2098 Quotations Found

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.

Author: Charles Baudelaire | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

When there’s trade liberalization and globalization, there are always winners and losers. It’s not as if everyone is better off. Say if we buy more cheap goods from China, where there’s a larger labor supply and wages are lower, rapid productivity, the jobs and incomes up, work, as in labor-intensive industries like some light manufacturing in Europe or US get displaced.

That’s part of the globalization … [ Read more ]

Author: Nouriel Roubini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Environment | Sustainability

Sometimes borrowing makes sense, to borrow to invest into something productive. But if you borrow just to consume, then eventually you get in trouble and your debt ratios become too high relative to your need to pay back your debts over time. It could be a problem for households, for the business sector, financial institutions, for governments, for a country as a whole.

Author: Nouriel Roubini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Finance | Investing, Personal Improvement

When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.

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

It’s so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don’t, you’ll need a lot of luck. And you don’t want to need a lot of luck. You want … [ Read more ]

Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.

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

What we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life.

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

We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In … [ Read more ]

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

It is easy—maybe too easy—to stop asking yourself what would make you happy, and stay close to the things that you think will make you safe. This is wrong, and I will tell you why: you are never safe. Loss and change are constants. You will never be safe, and you may not always be happy—but you owe it to yourself to start asking the … [ Read more ]

Author: Sady Doyle | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.

Author: Steven Levitt | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Take your jobs and your responsibilities very seriously, but don’t take yourselves too seriously.

Author: Judith Persichilli | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Philosophy

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Author: Audre Lorde | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships

Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

Author: E.E. Cummings | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

Author: Ernest Hemingway | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Your legacy is every life you touch.

Author: Maya Angelou | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We have what we call a negativity bias. That means we literally have more brain space reserved for negative emotions than we have for positive emotions. Why? Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions will keep you alive.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Unhappiness and happiness are not opposites. They’re largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. Happiness is not an absence of unhappiness nor vice versa. On the contrary, you need both happy and unhappy, negative and positive emotions all the time.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Happiness, Psychology | Behavior