2098 Quotations Found

Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.

[…]

A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other) responsibility (not blaming someone else) and remedy (your willingness to fix it).

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

The reality of life is not sensation but activity — I mean activity both in thought and in action. People who live by sensations are parasites, both materially and morally, in relation to those who work and create… who do not seek sensations [but] experience in fact much livelier, profounder, less artificial and truer ones than those who seek them.

[…]

The cultivation of sensations… leads … [ Read more ]

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

If you look at the actual budget breakdown, it tends to be that 1 percent is allocated to preventative health. I think that’s a bit of an underestimate because, you know, for things like cancer screening, et cetera, that would also count as preventative. But it’s still a small minority and a lot less than it needs to be.

This is the great pivot that needs … [ Read more ]

Author: Andrew Scott | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy

The art of poetry, like the art of living, is a matter of the quality of attention we pay to things.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Literature | Arts, Personal Improvement

Evolution has endowed humans with traits that don’t mix well with complexity and uncertainty, as such environments tend to make people risk-averse, either impulsive or reluctant to act, and focused on fending off dangers.

Authors: Charles Jacoby, Leo M. Tilman | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Just because the cost of inaction is invisible doesn’t mean it’s not real… The cost of inaction is the status quo. If you’re OK where you are, then you don’t need to do anything. But if you want to get to the next level, you need to understand the cost of doing nothing.

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

The difference between failure and success is often just staying with a problem a little longer… The difference between average and outstanding is often just one more.

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

[Adam] Smith saw things differently. Trade is not zero-sum, he wrote. Rather, trade increases the size of the market, which allows for greater labor specialization. Specialized labor is more productive than non-specialized labor, so that a world of trade and specialization, in which many people focus on one task and exchange their produce with others in mutually beneficial trades, is one in which everyone is … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Insight, Life & Society

People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subject: Economics | Economy

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

That is not a radical statement. People take what they can take, and it is only the interplay of countervailing … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Avent | Source: Evonomics | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society

Reserving judgment and being open minded do not mean that we need to forgo our very natural tendency to form opinions. That said, I draw a distinction between opinion and judgment. Opinions are what we think based upon available information and experiences. They can be shifted over time based on new information and new experiences. I have changed my mind as I accumulated more knowledge … [ Read more ]

Author: Phillip Barlag | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Americans have learned to shun the gray area. It is an uncomfortable place. Critical thought requires time, energy and accountability. In general, we want the answers provided to us in clean, digestible chunks.

Author: Phillip Barlag | Subjects: America, Education | Scholarship, International, Thought | Inquiry

A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

Author: John C. Maxwell | Subject: Personal Improvement

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Fear, Psychology | Behavior

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Author: Mark Twain | Subject: Personal Improvement

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Insight, Personal Improvement

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships

Why does a crowd of the same kind of people in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, stand by, smitten to the heart and miserable, and by ostentatious outward signs pretend to enjoy a lynching? Why does it lift no hand or voice in protest? Only because it would be unpopular to do it, I think; each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval—a thing which, to the … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Race Relations