Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Author: George Bernard Shaw | Subject: Life & Society
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.
Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Author: Mary Oliver | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue … [ Read more ]
Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.
Author: Konrad Adenauer | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Money changes circumstances but relationships change lives.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
Author: Bernard M. Baruch | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Your possessions should set you free like a boat or a pair of hiking boots. If you work for your possessions and they don’t set you free, what are you working for?
Author: Billy Harris | Subjects: Consumerism, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
Author: Voltaire | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
The only way you can expect someone to understand your point of view is to provide them with the substance from which your outlook was developed. Essentially then, the task is education and not argumentation.
Author: Herb Cohen | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
For centuries, our culture conditioned us to “see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving,” which in turn conditioned us to believe that the hardest thing about love is finding the right person to love us, but once we do, love is easy. [Erich] Fromm inverted this equation. […] he observed that the key to love is … [ Read more ]
Authors: Erich Fromm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains… the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.
Author: Walt Whitman | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society
Freedom gives no one license to change a heritage that belongs to the ages.
Author: Sigurd F. Olson | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society
Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.
Author: Frances Moore Lappé | Subject: Life & Society
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
People say what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will resonate within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Author: Joseph Campbell | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement
We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.
Author: Florence Williams | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society
One feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another.
Author: John Stuart Mill | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy
So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.
Author: John Stuart Mill | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous.
Author: John Stuart Mill | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Insight, Life & Society, Power