Bakunin

“It is the first fashionable party I ever attended." "Well," said Dick, "I haven't attended many. When I was a boot-black I found it interfered with my business, and so I always declined all the fashionable invitations I got.”
― Horatio Alger Jr., Ragged Dick : Complete Series (10 books) - Ragged Dick, Fame and Fortune, Mark the Match Boy, Rough and Ready and many more

“Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems. A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation. PRINCIPLE 4-Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. ��”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie: Building Lasting Relationships and Achieving Success

“The goddess Fortune is mad, blind, and stupid, some philosophers maintain. They declare that she stands upon a revolving globe of stone; whither Chance impels this stone, thither, they say, does Fortune fall. She is blind, they repeat, for that she fails wholly to perceive whereto she attaches herself. Moreover they declare that she is mad because she is cruel, uncertain, and inconstant; stupid because she knows not how to tell worthy from unworthy.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium

“when you know that your practices are actually changing your brain, you’re more likely to keep doing them.”
― Rick Hanson, Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness