Work

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

~ Carl Jung

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Machines

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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Democracy

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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Missionaries

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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Questions

The only question that really matters, the only question whose correct answer can exert a civilizing influence on the future specialist, is the question asked by Buddha and Jesus, by Lao-Tsu and Socrates, by Job and Aeschylus, and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, by every philosopher, every mystic, every great artist: Who am I and what, if anything, can I do about it?

~ Aldous Huxley

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Well-composed

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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Unnecessary

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; Rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

~ C.S. Lewis

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Communication

A man would have no pleasures in discovering all the beauties of the universe, even in heaven itself, unless he had a partner to whom he might communicate his joys.

~ Cicero

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Hardship

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

~ Alain de Botton

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Perfectionism

Perfectionism is not as much the desire for excellence, as it is the fear of failure couched in procrastination.

~ Dan Miller

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Mystery

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

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