We inaccurately assume that what is common practice represents objective truths about the world, as opposed to being deliberately created and perpetuated because it benefits certain groups.
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
One group has power. They justify that power as being natural in order to keep it. That idea of naturalness becomes part of the cultural rhetoric and becomes the lens through which the powerless are viewed. The powerless struggle to change because before they can attain rights they have to change the cultural narrative.
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Power, 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: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Relationships
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
Author: George Bernard Shaw | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
We do not quit playing because we grow old; we grow old because we quit playing.
Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life … [ Read more ]
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
A man who works with his hands is a laborer. A man who works with his hands and his brains is a craftsman. A man who works with his hands, brains, and heart is an artist.
Author: Louis Nizer | Subjects: Career, Life & Society
For in the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.
Author: John Sawhill | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
The common denominator of success — the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful — lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do. […] Because by doing the things they don’t like to do, they can accomplish the things they want to accomplish. Successful people are influenced by the desire for … [ Read more ]
Author: Albert E.N. Gray | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure
The most ominous of fallacies — the belief that things can be kept static by inaction.
Author: Freya Stark | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
Unless someone truly has the power to say no, they never truly have the power to say yes.
Author: Dan Millman | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Insight, Life & Society
I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that place will be proud of him.
Author: Abraham Lincoln | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The future is not someplace we are going to, but a place we are creating. The paths to it are not found, they are made.
Author: Jane Garvey | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition, and by the hope that he will not fail even though he has no guarantee for success.
Author: Erich Fromm | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that the choices we make can impact the … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Insight, Life & Society
In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.
Author: Stephen Ambrose | Subjects: Life & Society, Nature
We live in a world where all style and no substance will get you farther than no style and all substance.
Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation
In many large ways, it’s almost as if we have collectively stopped planning for the future. Instead, we all just sort of bounce along in the present, caught in the headlights of a tomorrow pushed by a few large corporations and shaped by the inescapable logic of hyper-efficiency — a future heading straight for us. It’s not just future shock; we now have future blindness. … [ Read more ]
Author: Farhad Manjoo | Subject: Life & Society
Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Happiness, Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
If you look at every human being as a Divine mirror, you will know yourself and understand life.
Author: Sherif Baba | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Religion