George > George's Quotes

“If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.”
― John D. MacDonald

“If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith

“if what i feel were equally distributed to the whole human family there would not be one cheerful face on earth”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Our words allow us to enter each other’s affective niches, even at extremely long distances. You can regulate your friend’s body budget (and he yours) even if you are an ocean apart—by phone or email or even just by thinking about one another.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder

“Even though you try to put people under control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good. That is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
― Lao Tsu, Tao Teh Ching

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“The kind of child our society resembles just now is one whose intelligence far exceeds his maturity. Every teacher and every parent knows what a formula for disaster that can be.”
― Sherwin B. Nuland, The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine

“It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood.”
― Layne Redmond, When The Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm

“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“There’s a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don’t need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.”
― Harriet Lerner

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis