Our greatest obstacle to happiness, [Anne] Gilchrist intimates, are our illusions of finitude and fragmentation — a failure of imagination that becomes a self-imposed prison of smallness, from which we are liberated only when we learn to see the interconnected wholeness of the universe.
Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement
Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it. Doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that — that’s what life is.
Author: Amy Poehler | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
As long as you judge yourself using someone else’s measure, you’ll never find your real self, no matter where you look.
Subjects: Individuality, Personal Improvement
If uncertainty is our core fear, we will pursue certainty at all cost, being rigid in our behaviors and thinking. We hold on to our opinions and feelings as facts. Our heart is closed to uncertainty, and therefore the richness of this moment. We may believe that we always need to have the right answer and that others who don’t agree with us are just … [ Read more ]
Author: Hylke Faber | Subjects: Fear, Psychology | Behavior
I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Author: Henry David Thoreau | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
A sense of responsibility makes the individual and supplies the key to one individual’s understanding of another. To accept the idea of collective guilt and collective responsibility means consciously or involuntarily to diminish individual guilt and responsibility. […] Thinking of that sort is the imperceptible embryo of moral nihilism.
Author: Vaclav Havel | Subjects: Individuality, Responsibility
Your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you’re thinking about and what you’re paying attention to. Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention.
Author: Daniel Kahneman | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
Author: Marshall McLuhan | Subject: Ethics | Integrity | Morality
If [a law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.
Author: Henry David Thoreau | Subjects: Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Law | Legal
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr | Source: from The Serenity Prayer | Subjects: Religion, Wisdom
German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the ultimate test of a moral society is the world that it leaves to its children. When I think of how we’re passing on unthinkable taxes and debts, and slipping our kids and grandkids the check, I say we are failing that moral test.
Author: Pete Peterson | Subjects: Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Politics & Public Policy
Life could be vastly improved if we could count our blessings as self-actualizing people can and do, and if we could retain their constant sense of good fortune and gratitude for it. Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important nonevil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.
Author: Abraham Maslow | Subjects: Gratitude, Psychology | Behavior
Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.
Author: Abraham Maslow | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, than you are indeed a man of true wisdom.
Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Wisdom
…that is just being in love, which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.
Authors: Louis de Bernières, Shawn Slovo | Source: Dr. Iannis (Pelagia’s father) in the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) | Subject: Love
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
Author: John Donne | Subjects: Individuality, Life & Society
We enact our hopes best when our eyes are fully open.
Author: Richard Crouter | Subject: Personal Improvement
The gains of idealists are short-lived unless and until they can be backed by law.
Author: Richard Crouter | Note(s): Discussing Reinhold Niebuhr | Subjects: Dreams, Philosophy
In some ways the health of a society can be measured by how many avenues to self-importance it opens up.
Author: David Brooks | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology
He, who by understanding, becomes converted to the gospel of service […] will serve kindness so that brutality will perish. […] And he who is strong, will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength, not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than … [ Read more ]
Author: Jack London | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Philanthropy, Wisdom