2098 Quotations Found

Substantially 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

Your words are how you see yourself, your actions are how other people see you.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement

Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.

Author: Bill Belichick | Subjects: Character, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure

In order to get the best out of life, we have to expect the best out of life. We’ve got to have these congruent beliefs, this faith that things are finally going to work out in the end. Why? The whole notion of the placebo effect, where our expectations turn into reality. And that’s why it is in the anticipation of happiness that happiness itself … [ Read more ]

Author: Baba Shiv | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure

Those who preach love as the world’s solution often have an extraordinarily exaggerated notion about our abilities in the field.

Author: George Dennis O’Brien | Subjects: Concepts, Love

When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.

Author: Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

I consider it a grave misfortune if, in any period or nation, intelligence remains, practically speaking, reduced to the limits of the intellectual. Intelligence asserts itself above all not in art, nor in science, but in intuition of life. The intellectual, however, barely lives; they are usually a person with poverty of intuition; their acts in the world are few and they have very little … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

It is undeniable that a large part of science and literature has been produced in a somnambulistic trance; that is to say, by creatures who are not at all intelligent… Science and literature, as such, do not imply perspicacity; but, undoubtedly, their cultivation is a stimulant which favors the awakening of the mind and preserves it in that luminous state of alertness which constitutes intelligence. … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science

Probably, humanity has almost always lived in this somnambulistic state in which ideas are not a wide-awake, conscious reaction to things, but a blind, automatic habit, drawn from a repertory of formulae which the atmosphere infuses into the individual.

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

Most folks aren’t honest with their feelings because they get unsolicited advice or intrusive questions.

Author: Jessmina Archbold | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the … [ Read more ]

Author: Learned Hand | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Religion

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.

Author: Denis Waitley | Subjects: Happiness, Psychology | Behavior

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Author: Alexander Graham Bell | Subject: Personal Improvement

As … Viktor Frankl noted in his writings, we are motivated not so much by money or material objects as by a fundamental need for meaning in our lives, which may come from family, religion, our vocation or something else that acts as the modal force of who we are as individuals.

Author: Claudine Gartenberg | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior

Lack of courage sabotages more people than lack of ability. Don’t beat yourself before you start.

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

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.

Author: Maria Robinson | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.

Author: Benjamin Franklin | Subject: Personal Improvement

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

Author: Benjamin Franklin | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they are 75.

Author: Benjamin Franklin | Subject: Life & Society

A negative thinker sees a difficulty in every opportunity. A positive thinker sees and opportunity in every difficulty.

Author: Unknown | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior