are not. The more abstract and ideological the realm, the more vehemently we can insist that moral choice in specific situations within narrow parameters proves a totality of … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Love
I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Author: Abraham Maslow | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
Author: Steven Wright | Subjects: Life & Society, Military | War | Peace
Understanding is love’s other name.
Author: Thich Nhat Hanh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, “love” is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word.
Author: Aldous Huxley | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Fairness cannot be defined by capitalism, which measures the value of the earth, its creatures, and humanity by how their production benefits those in power. Christians take God’s metric into account. What does God value, and then value most? Love will always be the answer. What could the earth, its humans, and all of creation look like with a lot more love and a lot … [ Read more ]
Author: Vahisha Hasan | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Love, Power, Religion
As long as we are motivated by materialism and our understanding of the world is clouded by ignorance, fairness will remain elusive.
Author: Shivani Parikh | Source: Vox | Subjects: Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
Many people in our society see justice as receiving what you have earned. The truth is that we all need more goodness than we have earned. We all need second chances, the room to make mistakes and cause damage without losing the opportunity to grow and fulfill our dreams. At the same time, justice requires that a price be paid. […] This may require extra … [ Read more ]
Author: Alexia Salvatierra | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Responsibility