There is no love that’s so right as admiration-based love, and that love should include the instructive dead. Somehow, I got that idea and I lived with it all my life; and it’s been very, very useful to me.
Author: Charlie Munger | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large, the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust … [ Read more ]
Author: Charlie Munger | Source: Farnam Street | Subject: Personal Improvement
Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.
Author: Charlie Munger | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind. It remembers to appreciate… It refuses to let … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
A well-functioning mind recognizes the futility and cruelty of constantly finding fault with its own nature… [It] can quieten its own buzzing preoccupations in order, at times, to focus on the world beyond itself.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
A mind in a healthy state is, in the background, continually performing a near-miraculous set of maneuvers that underpin our moods of clear-sightedness and purpose… A healthy mind is an editing mind, an organ that manages to sieve, from thousands of stray, dramatic, disconcerting, or horrifying thoughts, those particular ideas and sensations that actively need to be entertained in order for us to direct our … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry
Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator [that] asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.
Author: Alexandra Horowitz | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Author: Viktor Frankl | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Attitude, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The principles of Christian morality [have] always characterized its creed but too rarely its behavior.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subject: Religion
The fundamentalist mind… is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subject: Religion
Studies of political intolerance and ethnic prejudice have shown that zealous churchgoing and rigid religious faith are among the important correlates of political and ethnic animosity.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Religion
The one-hundred percenter, who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of toughness and masculinity.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Religion, for many individuals or groups, may be an expression of serene belief, personal peace, and charity of mind. But for more militant spirits it may also be a source or an outlet for animosities.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subject: Religion
Business in America at its highest levels appealed not merely to greed and the lust for power but to the imagination; alluring to the builder, the gamester, and the ruler in men, it offered more sport than hunting and more power than politics.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Business, International
Intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry
In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
In the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Education | Scholarship, International, Thought | Inquiry
It is a part of the intellectual’s tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry
To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry
Modern students of social mobility have made it incontestably clear that the legendary American rags-to-riches story, despite the spectacular instances that adorn our business annals, was more important as a myth and a symbol than as a statistical actuality.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: America, Business, International