When you’re a latecomer to a language, what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration. As latecomers, we always want to say more, you know, crack better jokes, say better things, but we end up saying less because there’s a gap between the mind and the tongue. And that gap is very intimidating. But if we manage not to be frightened … [ Read more ]
Author: Elif Shafak | Source: TED | Subject: Language
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
Author: Eric Hoffer | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
When someone tells you they’re bored, it’s usually because they are boring.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Insight, Psychology | Behavior
A wise man can learn from another man’s experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own.
Author: Will Durant | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Wisdom
To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
Author: Epictetus | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement
In the affairs of life or of business, it is not intellect that tells so much as character — not brains so much as heart — not genius so much as self-control, patience, and discipline, regulated by judgment.
Author: Samuel Smiles | Subjects: Business, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society
The ideologue looks at life and says, “what’s right works”; the pragmatist looks at life and says, “what works is right.”
Author: Mark Shields | Source: PBS NewsHour | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
An educated person is not necessarily one who has an abundance of general or specialized knowledge. Any person is educated who knows where to get knowledge when it is needed and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.
Author: Napoleon Hill | Subject: Education | Scholarship
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche | Subject: Education | Scholarship
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
Author: Noam Chomsky | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Most of the problems in life have two causes: we act without thinking or we think without acting.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
Circumstances do not make the man they reveal him.
Author: James Allen | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
There are two kinds of time: the kind you spend in your own way, and the time that other people control.
Author: Julia Hobsbawm | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
We value individualism but not as an end in itself; we value community but not at the expense of fundamental liberties.
Authors: E. J. Dionne, Jacob S. Hacker | Subjects: America, International
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
Author: Maya Angelou | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said.
Author: Voltaire | Subject: Communication
[We need] to resist our tendencies to make right or true that which is merely familiar and wrong or false that which is only strange.
Author: Robert Kegan | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement
Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.
Author: Unknown | Subject: Personal Improvement
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
Author: Margaret Young | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Author: Aristotle | Subject: Education | Scholarship