2098 Quotations Found

The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.

Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.

Author: Murphy’s Law | Source: Gylme’s Formula for Success | Subjects: Gratitude, Success / Failure

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about … [ Read more ]

Author: Marianne Williamson | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Wisdom

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

Author: Hector Hugh Munro | Source: The Munroe Doctrine | Murphy’s Law | Subject: Communication

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.

Author: Doug Larson | Source: Larson’s Law | Murphy’s Law | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

If you can distinguish between good advice and bad advice, then you don’t need advice.

Author: Laurence J. Peter | Source: Van Roy’s Law | Murphy’s Law | Subjects: Advice, Gratitude, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Author: Eric Hoffer | Source: Hoffer’s Law | Murphy’s Law | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior

If one views one’s problem closely enough, one will recognize oneself as part of the problem.

Author: Murphy’s Law | Source: Ducharm’s Axiom | Subject: Wisdom

Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

Author: Franklin P. Jones | Source: Jones’s Law | Murphy’s Law | Subjects: Experience, Gratitude

It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.

Author: Stephen Covey | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

Author: Mevlana Rumi | Subjects: Religion, Wisdom

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.

Author: Winston Churchill | Subjects: America, Politics & Public Policy

I do not believe the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion in which it will be politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right … [ Read more ]

Author: Milton Friedman | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

Yes, democracy is the rule of the majority; but there liberalism must enter. Majority rule must be tempered by the rights of minorities and of individual men and women; but when that temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing else than populism. More precisely: then it is nationalist populism. It may be that the degeneration of liberal democracy to populism will … [ Read more ]

Author: John Lukacs | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

Envy is always most intense when it is experienced laterally, not, as we would expect, when it is experienced vertically – that is, when it is inspired by someone we perceive as a peer rather than someone higher on the economic food chain, whose good fortune stirs only theoretical forms of resentment. The maid does not envy her mistress her jewels; she envies the housekeeper … [ Read more ]

Author: Daniel Harris | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

The ultimate test of the validity of claimed human rights is whether they survive uninhibited, informed discussion and scrutiny, not merely in one society but “across national boundaries.” As Adam Smith once wrote, ethical scrutiny requires examining moral beliefs from “a certain distance.”

Author: Amartya Sen | Subjects: Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Philosophy, Politics & Public Policy

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market is a symptom of deficient vitality: and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management, Psychology | Behavior

For most of those which were great once are small today. And those that used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both.

Author: Herodotus | Subjects: Material Possessions, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure, Wisdom

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night of the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Author: William Shakespeare | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Personal Improvement

Feeling like a victim is not a pleasant feeling, but it does free you from the responsibility of misfortune.

Authors: Alex Rovira, Fernando Trias de Bes | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Responsibility