To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.
~ Coventry Patmore
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Quotes
Discovery
What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.
~ Jonas Salk
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Never reaching the sea
What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem. I then begin the story, making it up as I go along, having all the excitement of finding out what will happen to the characters and how they will get out of their scrapes, but working steadily toward the known resolution so that I don’t get lost en route.
When asked for advice by beginners, I always stress that. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
~ Isaac Asimov
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Idleness
Constant idleness should be included in the tortures of hell, but it is, on the contrary, considered to be one of the joys of paradise.
~ Charles de Montesquieu
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Generous silence
Generous silence provides space for the other person to be with their own self, for you to be with them for presence to show up. It allows them to take a breath. It whispers, “this is an interesting place to be. Let’s hang out here for a moment.” […] Generous silence can allow the delicate insights of a conversation to blossom and bloom.
~ Michael Bungay Stanier
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Gravy
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
~ Bette Davis
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Miracles
A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.
~ M. C. Escher
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Love
You want my opinion? We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
~ Robert Fulghum
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Which are necessary
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
Simplicity is the consequence of refined emotions.
~ Jean D’Alembert
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Then you read
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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False dichotomies
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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Age-old struggle
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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Wisdom and learning
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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Listening
When you don’t know what to say, that’s okay. That shows you’re listening.
~ Anna Sale
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Together
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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Real change
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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Virtue
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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Drawbacks
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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Dreams
It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.
~ Don DeLillo
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