Good conversation mixes opinions, feelings, facts and ideas in an improvisational exchange with one or more individuals in an atmosphere of good will. It inspires mutual insight, respect and, most of all joy. It is a way of relaxing the mind, opening the heart and connecting, authentically, with others To converse well is surprising, humanizing and fun.
~ Paula Marantz Cohen
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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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Gratitude is like the good faith of traders—it maintains commerce; And we often pay, not because it is just to discharge our debts, but that we may more readily find people to trust us.
~ Rochefoucauld
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If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
~ Don Marquis
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If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
~ Rachel Carson
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Gratuitous violence in argument betrays a conscious weakness of the cause, and is usually a signal of despair.
~ Junius
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The law of the pleasure in having done anything for another is, that the one almost immediately forgets having given, and the other remembers eternally having received.
~ Seneca
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
~ E.M. Forster
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We’re driving faster and faster into the future, trying to steer by using only the rear-view mirror.
~ Marshall McLuhan
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Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of it.
~ Rollo May
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Who shall decide when doctors disagree, and sound casuists doubt like you and me?
~ Alexander Pope
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The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.
~ Elliot Erwitt
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If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.
~ Lewis Mumford
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
~ William James
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Insolence is not logic; Epithets are the arguments of malice.
~ R.G. Ingerson
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The polis or gathering place for governing, the root of our modern politics, was nothing but a physical space that designated and enabled the conversational space required for true self-governing. The capacity for talking together constituted the foundation for democracy, far more fundamental than voting. As one ancient Greek philosopher noted, “When voting started, democracy ended.”
~ Peter M. Senge
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Every man is a missionary, now and forever, for good or for evil, whether he intends or designs it or not.
~ Chalmers
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A well-composed song strikes the mind and softens the feelings, and produces a greater effect than a moral work, which convinces our reason, but does not warm our feelings, nor effect the slightest alteration in our habits.
~ Napoleon
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All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.
~ Elliott Erwitt
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The noblest art is that of making others happy.
~ P.T. Barnum
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