2098 Quotations Found

The effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.

Author: William James | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.

Author: John Tukey | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Author: Unknown | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s … [ Read more ]

Author: Ezra Klein | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Literature | Arts, Reading | Writing

Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.

Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

If the best way to predict the future is to invent it, the second-best way is to finance it.

Author: John Doerr | Subjects: Business, Change, Concepts, Life & Society

Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.

Author: David Kelley | Subject: Personal Improvement

If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Author: Isaac Newton | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement

To pray, “thy will be done,” I must be willing, if the answer requires it, that my will be undone.

Author: Elisabeth Elliot | Subject: Religion

Language is always a placeholder for a culture’s evolving understanding of itself, the space in which we work out our concepts as we learn how to think about them in learning how to speak of them.

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

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Author: James Baldwin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty

And yet, within these narrow parameters of being, nothing appeals to us more than the notion of freedom — the feeling that we are free, that intoxicating illusion with which we blunt the hard fact that we are not. The more abstract and ideological the realm, the more vehemently we can insist that moral choice in specific situations within narrow parameters proves a totality of … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Love

You’re entitled to your own opinion if you keep your opinion to yourself. If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data. I think if you’re willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.

Author: Adam Grant | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it – even if I have said it – unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Author: Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Author: Abraham Lincoln | Subjects: Concepts, Power, Psychology | Behavior

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Author: Abraham Maslow | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The true voyage of discovery is not a journey to new places; it is learning to see with new eyes.

Author: Marcel Proust | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Travel

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.

Author: Steven Wright | Subjects: Life & Society, Military | War | Peace