2098 Quotations Found

Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t issue from a specific part of the brain. No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own … [ Read more ]

Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world… In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.

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Emotions are not reactions to the world. … [ Read more ]

Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

Author: François de La Rochefoucauld | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Thought | Inquiry

Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.

Author: Michael Marmot | Source: The Atlantic | Subject: Math & Science

Rose Kennedy once told me that good luck is something you make and bad luck is something you endure, a very wise observation indeed. People do make their luck by daring to follow their instincts, taking risks, and embracing every possibility.

Author: Estée Lauder | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Author: Mary Oliver | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

One must believe in one’s talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant… It may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender care. And to give it those things means working at it every day.

Author: May Sarton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.

Author: Sent-tsán | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programing of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared.

Author: Eric Berne | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Articles & Links

Most of our psychological suffering and most of the pain we inflict on others stem from our confusion about what we want and all the consequent clumsiness with which we go after it.

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

The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

Author: Steven Pressfield | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Personal Improvement

This is the great and terrifying truth about the creative life: Anything we make — all this longing for beauty and meaning, all these reckonings and raptures, these most passionate and personal fragments of being — is just a tiny seed compacting everything we are, blown into the wind that is the world.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

When people’s actions have outcomes that don’t line up with how they see themselves, they tend to insulate their egos by blaming other people or unfavorable circumstances.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt.

Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Articles & Links

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life … [ Read more ]

Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: Concepts, Law | Legal, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Power

The myth of the self-made individual is one of the more sacred fictions of modern life. It endures because it promises us a just and happy reward that is equal to our persistence, resourcefulness and hard work. Like most irresistible promises, it deserves our skepticism.

It’s not impossible to achieve success on your own to the point where it could be accurately described as self-made. … [ Read more ]

Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

Author: Simone Weil | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Religion

In the world of science, we endeavor to uncover fundamental laws and elemental truths indifferent to our opinions of them — those selfsame truths and laws that made us and govern the electrical impulses coursing through our cortices at 100 meters per second to forge the thought-patterns of opinion. But in the human world where we live, we swirl in the movable host of human … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.

It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.

We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later, you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later, you become selfish. If you … [ Read more ]

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