850 Quotations Found

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. … [ Read more ]

Author: Bell Hooks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Author: Rainer Maria Rilke | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Relationships

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

Author: James Baldwin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Author: Jean-Paul Sartre | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society

There is nothing that gets in the way of success more than avoidance. We avoid hard conversations. We avoid certain people. We avoid hard decisions. We avoid evidence that contradicts what we think. We avoid starting a project until we’re certain of the outcome.

To justify our avoidance, we lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’re noble — we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. … [ Read more ]

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships, Success / Failure

Perceptions of insignificance can drive a process of seeking out groups, endorsing their ideologies and engaging in behaviors consistent with these.

Author: Jake Womick | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Human beings are group animals, and they are frightened and stressed when expelled from the groups to which they have belonged. Our political attachments often matter much more to us than our political ideas.

Author: David Frum | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

There is no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and that love should include the instructive dead. Somehow, I got that idea and I lived with it all my life; and it’s been very, very useful to me.

Author: Charlie Munger | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.

Author: Charlie Munger | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind. It remembers to appreciate… It refuses to let … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator [that] asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

Author: Alexandra Horowitz | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Author: Viktor Frankl | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Attitude, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

In the main, America took its stand with utility, with improvement and invention, money and comfort. It was clearly understood that the advance of the machine was destroying old inertias, discomforts, and brutalities, but it was not so commonly understood that the machine was creating new discomforts and brutalities, undermining traditions and ideals, sentiments and loyalties, esthetic sensitivities.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society

Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men.

Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

There is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any true bond, which nothing but indifference can break.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good. Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.

Author: Simone Weil | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a … [ Read more ]

Author: David Whyte | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Before I was six years old, my grandparents and my mother had taught me that if all the green things that grow were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the four-legged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the winged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all our … [ Read more ]

Author: Russell Means | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society

We went on making equations and theories and bombs in an attempt to control life; we went on making poems and paintings and songs in an attempt to live with the fact that we cannot.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Life & Society, Music, Psychology | Behavior