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C S Lewis: Progress
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” ― C. S. Lewis.
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Leo Buscaglia: Turn a life around
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” —Leo Buscaglia.
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Vincent van Gogh: Blazing hearth
“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.” —-Vincent van Gogh.
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C S Lewis: Truth or comfort
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” ― C. S. Lewis.
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Eric Idle: Amount of comedy
“At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This…
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C S Lewis: Aim at heaven
“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” ― C. S. Lewis.
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C S Lewis: Friendship
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.” ― C. S. Lewis.
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Daniel Dennett: Scholarly library
“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” —-Daniel Dennett.
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Elaine Scarry: Pain
“The absence of pain is a presence of world; the presence of pain is the absence of world.” —Elaine Scarry.
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C S Lewis: Be hatched or go bad
“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.” ―…
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Susan Neiman: Carrots and sticks
‘If you view religion as necessary for ethics, you’ve reduced us to the ethical level of four-year-olds. “If you follow these commandments you’ll go to heaven, if you don’t you’ll burn in hell” is just a spectacular version of the carrots and sticks with which you raise your children.’ —Susan Neiman.
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Charlie Munger: Deep part of human nature
“I’d like to repeat that business about not having to get it back the way you lost it. You know, that’s the reason so many people are ruined by gambling. They get behind and then they feel they have to get it back the way they lost it. It’s a deep part of the human…
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Gertrude Stein: Too careful
“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.” —Gertrude Stein.
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C S Lewis: Dream a new dream
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” ― C. S. Lewis.
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John T Reed: Core principles
“When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of…
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Richard Dawkins: Two opposite points of view
“When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.” —-Richard Dawkins.
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Dinos Christianopoulos: You forgot I was a seed
“What didn’t you do to bury me / But you forgot that I was a seed.” —–Dinos Christianopoulos.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poetry
“Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.” —-Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
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Erich Fromm: Understanding, not condoning
“Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.” —-Erich Fromm.
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Derek Bok: Law: too much, too little
“There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot.” —Derek Bok.
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Bertrand Russell: Hang a question mark
“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” ―Bertrand Russell.
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Jean Paul Richter: Is the heart to be of no account?
“Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?” —-Jean Paul Richter.
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Jeremy Grantham: Volatility
“Volatility is a symptom that people have no clue of the underlying value.” —Jeremy Grantham.
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Travis Bradberry: Self-awareness
“The biggest obstacle to increasing your self-awareness is the tendency to avoid the discomfort that comes from seeing yourself as you really are.” — Travis Bradberry.
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Charlie Munger: Competency
“It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it.” — Charlie Munger.
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Ted Williams: Good vs Great
“A good hitter can hit a pitch that is over the plate three times better than a great hitter with a questionable ball in a tough spot.” —Ted Williams.
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Carl Richards: Risk
“Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.” —Carl Richards.
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Bayard Rustin: Dignity
“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.” —Bayard Rustin.
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James Madison: Fetters
“The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.” —-James Madison.
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Cesare Beccaria: Prevent crimes
“It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.” —Cesare Beccaria.
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Albert Einstein: Hail to the man
“Hail to the man who went through life always helping others, knowing no fear, and to whom aggressiveness and resentment are alien.” —Albert Einstein.
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Robert Cialdini: Principle of social proof
“First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not…
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Giorgos Seferis: Lions and lambs
“Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” —-Giorgos Seferis.
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Hector Macdonald: Single truth
“Life feels simpler when we tell ourselves there is a single truth and everything else is a deviation from that truth–an error, a lie, an ‘untruth’. It’s disturbing to imagine that we can shape reality simply by choosing a different truth. The very idea of competing truths feels slippery, disingenuous, conniving.”— Hector Macdonald.
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Victor Cherbuliez: What helps luck
“What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.”—Victor Cherbuliez.
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Christine Stevens: Golden Rule
“The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule — we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us were any other species in our dominant position.” —Christine Stevens.
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P Z Myers: Science gets the job done
“What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or…
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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr: Death tugs at my ear
‘Death tugs at my ear and says, “Live, I am coming.”‘ —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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Douglas Adams: Learning experience
‘You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says,“You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”’ — Douglas Adams.
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Peter Bernstein: State of transition
“The trick in risk management is in recognizing that normal is not a state of nature, but a state of transition and that trend is not destiny.” —Peter Bernstein.
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Marcus Aurelius: Never let the future disturb you
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” —Marcus Aurelius.
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Luther Burbank: Jungle of weeds
“If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weeds.” —-Luther Burbank.
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Michelangelo Buonarroti: Beauty
“Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.” —Michelangelo Buonarroti
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Baltasar Gracián: Use contradiction
“It is a great way to provoke others: they commit themselves and you commit nothing. You can use contradiction to pry loose the passions of others. Showing disbelief makes people vomit up their secrets; it is the key to tightly closed breasts. With great subtlety you can test the will and judgment of others. Shrewdly…
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Baltasar Gracián: Prudence
“If the person doing something suspects he will fail, it will be evident to the person watching, even more so when he is a rival. If your judgment wavers in the heat of emotion, you’ll be thought a fool when things cool down. It is dangerous to undertake something when you doubt its wisdom. It…
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Baltasar Gracián: Make haste slowly
“Diligence is quick to carry out what intelligence has lingered over. Fools are fond of hurry: they take no heed of obstacles and act incautiously. The wise usually fail through hesitation. Fools stop at nothing, the wise at everything. Sometimes things are judged correctly but go wrong out of inefficiency and neglect. Readiness is the…
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Alexander Graham Bell: One closes, another opens
“When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.” —-Alexander Graham Bell.
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Multatuli: Swimming abilities of ducks
“One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water.” —-Multatuli (pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker).
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Richard Wilbur: Opposite of two
“What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.” —Richard Wilbur.
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Michel de Montaigne: Cast in the same mold
“The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war between princes.” —-Michel de Montaigne.
