2099 Quotations Found

Self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs.

Author: John Gardner | Source: PBS | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Be interested. Everyone wants to be interesting, but the vitalizing thing is to be interested… As the proverb says, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Author: John Gardner | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Personal Improvement

When you’re a kid every day is full of firsts, full of new experiences. As you get older, your firsts become fewer and fewer. If you want to stay young, you have to work to keep trying new things.

Author: Roy Spence | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Where pride walks nothing of life remains. It is the supreme destroyer of life. Pride leaves nothing in its path. It is death in life.

Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Living by inspiration is living. Living by intellect — by comparisons, calculations, schemes, concepts, ideas — is all a structure of pride in which there is not beauty or happiness — no life.

Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The measure of your life is the amount of beauty and happiness of which you are aware.

Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Happiness is pervasive. It is everywhere… When we are unhappy it is because something is covering our minds and we are not able to be aware of happiness. When the difficulty is past we find happiness again. It is not that happiness is all around us. That is not it at all. It is not this or that or in this or that. It is … [ Read more ]

Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Happiness defies the usual laws of effort and achievement: The more ferociously we try to attain it, the more it eludes us.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

…for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. […] All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate … [ Read more ]

Authors: Hannah Arendt, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Insight, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

What a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge … [ Read more ]

Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement

I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet. The most meaningful dependence of my house is not on the U.S. government, but on the world, the earth. No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we are still exactly … [ Read more ]

Author: Wendell Berry | Subjects: Environment | Sustainability, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. […] Voice … [ Read more ]

Author: Hermann Goering | Subjects: Life & Society, Military | War | Peace, Politics & Public Policy

People who have been single too long are the hardest to love. They have become so used to being single, independent and self-sufficient that it takes something extraordinary to convince them that they need you in their life.

Author: Sara Naveed | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Author: David Mitchell | Subject: Life & Society

Given sufficient commitment to a higher calling, it’s not the people without principles who do the damnedest things. It’s the people with them.

Author: Reed Arvin | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

If you know who someone’s heroes are, then you will know how they will turn out.

Author: Warren Buffett | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

If you make losing a sin, you make cheating a sacrament.

Author: Michael Gerson | Subject: Life & Society

America has always turned a blind eye to what we done to our own. We look out to the world and judge. We hear about the concentration camps but these camps went on for two hundred years right here in America.

Author: Cecil Gaines | Subjects: America, International

The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.

Author: John Rawls | Subjects: Law | Legal, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is the first virtue of systems of thought.

Author: John Rawls | Subjects: Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry