Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
~ Michael Lewis
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Inspirational Quotes book (reviewed)
Humility
A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false.
~ Benjamin Franklin
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Curiosity
If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. […] Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.
~ Nick Cave
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Mind
Mind unemployed is mind unenjoyed.
~ Bovee
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Wanting
The minute you stop wanting something you get it.
~ Andy Warhol
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Memento mori
We are all just walking each other home.
~ Ram Dass
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Thinking
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; It is thinking that makes what we read ours.
~ John Locke
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Mysterious
The world […] is indeed a strange and deeply mysterious place, forever changing and remaking itself anew. But this is not a novel condition, our world hasn’t only recently become bizarre and temporary, it has been so ever since its inception, and it will continue to be such until its end—mystifying and forever in a state of flux.
~ Nick Cave
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Amateurs
That’s all of us are: Amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.
~ Charlie Chaplin
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Luxury
If you wish to remove avarice you must remove its mother, luxury.
~ Cicero
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Experience
It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
~ Ram Dass
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Books
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
~ Mortimer J. Adler
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Words
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
~ Tom Stoppard
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Sea
Man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
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Nature
I can do nothing without nature. I do not know how to make things up.
~ Manet
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Work
No country ever was built by people sleeping in. Austria was not built by people sleeping in. America was not built by people sleeping in. People struggled, people suffered, people worked their asses off to build this country.
~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
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Reading
He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
~ William Godwin
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Enlightened
If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.
~ Ram Dass
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Path
I always tell young people to find a path in life that you can embrace and enjoy rather than something that you’re expected to do. That’s what makes life interesting. And once you achieve a certain level of success, no matter where you are, what you’re doing, don’t be content with that level. Push yourself to another level. People that are successful are always pushing.
~ Ed Viesturs
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Representation
[T]his is quite central to my fiction and to my analysis of the problems of creating a new nation today. Obviously, we can’t go back to a system in which every man is turning up in the village square—that’s in the past. But we have to find a way of dealing with the problems created by the fact that somebody says he’s speaking on your behalf, but you don’t know who he is. This is one of the problems of the modern world.
~ Chinua Achebe
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