Principles only mean something if you stick by them when they are inconvenient.
Author: Rod Lurie | Source: The movie The Contender (2000) | Subjects: Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Personal Improvement, Principles, Psychology | Behavior, Wisdom
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Author: Oscar Wilde | Subjects: Desires, Life & Society
There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatiences they do not return.
Author: Franz Kafka | Subjects: Philosophy, Psychology | Behavior
Just as the success of a corporate body in making money need not set the human condition ahead, neither does every scientific advance automatically make our lives more “meaningful.”
Author: James D. Watson | Subjects: IT | Technology, Math & Science
The roots of American higher education’s enormous vitality—institutional openness and diversity, the union of professional training and academic research in the same institution, and the combination of outstanding research at the upper levels with broad accessibility at the undergraduate level—are as much homegrown as imported from elsewhere.
Author: Mitchell G. Ash | Subject: Education | Scholarship
What is freedom for the individual? One viable form is freedom to act as you please as long as you do not inhibit a like freedom for others. A second notion is that an individual is free to the degree she is able to realize herself.
Author: Ross Terrill | Subject: Freedom | Liberty
God grant me the company of those who seek the truth and God deliver me from those who have found it.
Author: Isaac Newton | Subjects: Thought | Inquiry, Wisdom
Most students want and need the same things from higher education: general and specialized knowledge; the ability to analyze, think critically, and communicate; a degree; a good job; and the chance to live life well.
Author: Kevin Carey | Subject: Education | Scholarship
Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.
Author: Lao Tzu | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Wisdom
Thinking aloud is a habit responsible for much of mankind’s misery.
Author: Benjamin Franklin | Subjects: Thought | Inquiry, Wisdom
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Author: Horace Walpole | Subjects: Life & Society, Wisdom
You’re not ready to live your life until you know what you want written on your tombstone.
Author: Charlie Jones | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Meaning, Wisdom
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, … [ Read more ]
Author: Leo Tolstoy | Subjects: Happiness, Thought Starters, Wisdom
Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous.
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior
In our stroke for independence we struck a blow for all the world. Some men saw it then; all men see it now […] Let us ponder our duties like men of conscience and temper our ambitions like men who seek to serve, not to subdue, the world; let us lift our thoughts to the level of the great tasks that await us, and bring … [ Read more ]
Author: Woodrow Wilson | Subjects: America, Foreign Policy
But I say to the young: Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, and imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.
Author: Eleanor Roosevelt | Subjects: Life & Society, Wisdom
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures – both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe – a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind … [ Read more ]
Author: Benjamin R. Barber | Subjects: Culture, International
Sometimes when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution.
Author: Andrew Sullivan | Subject: Risk
Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him.
Author: Philip Pullman | Subject: Religion
Persons who are either too wealthy or too happy in their own lives tend to lose the need of love. It should also serve as a warning that those who are prone to love are equally prone to fear.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Fear, Love