851 Quotations Found

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

We may learn to know the world as we please: it will always retain a bright and a dark side.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.

Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Perception | Observation

The impermanence of things — of seasons and lifetimes and galaxies and loves — is what confers preciousness and sweetness upon them.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Perception | Observation

If you trade passion for stability, you basically trade one fiction for another. Both are products of our imagination.

Author: Esther Perel | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Everybody is reinforcing their structure of the universe over and over again and you meet [each other] like two huge things meeting. We enter into these conspiracies. You say, I’ll make believe you are who you think you are if you make believe I am who I think I am.

Author: Ram Dass | Source: BuzzFeed | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

In our culture we’ve been trained to make individual differences to stand out. You look at each person and think, ‘Brighter, dumber, older, younger, richer, poorer’ and we make all these dimensional distinctions, put them in categories and treat people that way. And we only see others as separate from ourselves. One of the dramatic characteristics of the psychedelic experience is being with another person … [ Read more ]

Author: Ram Dass | Source: BuzzFeed | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships

It is madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn. To give up on your dreams because one didn’t come true. To lose faith in prayers because one was not answered, to give up on our efforts because one of them failed. To condemn all your friends because one betrayed you, not to believe in love because someone was unfaithful or … [ Read more ]

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

People who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favor familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.

[…]

When the same tests are applied to decision-makers and authority figures … [ Read more ]

Authors: Kevin Ashton, Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.

Author: Daniel Gilbert | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

But one thing that happens when we acquire too much “knowledge” is that, like Othello, we sometimes fail to distinguish it from what can never be known, which may not be untrue. Another is that we’re tempted to lose sight of the distinction between those realms, like science and health, where the more data we have, the better, and others, like human relations, where the … [ Read more ]

Author: Pico Iyer | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Relationships

The secret to happiness in almost any relationship is knowing what not to say.

Author: Pico Iyer | Subject: Relationships

Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary, considered to be one of the joys of paradise.

Author: Charles De Montesquieu | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

God tests everyone, one with wealth, another with poverty. A rich man is tested in whether he would extend an arm of support to those who need it; a poor man in whether he would bear all his sufferings without discontent and with obedience.

Author: The Talmud | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Religion

When we treat our neighbors as they deserve to be treated, we make them even worse; when we treat them as if they were who we wish they were, we improve them.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. […] I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but … [ Read more ]

Author: Henry David Thoreau | Subject: Life & Society

The things people most commonly dread are as unworthy of dread to the wise person as the things they most desire are of wise desire.

Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

In our quest to do the best we can, we are apt to defeat ourselves by pushing against life with the brute force of uncalibrated ambition, razing our peace of mind on the sharp-edged sense that there is always more to achieve. If the object of life is not mere resilience but flourishing, attaining it may be less a matter of wild pursuit of favorable … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

It is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it. For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed forever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people … [ Read more ]

Author: Seneca | Subjects: Life & Society, Pain & Suffering