2098 Quotations Found

What we see depends mainly what we look for.

Author: John Lubbock | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

The quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your stories. Especially those you tell yourself.

Author: Pamela Slim | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Author: Daniel Kahneman | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Anybody can die nobly for a cause. The sign of maturity is to live day by day for that cause.

Author: Melvin Van Peebles | Subject: Life & Society

The white man… came with two great weapons. One is the bible and the other was the gun. If he didn’t humble you with the bible, he crumbled you with the gun. And, he’s still praising the Lord and passing the ammunition, all across the world.

Author: Lewis H. Michaux | Subjects: History, Race Relations

Black is beautiful. Black isn’t power. Knowledge is power. You can be black as a crow or white as snow but if you don’t know and you ain’t got no dough, you can’t go and that’s for sho’.

Author: Lewis H. Michaux | Subject: Race Relations

When I was a teaching fellow at Harvard College, I realized that there was a paradox in the way people made progress in mastering knowledge. The students who typically got As had mastered the material and integrated it into their being. Some could even teach the class. I called this the “hill of A.” The B students had acquired a basic level of knowledge; they … [ Read more ]

Author: Dov Seidman | Subject: Education | Scholarship

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, International

You do something all day long, don’t you? Everyone does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put sixteen good hours, and it is certain that you have been doing something all that time. The only difference is that you do a great many things and I do one. If you took the time in question and … [ Read more ]

Author: Thomas Edison | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management, Success / Failure

Without Time nothing is possible. Everything requires Time. Time is the only permanent and absolute ruler in the universe. But she is a scrupulously fair ruler. She treats every living person exactly alike every day. No matter how much of the world’s goods you have managed to accumulate, you cannot successfully plead for a single moment more than the pauper receives without ever asking for … [ Read more ]

Author: William J. Reilly | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. Always begin, again and again.

Author: Shunryu Suzuki | Subject: Personal Improvement

If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.

Author: Parker J. Palmer | Subject: Life & Society

Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering. Sometimes we aim that violence at ourselves … sometimes we aim that violence at other people.

Author: Parker J. Palmer | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering, Psychology | Behavior

Our heroes take on impossible jobs and stay with them for the long haul because they live by a standard that trumps effectiveness. The name of that standard, I think, is faithfulness — faithfulness to your gifts, faithfulness to your perception of the needs of the world, and faithfulness to offering your gifts to whatever needs are within your reach. The tighter we cling to … [ Read more ]

Author: Parker J. Palmer | Subject: Personal Improvement

To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up … [ Read more ]

Author: Parker J. Palmer | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

Author: W. M. Lewis | Subject: Life & Society

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.

Author: Frank Wilczek | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it. … [ Read more ]

Author: Rene Descartes | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Wisdom

Even after one has experienced love, one finds difficulty defining it. Likewise, one may define it and then have all kinds of trouble experiencing it, because, once having defined it, one is in too pompous a frame of mind ever again to submit to its sweet illusion. By and large, love is easier to experience before it has been explained — easier and cleaner. The … [ Read more ]

Author: E.B. White | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love