Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. […] Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, … [ Read more ]
Author: M. Scott Peck | Subjects: Life & Society, Wisdom
Psychology is half-baked, literally half-baked. We have baked the part about mental illness. We have baked the part about repair and damage. But the other side is unbaked. The side of strengths, the side of what we are good at, the side […] of what makes life worth living.
Author: Martin Seligman | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Criticism has the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.
Author: Carl Jung | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The wise know what to be thinking about, whereas the merely intelligent only know how to think.
Author: Scott Berkun | Subjects: Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry, Wisdom
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Author: Henry David Thoreau | Subjects: Hope, Personal Improvement
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Author: Jorge Luis Borges | Subject: Love
He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them.
Author: Samuel Johnson | Subjects: Culture, Psychology | Behavior
When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.
Author: Wayne Dyer | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Wisdom
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d rather have been talking.
Author: Aristotle | Subject: Wisdom
If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure
If we attribute too much power and potential to the media in the power struggle between the branches, we will be falling prey to mistaking the media for the message. And if we fall prey to that mistake, the inevitable result will be a tendency to shape the message, in this case the legislative process, to fit the media.
Author: John B. Anderson | Subjects: News | Media | Publishing, Politics & Public Policy
No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.
Author: Booker T. Washington | Subjects: Culture, Race Relations
There is a basic social divide between those for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is frightening.
Author: Andrew Solomon | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more; that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds.
Author: Nicholas Sparks | Source: The Notebook | Subject: Love
“We have learned that you cannot live from history,” a Kosovo Serb told a New York Times reporter in 1999. “Americans have no history and they live wonderfully well.”
Sometimes progress takes the form of historical amnesia.
But while applying the supposed lessons of history to the present may be inevitable, doing so is always perilous, for it involves the use of analogies that may, in hindsight, … [ Read more ]
Author: Christopher Clausen | Subject: History
Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.
Author: Christopher Hitchens | Subject: Miscellaneous
How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel? What would have happened to the Reformation if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong and leadership.
Author: Harry S. Truman | Subjects: Leadership, Politics & Public Policy
Prosperity in the form of wealth works exactly the same as everything else. You will see it coming into your life when you are unattached to needing it.
Author: Wayne Dyer | Subjects: Material Possessions, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.
Author: Mother Teresa | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
Author: Leonardo da Vinci | Subject: Thought | Inquiry