It’s interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others.
Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.
Author: George Monbiot | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Literature | Arts
Life is made up of patterns. Patterns of eating, thirst, sleep, and fight-or-flight are crucial to our individual survival; patterns of courtship, sex, attachment, conflict, play, creativity, family life, and collaboration are crucial to our collective survival. Wisdom is our ability to perceive these patterns and to shape them into coherent chapters within the longer narrative of our lives.
Author: Dacher Keltner | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom
We rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst.
Author: Dacher Keltner | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
The men […] people admire the most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
Author: H.L. Mencken | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.
Author: H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.
Author: Hodding Carter | Subjects: Family & Friends, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice, a structure, which produces beggars, needs restructuring.
Author: Martin Luther King Jr. | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy
The most dangerous risk of all is spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.
Author: Eleanor Roosevelt | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
It’s easy to spend your energy labeling people rather than working with them.
Author: James Clear | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Perhaps it is not difference, but distance that breeds tribalism and hostility. As proximity increases, so does understanding.
Author: James Clear | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome. The … [ Read more ]
Author: James Clear | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.
Author: Haruki Murakami | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Relationships
Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Subjects: Communication, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Relationships
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.
Author: Sigmund Freud | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
We are as clever with our machines and technologies as we are simple-minded in the management of our emotions. We are, in terms of wisdom, little more advanced than the ancient Sumerians or the Picts. We have the technology of an advanced civilization balancing precariously on an emotional base that has not developed much since we dwelt in caves. We have the appetites and destructive … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Wisdom
The knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.
Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement