The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible — not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications; but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
I am long past blame and praise, or, rather, I am not yet ready for them; there is so much still waiting to be understood.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Wisdom
The gap between knowing what you want and going after it is where fear thrives. You don’t need enough courage for the entire journey. You only need courage for the next step.
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
All of our creative work is our coping mechanism for life. Art is just what we call our instruments of self-salvation. It may touch other lives, salve and save them even, but it is always at bottom a private lifeline.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Art
I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” In the … [ Read more ]
Author: Jimmy Carter | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Change, Communication, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.
Author: Russell Ackoff | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
Author: Mark Twain | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
How you respond to anomalies is a good indicator of your open-mindedness. Anomalies are like a glitch in the matrix. You can identify these moments when you find something surprising, missing, or strange. Anomalies indicate the world doesn’t work the way you thought it did. These moments can be worth their weight in gold if you pay attention. Closed-minded people tend to ignore or gloss … [ Read more ]
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half.
Author: Jacques Lusseyran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Pain & Suffering
Studies confirm that both men and women tend to equate confidence with competence because they assume that those who do not question their own ability and who view themselves as destined for greatness must have good reason for doing so. In fact, inept individuals tend to be less accurate in evaluating their own talents for the simple reason that they lack the expertise to know … [ Read more ]
Author: Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement, Relationships
Another way of thinking about the class/partisan divide … is between people whose business is the production and distribution of words — academics, journalists, civil servants, lawyers, intellectuals — and people whose business is the production and distribution of things — manufacturers, drivers, contractors, distributors, and so on. The first group makes the rules for the administrative state. The latter lives under the weight of … [ Read more ]
Author: Bret Stephens | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
By the early 2000s, I came to believe that the free market policies that were right to combat stagnation and sclerosis a few decades earlier were not right for an age of inequality and social breakdown. Then the congressional Republicans began to oppose almost every positive federal good, even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Trump brought the three horsemen of the apocalypse — immorality, dishonesty … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
Author: Paul Graham | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
Cunning and deceit will serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.
Author: Machiavelli | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Men in general live as much by appearances as by realities; indeed, they are often moved more by things as they appear than by things as they really are.
Author: Machiavelli | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
When it is the persistent and universal tendency in any society to concentrate upon the intellect and its training, the result will be a society which amasses power, and with power the means to the good life, but which has no correspondingly developed capacity for living the good life for which it has amassed the means… We have immense power, and immense resources; we worship … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Power, Sociology | Anthropology
The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it, and is the subordinate partner in the human economy. This is … [ Read more ]
Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior