2098 Quotations Found

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men and excluding black Americans were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or … [ Read more ]

Authors: Abraham Lincoln, Heather Cox Richardson | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Race Relations

Rather than being a tool to further exploit the planet and one another, artificial intelligence is an opening to other minds, a chance to fully recognize a truth that has been hidden from us for so long. Everything is intelligent, and therefore — along with many other reasons — is worthy of our care and conscious attention.

Author: James Bridle | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology

To define intelligence simply as what humans do is the narrowest way we could possibly think about it — and it is ultimately to narrow ourselves, and lessen its possible meaning. Rather, by expanding our definition of intelligence, and the chorus of minds which manifest it, we might allow our own intelligence to flower into new forms and new emergent ways of being and relating. … [ Read more ]

Author: James Bridle | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself.

Author: Simone de Beauvoir | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Psychology | Behavior, Senses

[The] generative possibility of being wrong is by definition a function of the friction around being right — contention is the crucible of creation, within us and between us.

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

One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality. All other activities are due to selfish desire.

Author: Hindu wisdom | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness.

Author: John Steinbeck | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

We exist — and go on existing — because there is more hope than despair in us.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Hope, Psychology | Behavior

Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure, Wisdom

Jealousy is self-confirming; it breeds itself… In no simple way (such as: OK, I was wrong all along) will this state of torment and anguish give up its claims or its existence.

[…]

The imagination not to imagine is an important power of intelligence disabled here by the seeming necessities of obsession.

Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Jealousy is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.

Author: Henri-Frédéric Amiel | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

There is another affliction of passion which may be seen as a companion obsession to jealousy; that is the state called being-in-love. Unlike jealousy, about which, to my mind, there is really nothing redeeming to be said, being-in-love does have pleasures, even virtues, which can survive its transformation into some more reasonable relation. But the state of being-in-love itself is strikingly similar to jealousy. The … [ Read more ]

Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

As the child grows gradually aware of the absolute separateness of his being from all other beings in the world, he discovers that this condition offers both pleasure and terror. On the one hand he cherishes his separate, individual, regal self, and on the other he yearns for the loneliness of his autonomy to be relieved by relation with others. The manner in which he … [ Read more ]

Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The experience of jealousy always includes so strong a conviction of being injured that it is most unusual for the jealous person to be able to consider the injury his jealousy causes others. For this reason, the real guilt that is jealousy’s inevitable consequence is seldom acknowledged by a jealous person; it is obliterated by his overriding absorption in his own injury.

Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The biggest obstacle to increasing your self-awareness is the tendency to avoid the discomfort that comes from seeing yourself as you really are.

Author: Travis Bradberry | Subject: Personal Improvement

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, … [ Read more ]

Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.

Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Good & Evil

The discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one increasingly rare in a culture where most people would rather armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would rather be right than understand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Ask any conservative about what defines their worldview, and one of the first things they’ll tell you is that they stand for eternal truths against passing fads. Liberals, they believe, have an unjustified faith in the plasticity of human nature — which for conservatives is a fixed and unchangeable thing.

Author: Zack Beauchamp | Source: Vox | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. This is a more realistic and productive way to measure your progress.

Author: Jordan B. Peterson | Subject: Personal Improvement