2098 Quotations Found

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — … [ Read more ]

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

Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The people who are happiest with their lives encounter plenty of suffering too. They don’t seek it, but they also do not consider it to be some sort of sickness; nor are they afraid of it. On the contrary, they know that suffering is necessary to learn and grow. Research shows that experiences of sadness can improve memory, judgment, motivation, and goodness toward others.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Experience, Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Competence is how good you are when there is something to gain. Character is how good you are when there is nothing to gain. People will reward you for competence. But people will only love you for your character.

Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Character, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours.

Author: Eric Berne | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

Debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to die. You have committed your life to making money to pay for your past.

Author: Kent Nerburn | Subjects: Finance | Investing, Personal Improvement

We all instinctively try to simplify the data that we receive, but there are better and worse simplifications. Better simplifications arise from a deeper knowledge of the environment along with a deeper understanding of the organization and its capabilities. That knowledge and understanding develops when people attend to more things, entertain a greater variety of interpretations, differentiate their ideas, argue, listen to one another, work … [ Read more ]

Author: Karl E. Weick | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Information, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry

Have maximum financial flexibility to face both hazards and opportunities.

Author: Charlie Munger | Subject: Finance | Investing

It’s so simple, yet makes such a difference. Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, “Make me feel important.”

Author: Mary Kay Ash | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships

Human beings have two fundamental needs above and beyond basic survival:

1. Relational needs: to develop and maintain social relationships with others.
2. Epistemic needs: to establish the sense of knowing what is real and true in the world.

Both needs are dependent on other people. While we can, of course, have our own version of the truth, feeling alone in our opinions can undermine the extent to which those … [ Read more ]

Author: Maya Rossignac-Milon | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

How do we cover these issues wherein opinion is extremely polarized but wherein our best judgment is that the truth lies more with one side. In general, the way we cover things is we quote people from one side and the other, and it’s a marketplace of ideas. We let the public decide where the truth lies, but there have been times when that model … [ Read more ]

Author: Nicholas D. Kristof | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Journalism

Larry Summers said that events are mostly negative and trends are mostly positive. Well, we [the news] cover events. If we want to be the first rough draft of history, it’s worthwhile to do a better job covering those positive trends.

Authors: Larry Summers, Nicholas D. Kristof | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, History, Journalism, Life & Society

It’s tough to be good at something you’re not interested in. It’s nearly impossible to be great at something you’re not obsessed with.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

A lot of mistakes come from copying people playing a different game than you.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Personal Improvement

We must always remember that possessions have no inherent value. They become what we make them. If they increase our capacity to give, they become something good. If they increase our focus on ourselves and become standards by which we measure other people, they become something bad.

Author: Kent Nerburn | Subjects: Demographics, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement

Wanting to change is as much about our wanting, and how we describe it, as it is about the changes we want. Getting better means working out what we want to get better at.

Author: Adam Phillips | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Myriad unchosen variables, from genetic and cultural inheritance to accidents and natural disasters, constrain our capacity for change. But beyond this question of whether and how we can choose our transformation is the question of what transformation to choose at all — a fundamental question of self-knowledge, riddled with all the ways in which we are fundamentally opaque to ourselves.

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

Change is often a consequence of, and a coping mechanism for, the contradictions we live with — an attempt at greater cohesion.

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

The profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found.

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

In the long-run, prioritization beats efficiency.

Author: James Clear | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management