2099 Quotations Found

We are as clever with our machines and technologies as we are simple-minded in the management of our emotions. We are, in terms of wisdom, little more advanced than the ancient Sumerians or the Picts. We have the technology of an advanced civilization balancing precariously on an emotional base that has not developed much since we dwelt in caves. We have the appetites and destructive … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Wisdom

The knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.

Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves. Our settled impulse is to blame anyone who lays our blind spots and insufficiencies bare, unless our defenses have first been adroitly and seductively appeased. In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud, or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The American tendency [is] to admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes justification.

Author: George Orwell | Subjects: America, International

It is difficult to think of any politician who has lived to be eighty and still been regarded as a success. What we call a ‘great’ statesman normally means one who dies before his policy has had time to take effect. If Cromwell had lived a few years longer he would probably have fallen from power, in which case we should now regard him as … [ Read more ]

Author: George Orwell | Subjects: History, Politics & Public Policy

We can think of history as a succession of rare big events in which a story goes viral, often (but not always) with the help of an attractive celebrity (even a minor celebrity or fictional stock figure) whose attachment to the narrative adds human interest.

Author: Robert J. Shiller | Source: strategy+business | Subject: History

I have to say that the single most important lesson I learned in 25 years talking every single day to people was that there’s a common denominator in our human experience. […] The common denominator that I found in every single interview is we want to be validated. We want to be understood. I’ve done over 35,000 interviews in my career. And as soon as … [ Read more ]

Author: Oprah Winfrey | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Democracy is designed as a feedback loop. Voters choose leaders. Leaders govern. Voters judge the results, and either return the leaders to power, or give their opponents a chance. That feedback loop is broken in American politics. It is broken because of gerrymandering, because of the Senate, because of the filibuster, because of the Electoral College, because we have declared money to be speech and … [ Read more ]

Author: Ezra Klein | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, International, Politics & Public Policy

There are two things of which a man cannot be careful enough: of obstinacy if he confines himself to his own line of thought; of incompetency, if he goes beyond it.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Personal Improvement

The senses do not deceive; it is the judgment that deceives.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Psychology | Behavior, Senses, Thought | Inquiry

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Insight, Intelligence | Knowledge

We may learn to know the world as we please: it will always retain a bright and a dark side.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do anything worth doing.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

So obstinately contradictory is man that you cannot compel him to his advantage, yet he yields before everything that forces him to his hurt.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Personal Improvement

It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Insight, Personal Improvement

How can a man come to know himself? Never by thinking, but by doing. Try to do your duty and you will know at once what you are worth.

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Personal Improvement

There’s always some truth behind “just kidding”,
knowledge behind “I don’t know,”
emotion behind “I don’t care,”
and pain behind “it’s okay”.

Author: Unknown | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.

Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Perception | Observation

The impermanence of things — of seasons and lifetimes and galaxies and loves — is what confers preciousness and sweetness upon them.

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