When you get older, you realize it’s a lot less about your place in the world but your place in you. It’s not how everyone views you, but how you view yourself.
~ Natalie Portman
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Quotes
Idleness
[H]ad I my life to arrange over again, I would do again as I have done. Only those who have lived at the full stretch seven days a week for a long time can appreciate the full beauty of a regular recurring idleness. Moreover, I am ageing. And it is a question of age. In cases of a bounding youth and exceptional energy and desire for effort I should say unhesitatingly: Keep going, day in, day out.
~ Arnold Bennett
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More than just questions
Questions alone are not enough. Context matters. The mind-set that people bring to the room matters. How people came to be in the room matters. The room itself matters. The social structure of how people talk to each other matters. The action of the leader/convener matters.
~ Peter Block
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Speak
All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember it.
~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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Crazy
If you want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages, this crazy music, and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person.
~ Kayne West
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The letter kills
Individually and collectively, men have always been the victim of their own words […] Taken too seriously, symbols have motivated and justified all the horrors of recorded history. On every level from the personal to the international, the letter kills. Theoretically we know this very well. In practice, nevertheless, we continue to commit the suicidal blunders to which we have become accustomed.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Society
Society is not some grand abstraction, my friends. It’s just us. It’s the words we use, which are the thoughts we have, which determine the actions we take.
~ Umair Haque
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Shame
While you can still avoid shame by hiding, you won’t find happiness or even stability that way. The thing is, shame is a choice. It’s worth repeating: Shame can’t be forced on you; it must be accepted. The artist, then, combines courage with a fierce willingness to refuse to accept shame. Blame, sure. Shame, never. Where is the shame in using our best intent to make art for those we care about?
~ Seth Godin
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The future
No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
~ Ian Wilson
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Perspective
Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it’s not the deer that is crossing the road, rather it’s the road that is crossing the forest.
~ Muhammad Ali
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Unprecedented
Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.
~ Kelly Hayes
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Calm realization
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.
~ Arnold Bennett
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Change
If we can accept the idea that all real change is a shift in narrative—a new story as opposed to the received dominant story—then the function of citizenship, or leadership, is to invite a new narrative into existence. Narrative begins with a ride on the wave of conversation. For greatest effect, we need a new conversation with people we are not used to talking to.
~ Peter Block
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Our toil
Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.
~ Bram Stoker
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The glass
I’m not interested in whether the glass if half empty or half full. I’m interested in figuring out how to fill the glass.
~ Donal Kaberuka
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Mindless malice
Even when one is crossing it at seventy miles an hour on a four-lane highway, the desert can seem formidable enough. To the forty-niners it was unmitigated hell. Men and women who are at her mercy find it hard to see in Nature and her works any symbols but those of brute power at the best and, at the worst, of an obscure and mindless malice.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Curiosity
One should always be curious. Not a passive curiosity dependent upon information received, but an aggressive curiosity that compels one to seek things out and ascertain them for oneself.
~ Issey Miyake
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The disturbing truth
Artists never stop looking for the disturbing truth behind the facade. When reality arrives, they won’t be surprised, because they saw it coming. Sometimes they even encouraged it to come.
~ Seth Godin
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It’s all memory
Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?
~ Tenessee Williams
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Prescription
One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents that imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness.
~ Paolo Freire
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