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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b59e123 | I don't want to be defined by this. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| e0e2d57 | Contemplating leaving everything I had ever known of one ill-advised hour of passionate lunacy. | Jane Harvey-Berrick | ||
| be87b13 | The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outwards from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 047cfd5 | Some things you miss because they're so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don't see because they're so huge. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| 194b30c | You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. | Robert M. Pirsig | ||
| b79ee3f | I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind. If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract co.. | awareness consciousness enlightenment high-country introspection meditation montana mountains philosophy reflection thought wild | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 6f3b435 | The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unu.. | buddhism philosophy psychology | Pirsig Robert M. | |
| 21e5652 | Great men can't be ruled... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. | the-fountainhead | Ayn Rand | |
| 08fc1d6 | Once you considered failure you were one step farther away from success. | Nora Roberts | ||
| a6a4bff | They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 6a4aab3 | The trees had protected it from time and weather, and from men who have less pity than time and weather. | Ayn Rand | ||
| d33c6f3 | So I want to say that of all the people I have known, you are the only person I regret leaving behind. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 4fcfe79 | Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 80ec2e8 | All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It's a tough battle. The toughest. It's simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he's there to be fought. But when he isn't. . . | collectives committees incompetency nothingness | Ayn Rand | |
| d623bd7 | They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid. | Ayn Rand | ||
| ec71317 | Dont switch the blame to her, that's the oldest trick of all cowards | Ayn Rand | ||
| 97565e7 | Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth | Ayn Rand | ||
| 8057b71 | Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition. | political psychology reason statism | Ayn Rand | |
| e1dbb96 | The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression - not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained. | Ayn Rand | ||
| b102995 | There's nothing of any importance in life--except how well you do your work. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 6ec5032 | Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 71f8c9c | This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured - the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart - the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but has the excuse of a sister to support - the businessman who hated his business - the worker who hated his work - the intellectual who hated everybody - all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew wel.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 8282dfc | You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line--it's a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 51d17c5 | What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We." -- | Ayn Rand | ||
| 84e205a | Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unconditional, consummate joy. She did not know whether she was singing. Perhaps she was only hearing the music somewhere. But the music had been a promise; a promise at the dawn of her life. That which had been promised then, could not be denied t.. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 49ca790 | It takes two to make every great career: the man who is great, and the man-almost rarer-who is great enough to see greatness and say so. | Ayn Rand | ||
| c86e676 | To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge - Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve - Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, .. | Ayn Rand | ||
| a2b2588 | When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least to say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and his reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced--since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than an idea. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 9c5bfb1 | A man who seeks escape from the responsibility of supporting his life by his own thought and effort, and wishes to survive by conquering, ruling and exploiting others, is NOT an Individualist. | survive | Ayn Rand | |
| 6d7a6c2 | I am a man who does not exist for others. | Ayn Rand | ||
| 72a1a42 | To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem. | sacrifice vices virtue | Ayn Rand | |
| 54faed8 | If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know? | Ayn Rand | ||
| ab46440 | The willingness to experience and accept our feelings carries no implication that emotions are to have the last word on what we do. I may not be in the mood to work today; I can acknowledge my feelings, experience them, accept them--and then go to work. I will work with a clearer mind because I have not begun the day with self-deception. | Nathaniel Branden | ||
| d327380 | You know why I like to talk to you, Delia? You never interrupt with your experiences. Not jiggling your foot till you get a chance to jump in with your life history. | listening relationship | Anne Tyler | |
| 0a40090 | We must always look at things from the point of view of eternity, the college theologians used to insist, from which, I imagine, we would all appear to have speed lines trailing behind us as we rush along the road of the world, as we rush down the long tunnel of time- the biker, of course, drunk on the wind, but also the man reading by a fire... | Billy Collins | ||
| f8ba8db | he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 98583ce | Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides th.. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 9e188bc | The thing about caller ID is," Red said, more or less to himself, "it seems a little like cheating. A person should be willing to take his chances, answering the phone." | Anne Tyler | ||
| 431ac2a | But still, you know how it is when you're missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family's house. "It's him!" you say. "He came! We knew he would; we always ..." But then you .. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 58e620c | I'll just tell you what I've learned that has helped me," he said. "Shall I?" "Yes, tell me," she said, growing still. "I broke my days into separate moments," he said. "See, it's true I didn't have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on T.. | Anne Tyler | ||
| 3971d35 | These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thim.. | Brian Doyle | ||
| ba3a9d4 | The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That's why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to "human error." The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training pr.. | Donald A. Norman | ||
| 5905ca1 | The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can't do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can't, so you don't even try. The result is that you can't, just as you thought. | Donald A. Norman | ||
| aa87063 | It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world. | Robert Harris |