2097 Quotations Found

The expectations of others are bars we use to build our own cages.

Author: David Hayward | Subject: Personal Improvement

There are people in the world less qualified than you doing the things that you’ve always wanted to do simply because they found a way to ignore the voices in their own heads that told them they couldn’t or just weren’t good enough.

Author: Unknown | Subject: Personal Improvement

Most people don’t do great things because they don’t usually feel great when you’re doing them.

Author: Unknown | Subject: Personal Improvement

The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.

Author: Chris Hedges | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

When those accustomed to breaking things try to build them, they seem to have little idea of how much work it actually takes. They seem to think that actual accomplishments are there for the taking, and that splashy announcements and dramatic actions can solve intricate problems.

Author: Heather Cox Richardson | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

People have a funny way of looking at the world in the way they cut the data. They’re not honest with themselves… they are not looking at the way the world really is as opposed to the way that they want the world to be. This is the internal war that people have to fight to get to what the truth is and ultimately what … [ Read more ]

Author: Steve Cohen | Subjects: Concepts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure, Truth | Right | Wrong

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the … [ Read more ]

Author: Sylvia Plath | Subject: Life & Society

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future. There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.

Author: Charlie Munger | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, History

By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. [James Davison] Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

James Davison Hunter… reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.

American culture, Hunter argues, was formed … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

It is better to die for an idea that will live than live for an idea that will die.

Author: Steve Biko | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy

We don’t know our true values until they’re tested. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” We don’t know if we’re actually honest until we tell the truth when the truth will hurt us.

Authors: C.S. Lewis, David French | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Truth | Right | Wrong

It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

Author: David French | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Truth | Right | Wrong

I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.

Author: David French | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

[Paul O’Keefe] and two co-authors—[Carol] Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford—recently performed a study that suggests it might be time to change the way we think about our interests. Passions aren’t “found,” they argue. They’re developed.

Author: Olga Khazan | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Career, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best. Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.

Author: Ragnar Lothbrok | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Power

Surprises alert you to flawed thinking. When results are not what you expected. When facts disagree with you. When someone does something unexpected. “What surprise tells you,” my friend Adam Robinson says, “is that your model of the world is incorrect.” And when your model of the world is incorrect, you need to figure out why.

Authors: Adam Robinson, Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Truth | Right | Wrong

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change. For I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance.

Author: Marcus Aurelius | Subjects: Concepts, Personal Improvement, Truth | Right | Wrong

[I tried] whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.

Author: Charles Darwin | Subjects: Concepts, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Truth | Right | Wrong

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Author: Elinor Smith | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure