A revolution is any change that alters the power structure. This [Fourth Industrial Revolution] is not a revolution. It’s a reformation, because it bolsters the existing power structure. The rhetoric of revolution is a cover-up.
Author: Gianpiero Petriglieri | Subjects: Change, Concepts, History, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
People often say that this or that person has not found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.
Author: Thomas Szasz | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We argue with our biology, and the result of that argument is civilization.
Author: Charles Siebert | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
True friends say good things behind your back and bad things to your face.
Author: Unknown | Subject: Relationships
Everybody’s damaged. It’s just a question of how badly, and whether you’re healing or still bleeding.
Author: Angela N. Blount | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Memory, then, is not the pencil with which the outline of a life is drawn but the eraser — something as true of our personal memory as it is of our collective memory, which contains everything we know as culture.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Memory
The vast majority of life unfolds in the small, unremembered moments that furnish the microscopic threads in the tapestry of being.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
The exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.
Author: Sally Mann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
Author: Gabriel García Márquez | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Insight, Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.
Author: Norman Vincent Peale | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together. They can, I suppose, but I think rather to the detriment of either one or the other. And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t.
Author: Susan Sontag | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Transience makes a ghost out of each experience. There was never a dawn that did not drop down into noon, never a noon which did not fade into evening, and never an evening that did not get buried in the graveyard of the night. […] Out of the fiber and density of each experience transience makes a ghost. The future, rich with possibility, becomes a … [ Read more ]
Author: John O’Donohue | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Memory
Women explore for eternity in the vast garden of sacrifice.
Author: Céline (Before Midnight) | Subjects: Concepts, Feminism, Life & Society
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Author: William Butler Yeats | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
There is an unfortunate myth that success is mainly determined by something called ability. But research indicates that our best measures of these qualities are unreliable predictors of performance in academics or employment.
Author: Janet Yellen | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
To respond in a reactive culture, to marry firm moral conviction with a spirit of goodwill and the porousness necessary for appraising other perspectives in order to evolve one’s own, is a Herculean feat of character. And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so antithetical to one’s own that the collision is bound to shatter … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Relationships
You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been … [ Read more ]
Author: Charles Mackay | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The world loves talent, but pays off on character.
Author: John Gardner | Source: PBS | Subjects: Character, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
When you’re a kid every day is full of firsts, full of new experiences. As you get older, your firsts become fewer and fewer. If you want to stay young, you have to work to keep trying new things.
Author: Roy Spence | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement