Quotations Archive - Page 33 of 105

William James

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

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

Andy Clark

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

Author: Andy Clark | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Maria Popova

Reality is not how the present self parses the world but how the Russian nesting doll of selves we carry — all the people we have ever been, with all the experiences we have ever had — constructs the world before its eyes. Our sensorium is a simulation we ourselves are constantly running.

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

Andy Clark

Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of … [ Read more ]

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

Katherine Anne Porter

We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.

Author: Katherine Anne Porter | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Saul Bellow

Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world.

Author: Saul Bellow | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Literature | Arts

Henry David Thoreau

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

Author: Henry David Thoreau | Source: The Art of Manliness | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

Peter Wehner

When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

Author: Peter Wehner | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Religion

Eleanor Roosevelt

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Author: Eleanor Roosevelt | Subject: Personal Improvement

Hermann Hesse

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that … [ Read more ]

Author: Hermann Hesse | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Education | Scholarship

Maria Popova

While we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Dharmesh Shah

You can’t add simplicity in. You must take complexity out.

Author: Dharmesh Shah | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Personal Improvement

Matthieu Ricard

I like the idea of Richard Davidson’s that happiness is a skill. It can be deeper, more present in your mental landscape. We deal with our mind from morning to evening, but we spend very little attention on improving the way we translate outer conditions, good or bad, into happiness or misery. And it’s crucial, because that’s what determines our day-to-day experience of the world! … [ Read more ]

Author: Matthieu Ricard | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Advice, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Maria Popova

Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough. This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along … [ Read more ]

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

Emily Anhalt

Healthy narcissism is when you think highly enough of yourself to think you’re capable of incredible things and hold that belief in yourself. Unhealthy narcissism is when you’re actually deeply insecure and use confidence as a false mask to deny how insecure you feel.

Author: Emily Anhalt | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Psychology | Behavior