2097 Quotations Found

Sometimes amateurs believe they are professionals, but professionals never believe they are amateurs.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Career, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement

Nomadic society is always more equitable, more egalitarian than sedentary, agricultural society, where you can accumulate wealth and pass it on through generations. The beginnings of class structure start with agriculture.

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Material Possessions

I’ve always thought of freedom as an activity, not a condition. There’s a tendency, especially in our culture, to think of freedom as “freedom from.” To be free is to not be tyrannized by some outside power, and that’s fine, but it’s incomplete. You can be free of tyranny, but if you’re destitute, if you’re abandoned, if you don’t have agency because your most immediate … [ Read more ]

Author: Sean Illing | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Conservatives are concerned with an outside threat, and liberals, they’re much less worried about outsiders. In fact, they’re often quite open to them culturally. What they’re worried about is internal unfairness. If you take those two concerns and you marry them together in one society, you have a society that can both protect itself and run a fairly equitable system. Either one by itself wouldn’t … [ Read more ]

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for. That raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. […] The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. … [ Read more ]

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Here are the two best prayers I know: “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Author: Anne Lamott | Subject: Religion

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

Author: William Bruce Cameron | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Author: Mevlana Rumi | Subjects: Concepts, Pain & Suffering

We can think our way into a new way of acting, and we can also act our way into a new way of thinking.

Author: Alisa Cohn | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

Author: Edmund Burke | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

[Daniel Kahneman’s] central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That’s a powerful and important discovery.

Authors: Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The person who cannot take advantage of an opportunity is no better off than the person that never sees it in the first place.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

No one ever talks about their feelings anyway, without dressing them in dreams and laughter; I guess it’s just too painful otherwise.

Author: Jackson Browne | Subjects: Communication, Psychology | Behavior

The unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what’s around you.

Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Fear, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Author: Freeman Dyson | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Math & Science

If you repeated what you did today 365 more times will you be where you want to be next year?

Author: Kevin Kelly | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names […] but we recognize … [ Read more ]

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

When you realize you probably have enough, you become much less anxious about uncertainty: you think, “I could try something new, I have enough,” rather than, “How do I get more?”

Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Humility isn’t a lack of confidence but an earned confidence. The confidence to say that you might not be right, but you’ve done the diligence, and you’ve put in the work. Humility keeps you wondering what you’re missing or if someone is working harder than you. And yet when pride and arrogance take over, humility flees and so does our ability to learn, adapt, and … [ Read more ]

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior