English Quotes

We pay for our wealth with broken nights, fractious relationships, distant family ties--at times, with life itself. We should look not only at the money we have accumulated, but also at the calm that we have forfeited while doing so. #TheSchoolOfLife — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 17, 2025

Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics. #LordChesterfield — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 17, 2025

Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites. #MichaelSandel — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 17, 2025

Then you realize that even if you'd tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn't have done better, and if you'd really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing. #BenjaminHoff — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 17, 2025

Over time the body inevitably deteriorates. Sooner or later, it's defeated and disappears. When the body disintegrates, the spirit also (most likely) is gone too. I'm well aware of that. However, I'd like to postpone, for as long as I possibly can... #HarukiMurakami — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 17, 2025

This raises the possibility that the immense improvement in material conditions over the last two centuries was offset by the collapse of the family and the community. #YuvalNoahHarari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 17, 2025

...there's likely more insight to be gleaned where others aren't looking--it just won't seem as relevant to the current conversation... researchers who are out in the weeds can expect fewer citations (even if a small number of them will make big, juicy discoveries) #RobinHanson — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 16, 2025

We've underestimated utilitarianism because we've overestimated our own minds. We've mistakenly assumed that our gut reactions are reliable guides to moral truth. #JoshuaGreene — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 16, 2025

Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. #JonathanHaidt — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 16, 2025

[Negative visualization teaches us] to enjoy what we have without clinging to it. #WilliamBIrvine — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 16, 2025

We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might some time or other become our enemies #LaBruyere — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 16, 2025

That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories. #HarukiMurakami — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 16, 2025

I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home #WarrenBuffett — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 15, 2025

Production is important because it provides the material basis for happiness. But it is only the means, not the end. In one survey after another Costa Ricans report far higher levels of life satisfaction than Singaporeans. #YuvalNoahHarari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 15, 2025

I am fond of reading in all shapes; but particularly such as tends to educate the mind and invigorate the spirit. #FrancoisdeLaRochefoucauld — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 15, 2025

A fellow-man may with impunity be murdered under his window, for the philosopher has only to put his hands over his ears and argue a little with himself to prevent nature, which rebels inside him, from making him identify himself with the victim of the murder #JeanJacquesRousseau — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 15, 2025

Disenchantment is not a one-way street. We are capable of a second, more accurate look. We can turn to art for hints on how to perform the manoeuvre of re-enchantment. Many works of art look with particular focus at what has been ignored and taken for granted. #TheSchoolOfLife — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 15, 2025

Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats--either real or imaginary. #YuvalNoahHarari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 15, 2025

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. #Aristotle — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 14, 2025

With no evident awareness of the contradiction [the secular] may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics... #AlaindeBotton — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 14, 2025

So stay true to your own nature. If you like to do things in a slow and steady way, don't let others make you feel as if you have to race. If you enjoy depth, don't force yourself to seek breadth. If you prefer single-tasking to multi-tasking, stick to your guns. #SusanCain — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 14, 2025

We believe we seek happiness in love, but actually what we often seek is familiarity--which may complicate any plans we might have for happiness. #TheSchoolOfLife — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 14, 2025

[Through reading widely] in my imagination I traveled freely through time and space, saw all kinds of amazing sights, and let all kinds of words pass right through my very body. Through all this, my perspective on life became a more composite view. #HarukiMurakami — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 14, 2025

Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. #MahatmaGandhi — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 14, 2025

...the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. #AzizAnsari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 13, 2025

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as the way things happen. #TimUrban — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 13, 2025

It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. #EricHoffer — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 13, 2025

What identifies gossip is the pretence that only certain people are foolish, sexual, embarrassing and prone to lose their tempers or say things they regret. #TheSchoolOfLife — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 13, 2025

We don't need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that's within us, and use it. #BenjaminHoff — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 13, 2025

It turns out that in being asked what we do, we aren't really being asked what we do but what we are worth--and, more precisely, whether or not we are worth knowing. #TheSchoolOfLife — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 13, 2025

Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems. This entraps us into what Tversky and Kahneman call the conjunction fallacy in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements #StevenPinker — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 12, 2025

[Principal characteristics of nationalist thought] obsession, instability, indifference to reality #GeorgeOrwell — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 12, 2025

Giorgio de Chirico foresaw a narrowing horizon for activities as unproductive as observation. #JennyOdell — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 12, 2025

The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to live for, so ultimately is autonomy. #AtulGawande — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 12, 2025

In recommending free trade to developing countries, the Bad Samaritans point out that all the rich countries have free(ish) trade. This is, however, like people advising the parents of a six-year old boy to make him get a job... #HaJoonChang — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 12, 2025

Knowledge comes in two major forms: explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is all the facts you know and can consciously report, independent of context... Tacit Knowledge is procedural... knowing how rather than knowing that. #JonathanHaidt — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 12, 2025

The history that now effects everyman is world history #CWrightMills — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 11, 2025

[Unschooled workers] won't accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with coworkers, or they won't accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before. #KevinSimler — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 11, 2025

System 1 [intuitive thinking] continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2 [deliberate thinking], impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. #DanielKahneman — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 11, 2025

It is no surprise that, on the whole, professors lean left. So do artists, poets, and people who love to watch foreign movies. One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience... #JonathanHaidt — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 11, 2025

...jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner... It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general. #AlaindeBotton — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 11, 2025

People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them. #JamesClear — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 11, 2025

Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. #SusanCain — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 10, 2025

Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be very numerous or highly trained. #AntonioGra… — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 10, 2025

How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy. #MarcusAurelius — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 10, 2025

Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities. #NathanielBranden — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 10, 2025

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm. #SamHarris — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 10, 2025

How have a hundred men who wish for a master the right to vote on behalf of ten who do not? The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention, and presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least. #JeanJacquesRousseau — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 10, 2025

You're always the person you were when you were born, she says impatiently. You just keep finding new ways to express it. #GloriaSteinem — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 9, 2025

But the [terminal cancer patients] who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable #AtulGawande — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 9, 2025

On these algorithm-pumped absurdities, the fate of the whole country turned. When Bolsonaro unexpectedly won the presidency, his supporters chanted Facebook! Facebook! Facebook! They knew what the algorithms had done for them. #JohannHari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 9, 2025

[Self-deception theory, Robert Trivers] the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people. #StevenPinker — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 9, 2025

The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them. #JeanJacquesRousseau — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 9, 2025

Now they can acquire the egg from one source (including, in many cases, the intended mother) and the womb from another. This unbundling of the supply chain, Spar explains, has prompted growth in the surrogacy market. #MichaelSandel — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 8, 2025

The most important thing [kids] can do with that time is to play, especially in free play, outdoors, with other kids. #JonathanHaidt — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 8, 2025

When God is dead, human beings--much to their detriment--are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth... #AlaindeBotton — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 8, 2025

...maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others. #AntonioGramsci — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 8, 2025

...the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial. #CWrightMills — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 8, 2025

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society, he pointed to the Sears catalogue. #AlaindeBotton — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 8, 2025

Homogeneity is a death sentence. To rid a species of its mutants and outliers is to make that species dangerously vulnerable to the elements #LuluMiller — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 7, 2025

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. #GloriaSteinem — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 7, 2025

If you look to your children to provide meaning for your life, your life will be meaningless. If you need them to be successful to feel successful [...], you will always fail. Your children were not born to complete your life. They were born to complete their own. #WilliamMartin — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 7, 2025

Vanier walked out of a society that celebrates the successful and the strong to devote his life purely to those who are weak. He did it because he understands his own weakness. #DavidBrooks — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 7, 2025

For managers, important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture. #JulieZhuo — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 7, 2025

When Epicurus defined happiness as the supreme good, he warned his disciples that it is hard work to be happy. Material achievements alone will not satisfy us for long. #YuvalNoahHarari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 6, 2025

Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self. #EricHoffer — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 6, 2025

If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature... #GeoffreyWest — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 6, 2025

We each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right--or rather the most horribly wrong--conditions. #AlaindeBotton — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 6, 2025

Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart. #PauloCoelho — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 6, 2025

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. #ThomasJefferson — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 6, 2025

A regular period of quiet solitude helps create a bedrock of self-sufficiency that accompanies us into the social hours ahead. #DerrenBrown — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 5, 2025

My theory is that we get depressed because we're not getting what we want, and we're not getting what we want because we have never been taught to get what we want. #MarshallRosenberg — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 5, 2025

One fundamental difference between American and Oriental culture is the individual's position in society. In American culture an individual's interest is primary. This makes American society more aggressively competitive, with a sharper edge and higher performance. #LeeKuanYew — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 5, 2025

When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart. #StevenPinker — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 5, 2025

People's buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event. When someone gets married, for example, they're more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. #CharlesDuhigg — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 5, 2025

...discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. #GeorgeOrwell — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 4, 2025

Character: love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you #DavidBrooks — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 4, 2025

Highly prestigious individuals have many claims on their time and attention, many would-be friends lining up at their door. Less prestigious individuals, meanwhile, have fewer claims on their time and attention, and must therefore offer their friendship at a discount. #KevinSim… — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 4, 2025

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone... #SteveWozniak — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 4, 2025

The fundamental bargain of sustained coupledom: either individual's autonomy or freedom of movement is of secondary importance compared to the other person's security and peace of mind. #LauraKipnis — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 4, 2025

A loving household isn't one where there is uncomplicated happiness; it is one where, through parental guidance... members have learnt to show one another a high degree of forbearance for the profoundly grating behaviours of which they know they are all guilty. #TheSchoolOfLife — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 3, 2025

In this tradition and in modern ecology, there is potential to realize that work is not only industry, the productive action that transforms the world, but also reproduction, the work of remaking life with each year and generation. #JedediahPurdy — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 3, 2025

In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be different. #YuvalNoahHarari — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 3, 2025

When did we decide that a drug company executive at Moderna can collect a golden parachute valued at [USD] 926 million for not working, while EMT workers who work around the clock to save lives make as little as 40,000 a year? #BernieSanders — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 3, 2025

Parents of the Tao refuse to level blame. They watch the evening news without complaining. They observe the failures of others and never gloat. When their children let them down they remain serene. The fulfill their own duties and never worry about others. #WilliamMartin — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 3, 2025

The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. #AntonioGramsci — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 3, 2025

I expect leaders to buffer their people from all the political and bureaucratic insanity, not throw them into it. #GeneKim — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 2, 2025

...few of us had decent role models in terms of our fathers or mothers, how inadequately we were prepared or educated for love as adults [...] miracle is that some people through their own independence, or their own perseverance, or their own creativity, make it #NathanielBranden — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 2, 2025

A person who tries to treat life as if it were an extension of school often becomes what the Danish novelist Matias Dalsgaard calls an insecure overachiever #DavidBrooks — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 2, 2025

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own. #JonathanHaidt — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 2, 2025

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That's my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. #HarukiMurakami — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 2, 2025

I've argued that practices of close attention can help us see into nuanced ecologies of being and identity... it asks us to loosen our grip on the idea of discrete entities, simple origin stories, and neat A-to-B causalities. It also requires humility and openness... #JennyOdell — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 2, 2025

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul. #Thoreau — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 1, 2025

People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles. #DavidBrooks — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 1, 2025

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,' observed Chamfort #AlaindeBotton — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 1, 2025

[Sensitivity involves an encounter] between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous--and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time... the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit different than they went in. #JennyOdell — English Quotes (@english_quotes) Mar 1, 2025