2098 Quotations Found

Edges are, in some ways, an embodiment of the core dilemma about how to live, and how to live under the spectre of death. Boundaries say here is OK, but beyond is the insistent abyss, and I am curious about that. Limits give us a place to challenge ourselves and triumph over. They provide an opportunity for growth, where going beyond a limit can test … [ Read more ]

Author: Ruth Allen | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Empathy comes not from the things we say but from the questions we ask and the way that we pay attention.

Author: Jamil Zaki | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Empathy is an experience. Kindness is a behavior. Kindness is the things we do for other people. There are lots of reasons you might act kindly. You might help your friend move because you owe them. Or you might help them because you care for them. In the second case, it’s empathy that’s leading to kindness. And there are all sorts of evidence that when … [ Read more ]

Author: Jamil Zaki | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.

Author: Leo Tolstoy | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning

We cannot love whom we do not understand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.

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

Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness.

Author: Kent Nerburn | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

it’s really easy to build bad models. A model is supposed to describe something in the real world, and if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world, then it’s the model’s fault and your fault for building the model, and not the real world’s fault. And that’s a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of … [ Read more ]

Author: Nate Silver | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society

Inequality, we’re taught to believe, is the necessary price of civilization.

Author: David Wengrow | Source: TED | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

People imagine that they would prefer variety more than they do. The reality is that they only prefer variety if habituation sets in. Otherwise, in episodes separated by time, they strongly prefer favorites.

Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Consumerism, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

People tend to assume that the future will look largely like today. Underestimating the future is a time-honored tradition. Arthur Clark observed, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” People almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the … [ Read more ]

Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Possibility, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

When we think about events in the distant future, we focus on why they will happen; when we think about events in the near future, we focus on how they will happen.

Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

When we are selecting something, we focus on the most positive attributes. When we are rejecting something, we focus on the most negative.

Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

If a bad event is predictable and we anticipate it, we develop ways to rationalize and adjust to the impact. This gives us a feeling of control. For example, a number of experiments found that subjects who receive strong shocks in a regular pattern deal with it better than subjects who receive mild shocks at unpredictable intervals.

People find it gratifying to exercise control, not only … [ Read more ]

Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Chief Executive | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Ignoring a problem on the electorate’s mind doesn’t make it go away; it only sends voters searching for a candidate who will listen. Views can shift over time, but probably not over the course of a campaign. Elections aren’t a battle for hearts and minds. They’re a fight to give voters what they already want.

Author: Timothy Shenk | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

We are always divided between our will and our personality, the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever we face the abyss between the two, we are overcome with an uneasy feeling the existentialists called Angst. [Iris Murdoch defines] it as the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control.” … … [ Read more ]

Authors: Iris Murdoch, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Paradoxically, while our illusions about ourselves and others are the work of fantasy, seeing clearly is the work of the imagination — of the willingness to investigate imaginatively what lives behind the masks people wear, what hides in our own blind spots.

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

In the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

In any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships

More often than not, when a person breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior