Pradnya > Pradnya's Quotes

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“You are energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy just changes form. And that means You! The true essence of You, the pure energy of You, has always been and always will be. You can never not be.”
― Rhonda Byrne, The Secret

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“He who advances without seeking fame,
Who retreats without escaping blame,
He whose one aim is to protect his people and serve his lord,
The man is a jewel of the Realm”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“If you tell somebody something, you've forever robbed them of the opportunity to discover it for themselves.”
― Curt Gabrielson, Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff

“All of this is good but great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way. Students learn best by personally experiencing learning that is physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. John Dewey had it right in 1935 when he espoused his theories on experiential learning. Today we call this constructivism.”
― Anonymous

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Don't be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“Live the Life of Your Dreams: Be brave enough to live the life of your dreams according to your vision and purpose instead of the expectations and opinions of others.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“Don’t waste your time in anger, regrets, worries, and grudges. Life is too short to be unhappy.”
― Roy T. Bennett

“Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”
― Mario Andretti

“The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

“Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

“William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists.
It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

“The pursuit of excellence with unrestrained passion can lead to the accomplishment of wonders with unsurpassed joy.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously.”
― Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

“My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”
― William Butler Yeats

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“When the wind of change blows, some people build walls, others build windmills.”
― Chinese Proverb

“A busy mind is full of thoughts, a blissful mind is full of ideas.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Nobody ever made a mark by being like everyone else.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Telephone did not come into existence from the persistent improvement of the postcard.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Constraint inspires creativity”
― Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind