2099 Quotations Found

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.

Author: Daniel Kahneman | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

A revolution is any change that alters the power structure. This [Fourth Industrial Revolution] is not a revolution. It’s a reformation, because it bolsters the existing power structure. The rhetoric of revolution is a cover-up.

Author: Gianpiero Petriglieri | Subjects: Change, Concepts, History, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.

Author: Francis Bacon | Subjects: Art, Beauty | Aesthetics, Concepts

People often say that this or that person has not found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates.

Author: Thomas Szasz | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We argue with our biology, and the result of that argument is civilization.

Author: Charles Siebert | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

…the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times — although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Subject: Personal Improvement

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

Author: Epicurus | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

True friends say good things behind your back and bad things to your face.

Author: Unknown | Subject: Relationships

Everybody’s damaged. It’s just a question of how badly, and whether you’re healing or still bleeding.

Author: Angela N. Blount | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The more a person analyzes his inner self, the more insignificant he seems to himself. This is the first lesson of wisdom. Let us be humble, and we will become wise. Let us know our weakness, and it will give us power.

Author: William Ellery Channing | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. The first to forget is the happiest.

Author: Unknown | Subject: Personal Improvement

…some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.

Author: Pope Francis | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Politics & Public Policy

I would not go so far as to claim that knowledge and wisdom are mutually exclusive; but they are far from being communicating vessels, and the level of one has no bearing on that of the other. More people have gained wisdom from unknowledge, which is not the same as ignorance, than from knowledge.

Author: Erwin Chargaff | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Wisdom

Our understanding of the world is built up of innumerable layers. Each layer is worth exploring, as long as we do not forget that it is one of many. Knowing all there is to be known about one layer — a most unlikely event — would not teach us much about the rest. The integration of the enormous number of bits of information and the … [ Read more ]

Author: Erwin Chargaff | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Memory, then, is not the pencil with which the outline of a life is drawn but the eraser — something as true of our personal memory as it is of our collective memory, which contains everything we know as culture.

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

The vast majority of life unfolds in the small, unremembered moments that furnish the microscopic threads in the tapestry of being.

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

The exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.

Author: Sally Mann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Insight, Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.” When engaged in the process of knowledge, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, to give assent to it on that very account.

Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Author: Richard Wiseman | Subject: Personal Improvement