The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
~ Madeleine L’Engle
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Quotes
A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Change, please
I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.
~ George Carlin
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Greed
Accursed thirst for gold! What dost thou not compel mortals to do?
~ Virgil
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New associations
Instead of feeling complacent about what you know, you must expand your knowledge to related fields, giving your mind fuel to make new associations between different ideas. You must experiment and look at problems from all possible angles. As your thinking grows more fluid, your mind will grow increasingly dimensional, seeing more and more aspects of reality. In the end, you will turn against the very rules you have internalized, shaping and reforming them to suit your spirit.
~ Robert Greene
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Ethics
The worst mistake which was ever made in this world was the separation of political science from ethics.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Exhaustion
Learning never exhausts the mind.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
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New kind of society
[…] what we need is a few hints on the art of creating an entirely new kind of society, durable but adventurous, strong but humane, highly organized but liberty-loving, elastic and adaptable. In this matter Greece and Rome can teach us only negatively—by demonstrating, in their divergent ways, what not to do.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Creating connection
The alternative is an interaction that creates a connection instead of destroying it. Where is the eye contact? Where is the dignity that comes from recognizing another?
When we humanize the person at the other end of the counter or the phone or the Internet, we grant them something precious—personhood. When we treat the people around us with dignity, we create an entirely different platform for the words we utter and the plans we make.
~ Seth Godin
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The task of art
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
~ Marcel Proust
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Yourself
If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: You have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: You can become better yourself.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Say something original
Many stupid things are uttered by people whose only motivation is to say something original.
~ Voltaire
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Everything unresolved
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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Try to remember
After a long conversation, stop and try to remember what you have just discussed. Don’t be surprised if many things, sometimes even everything you have discussed, were meaningless, empty, and trivial, and sometimes even bad.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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The present
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
~ C.S. Lewis
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Simple work
When a person sets to work, even if it is the most unqualified, primitive, simple work, the human soul calms down. As soon as a person starts to work, all the demons leave him and cannot approach him. A man becomes a man.
~ Thomas Carlyle
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Failure also
Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery… but weakness… folly… failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.
~ “Yoda”
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Too tired
You tell me flatly that you are too tired to do anything outside your programme at night. In reply to which I tell you flatly that if your ordinary day’s work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted. A man’s powers ought not to be monopolized by his ordinary day’s work.
~ Arnold Bennett
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Seen in the light
To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.
~ Coventry Patmore
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Discovery
What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.
~ Jonas Salk
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Never reaching the sea
What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem. I then begin the story, making it up as I go along, having all the excitement of finding out what will happen to the characters and how they will get out of their scrapes, but working steadily toward the known resolution so that I don’t get lost en route.
When asked for advice by beginners, I always stress that. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
~ Isaac Asimov
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