A long long time ago I began collecting inspirational quotes and aphorisms which became my collection of quotes.
Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Simplicity is the consequence of refined emotions.
~ Jean D’Alembert
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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was reading books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. An artist is a sort of emotional historian.
~ James Baldwin
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It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; A world where we are always moral and our enemies immoral.
~ Saul D. Alinsky
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The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle—the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.
~ Douglas MacArthur
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Seek to learn constantly while you live; Do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.
~ Solon
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When you don’t know what to say, that’s okay. That shows you’re listening.
~ Anna Sale
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Humanity has begun to understand that we will all rise or fall together—that we are bound together, as we live together. People are listening more and more to the voice which speaks this inside of us.
~ Lucy Malory
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Change—real change—comes from the inside out. It doesn’t come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior with quickfix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the root—the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential paradigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world.
~ Stephen Covey
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The simplest, quickest and surest means to becoming known as a virtuous person is to work on yourself, to actually be virtuous. Examine each virtue, and you will see that they all were achieved with work and exercise.
~ Socrates
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The very shortcomings which make others difficult and unbearable mean less in yourself. You do not see them, and when you speak of other people having these drawback, you do not notice that you are describing yourself.
~ Jean de la Bruyère
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It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.
~ Don DeLillo
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Wealth is not about having a lot of money; It’s about having a lot of options.
~ Chris Rock
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Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
~ Thomas Carlyle
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Being self-reliant is critical. To make yourself less dependent on others and so-called experts, you need to expand your repertoire of skills. And you need to feel more confident in your own judgement. Understand: We tend to overestimate other people’s abilities—after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing—and we tend to underestimate our own. You must compensate for this by trusting yourself more and others less.
~ Robert Greene
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If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Advice is like being handed a large amount of foreign currency. What do you do with it?
~ Rhik Samadder
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Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings blessed death.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
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If you’re a pole vaulter, you need a long runway to pick up the speed required to plant the pole and flip over the bar. Odds are you are not a pole vaulter. You don’t need a runway of context, justification, and general flim-flam to be curious. It’s not really about you. Save everyone the time, and just ask the question.
~ Michael Bungay Stanier
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