2099 Quotations Found

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subject: Life & Society

It would almost appear that the very domain of human activity most crucial to the fate of nations is inescapably in the hands of wholly irresponsible political rulers. Political leaders or governments owe their power either to the use of force or to their election by the masses. They cannot be regarded as representative of the superior moral or intellectual elements in a nation.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

Your conscience shouts, “Here’s what you should do,” while your intuition whispers, “Here’s what you could do.” Listen to that voice that tells you what you could do. Nothing will define your character more than that.

Author: Steven Spielberg | Subject: Personal Improvement

You always get what you screen for. […] and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods. Well, we hear a lot about testing and evaluation, and we have to think carefully when we’re testing whether we’re evaluating or whether we’re weeding, whether we’re weeding people out, whether we’re making some cut. […] evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to … [ Read more ]

Author: Stuart Firestein | Subject: Education | Scholarship

We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing.

Author: Stuart Firestein | Subject: Education | Scholarship

Look, the whole reason democracy exists as an institution is not that it will give us a good government. It doesn’t and won’t. Rather, the point is when choosing a ruler, it’s safer to vest power in the idiots than a tyrant because the idiots can’t manage to stay on task for more than a few minutes at a time. Democracies stagger from hither to … [ Read more ]

Author: Rocco Dooley, Jr. | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

In an honest search for knowledge, you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period.

Author: Erwin Schrodinger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

But what kind of knowledge is concerned with that which is outside and independent of all relations, that which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and therefore is known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas, which are the direct and adequate objectivity of the thing in-itself, … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur Schopenhauer | Subjects: Art, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

Author: Bill Watterson | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time.

Author: Bill Watterson | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Philosophy

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what … [ Read more ]

Author: Bill Watterson | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.

Author: James Clerk Maxwell | Subject: Math & Science

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency — the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Author: Allan Bloom | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Literature | Arts, Reading | Writing

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

Author: George Washington Carver | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Insight, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if we can live in some context of meaning. […] In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can’t count on … [ Read more ]

Author: John Gardner | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior