Where pride walks nothing of life remains. It is the supreme destroyer of life. Pride leaves nothing in its path. It is death in life.
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Living by inspiration is living. Living by intellect — by comparisons, calculations, schemes, concepts, ideas — is all a structure of pride in which there is not beauty or happiness — no life.
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The measure of your life is the amount of beauty and happiness of which you are aware.
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
…for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. […] All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate … [ Read more ]
Authors: Hannah Arendt, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Insight, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry
What a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet. The most meaningful dependence of my house is not on the U.S. government, but on the world, the earth. No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we are still exactly … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. […] Voice … [ Read more ]
Author: Hermann Goering | Subjects: Life & Society, Military | War | Peace, Politics & Public Policy
People who have been single too long are the hardest to love. They have become so used to being single, independent and self-sufficient that it takes something extraordinary to convince them that they need you in their life.
Author: Sara Naveed | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
Author: David Mitchell | Subject: Life & Society
If you make losing a sin, you make cheating a sacrament.
Author: Michael Gerson | Subject: Life & Society
The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.
Author: John Rawls | Subjects: Law | Legal, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is the first virtue of systems of thought.
Author: John Rawls | Subjects: Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.
Author: Albert Einstein | Subject: Life & Society
Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.
Author: Bill Watterson | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what … [ Read more ]
Author: Bill Watterson | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.
Author: George Washington Carver | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the … [ Read more ]
Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Insight, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if we can live in some context of meaning. […] In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can’t count on … [ Read more ]
Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Someone defined horse sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people. But we have to bet on people — and I place my bets more often on high motivation than on any other quality except judgment. There is no perfection of techniques that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes from strong motivation. The … [ Read more ]
Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Business, Life & Society, Motivation, Psychology | Behavior