2098 Quotations Found

Not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great. Because greatness is determined by service.

Author: Martin Luther King Jr. | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

You want money, power, pleasure, and fame. That’s what you want, right? If you make those things the goals, you’re in trouble. You’re in trouble. The goals are faith, family, friends, and work that serves. You can use money, power, pleasure, and fame but only as a springboard to those other things.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The real formula for satisfaction that endures is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want. Haves divided by wants.

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

[Happiness is] enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning or purpose. And if you get this this enjoyment thing wrong, you’re going to get addiction. Anything that you do that feels good and you’re doing it alone again and again and again and again, [is] addiction, not happiness. Add people. Add memories. That’s the point.

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

Emotions are not good things and bad things. Positive and negative emotions are simply information about the outside world. You need your negative emotions because in the Pleistocene you’d be hunted down by a saber tooth tiger. And today without your negative emotions, you’d get run over by a car.

You need negative emotions. And that means you can’t be happy. What you can be with … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

We can manage our emotions by thinking about them, understanding them, getting space between what we feel and what we decide to do.

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

Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness and feelings are related, but feelings are evidence of happiness… You have to understand that those feelings that you have, they’re related to something tangible that you can understand, that you can actually manage.

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

Illusion of explanatory depth … is similar to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people with low levels of skill in an activity tend to overrate their competence. One explanation for this is “hypocognition,” that people don’t know what they don’t know.

[…]

The overconfidence of people laboring under the illusion of explanatory depth can lead to the spread of misinformation. As researchers have shown, … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Psychology | Behavior

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young … have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Author: Lewis Mumford | Source: The Art of Manliness | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society

When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.

Author: Alexander Pope | Source: The Art of Manliness | Subject: Life & Society

Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Environment | Sustainability, Love, Nature, Personal Improvement

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Author: Robert Frost | Source: Big Think | Subject: Education | Scholarship

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

Author: Henry Ford | Source: Big Think | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning, Personal Improvement

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem.

Author: Thomas Szasz | Source: Big Think | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning

If knowledge is a power, then learning is a superpower.

Author: Jim Kwik | Source: Big Think | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning

Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or could not learn.

Author: Winston Churchill | Source: Big Think | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning

Our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.

Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Senses

In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing. But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience. Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.

Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Author: Joan Didion | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

The selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe.

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