2099 Quotations Found

Ignorance is a really good thing, as long as it’s coupled with curiosity.

Author: Alan Alda | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

There are two kinds of success: success of distinction and success of satisfaction. Success of distinction means getting rich, or famous, or in some way marked out among your fellows. But this point should not be overlooked: that in this sort of success Chance plays a great part. Good fortune has not all to do with making a prominent person, but it always has something … [ Read more ]

Author: Frank Crane | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.

Author: Irving Kristol | Subjects: Life & Society, Religion

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Subject: Personal Improvement

Two kinds of people in the world […] Those who let things happen, and those who make things happen. Be the second kind.

Author: Matthew E. May | Subject: Personal Improvement

Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves—regret for the past and fear for the future.

Author: Fulton Oursler | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

Author: Gerry Spence | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.

Author: Fred Rogers | Subject: Life & Society

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it … [ Read more ]

Author: Carl Sagan | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Narcissists live with the assumption that they cannot reliably depend on anyone’s love or loyalty.

Author: Manfred Kets de Vries | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.

Author: Peter T. McIntyre | Subject: Personal Improvement

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

Author: Gandhi | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Environment | Sustainability

Self-love is the only enduring form of passion.

Author: Lawrence Sanders | Source: McNally’s Trial (book) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology

Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company [but desire it and cannot find it].

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as … [ Read more ]

Author: Martha Nussbaum | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

Nowhere is our capacity for enchantment, nor our capacity for self-deception, greater than in love — the region of human experience where the path to truth is most obstructed by the bramble of rationalization and where we are most likely to be kidnapped by our own delicious delusions. There, it is perennially difficult to know what we really want; difficult to distinguish between love and … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

Our human foibles don’t negate our goodness or our desire for betterment but, rather, provide both the fuel for it and the yardstick by which we measure our moral progress.

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

This is how the world changes: We loosen the stranglehold of our givens, bend and stretch our minds to imagine what was once unimaginable, test our theories against reality, and emerge with vision expanded into new dimensions of truth.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement