Construction Motivational Quotes

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The road to success is always under construction
Lily Tomlin
You have to lift a person up before you can really put them in their place.
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.
Dalai Lama XIV
The road to success is always under construction.
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
You can choose to use your time constructively or destructively. Whatever you choose to do will directly affect the outcome of your future.
Diamante Lavendar
human anger is designed by God to motivate us to take constructive action in the face of wrongdoing or when facing injustice.
Gary Chapman (Anger: Taming a Powerful Emotion)
4 is the worst time to wake up, as anyone with the normal human sensitivities will tell you. Far too late to make a cup of tea or go back to sleep. Far too early to get up and do something constructive. There's nothing on television but arrogant evangelists and people selling acne solutions and motivational tapes. For me, base 12 philosophy aside, midnight is not the witching hour. 4:00 is.
Toni Jordan (Addition)
What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair -- I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock.
Chuck Klosterman (Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota)
I can’t speak for other writers, but I write to create something that is better than myself, I think that’s the deepest motivation, and it is so because I’m full of self-loathing and shame. Writing doesn’t make me a better person, nor a wiser and happier one, but the writing, the text, the novel, is a creation of something outside of the self, an object, kind of neutralized by the objectivity of literature and form; the temper, the voice, the style; all in it is carefully constructed and controlled. This is writing for me: a cold hand on a warm forehead.
Karl Ove Knausgård
Always choose to be smart There are two types of people in the world, the seekers of riches and the wise thinkers, those who believe that the important thing is money, and those who know that knowledge is the true treasure. I, for my part, choose the second option, Though I could have everything I want I prefer to be an intelligent person, and never live in a game of vain appearances. Knowledge can take you far far beyond what you imagine, It can open doors and opportunities for you. and make you see the world with different eyes. But in this eagerness to be "wise", There is a task that is a great challenge. It is facing the fear of the unknown, and see the horrors around every corner. It's easy to be brave when you're sure, away from dangers and imminent risks, but when death threatens you close, "wisdom" is not enough to protect you. Because, even if you are smart and cunning, death sometimes comes without mercy, lurking in the darkest shadows, and there is no way to escape. That is why the Greek philosophers, They told us about the moment I died, an idea we should still take, to understand that death is a reality. Wealth can't save you of the inevitable arrival of the end, and just as a hoarder loses his treasures, we also lose what we have gained. So, if we have to choose between two things, that is between being cunning or rich, Always choose the second option because while the money disappears, wisdom helps us face dangers. Do not fear death, my friend, but embrace your intelligence, learn all you can in this life, and maybe you can beat time and death for that simple reason always choose to be smart. Maybe death is inevitable But that doesn't mean you should be afraid because intelligence and knowledge They will help you face any situation and know what to do. No matter what fate has in store, wisdom will always be your best ally, to live a life full of satisfaction, and bravely face any situation. So don't settle for what you have and always look for ways to learn more, because in the end, true wealth It is not in material goods, but in knowledge. Always choose to be smart, Well, that will be the best investment. that will lead you on the right path, and it will make you a better version of yourself.
Marcos Orowitz (THE MAELSTROM OF EMOTIONS: A selection of poems and thoughts About us humans and their nature)
Some jump down off the bridges, some sail towards the horizon… Meaning is always under construction.
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life? But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review we ask God’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken. On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives. In thinking about our day we may face indecision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind. Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with God, it is not probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it. We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems. We ask especially for freedom from self-will, and are careful to make no request for ourselves only. We may ask for ourselves, however, if others will be helped. We are careful never to pray for our own selfish ends. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work. You can easily see why.
Bill Wilson
They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment.
Chuck Palahniuk (Damned (Damned, #1))
When a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a program of hate. What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, even kill them? It requires a “hostile imagination,” a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.” That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive, one that loads his rifle with ammunition of hate and fear. The image of a dreaded enemy threatening one’s personal well-being and the society’s national security emboldens mothers and fathers to send sons to war and empowers governments to rearrange priorities to turn plowshares into swords of destruction.
Philip G. Zimbardo (The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil)
It occurred to me. . .that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution's highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us. But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere - and nowhere. We are no more beautiful and essential or magnificent than an earthworm. In fact - and dare we go there, you and I? - you could say the worm is more beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm's heart, and so who are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?
Rick Yancey (The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist, #4))
Employers who understand human nature, get the best there is in men, not by criticism, but by constructive suggestion.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich (Start Motivational Books))
It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.
Italo Calvino (The Uses of Literature)
I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything--every dot, every dash--will live
Katsushika Hokusai
Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible. Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity. Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
Words have the power to destroy and construct a better life
Ashmita Mishra (Understanding heals the wound)
True leaders don't give consoling answers, they take constructive actions.
Amit Kalantri
When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. . . . On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. . . . Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.
Alcoholics Anonymous (Daily Reflections: A Book of Reflections by A.A. Members for A.A. Members)
As parents we carry the blueprints, the dreams of what our family could be. The plans change, the whole thing goes way over budget, there are unexpected additions, and the work never ends. Still, through the messiness of construction we see each other with such depth and hope. Our five year-old boy is still so clearly the baby he once was and sometimes—can you see it?—the young man he will one day be. We draw energy and inspiration from our dreams; our simple, common motivations. --SIMPLICITY PARENTING
Lisa Ross
Acceptance doesn't mean tolerating unhealthy relationships or problem behaviour. In relationships, acceptance has two key qualities. First, it means being willing to recognize that your partner, right here and right now, is struggling too. It means allowing for the possibility that his motivations might be good and constructive, even if it doesn't feel that way. It means not getting caught up in the belief that he's wrong or doesn't care about you, and instead embracing the possibility that he's doing the best he can. He may even be trying to make you happy--but in a way that only makes sense inside the male mind. Acceptance also means embracing the formidable task of empathizing with your partner's struggle when you least want to do so.
Shawn T. Smith (The Woman's Guide to How Men Think: Love, Commitment, and the Male Mind)
The message is constantly displayed on television commercials, where the motive of keeping up with (rather than cooperating with) the Jonses is treated as an unquestioned value.
Philip Cushman (Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy)
Taking responsibility for your circumstances. Take responsibility. Be strong enough to admit your wrongs, ask for forgiveness, and think of constructive solutions to solve your problems.
Kevin J. Donaldson (10 Secrets of the New Rich: Your Ultimate Motivational Guide to Achieving Personal Transformation, Mastering Entrepreneurship, and Joining the World's New Breed of Millionaires)
With each drop of tear that we shed in our times of excruciating pain, our brain constructs majestic new cellular connections to aid in the pursuit of our passion - in the pursuit of truth.
Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
The over-whelming preponderance of people have not freely decided what to believe, but, rather, have been socially conditioned (indoctrinated) into their beliefs. They are unreflective thinkers. Their minds are products of social and personal forces they neither understand, control, nor concern themselves with. Their personal beliefs are often based in prejudices. Their thinking is largely comprised of stereotypes, caricatures, oversimplifications, sweeping generalizations, illusions, delusions, rationalizations, false dilemmas, and begged questions. Their motivations are often traceable to irrational fears and attachments, personal vanity and envy, intellectual arrogance and simple-mindedness. These constructs have become a part of their identity.
Richard Paul (The Thinker's Guide to Fallacies: The Art of Mental Trickery and Manipulation)
This world is no paradise; People try to disguise; People care about lies And love is dying This world wasn’t meant to unite; It’s all a construction For every kingdom’s strategy; There is no place for love
Jazalyn (vViIrRuUsS: I Never Forget)
It’s more about developing a sense of how he looks at the world. Motivation is highly individualistic. But what we all have in common is that we construct our own identities based on what we’ve learned of the world.
Val McDermid (Killing The Shadows)
Napoleon, as the perfect and elaborate type of one passion, belongs to antique humanity: whose characteristics — the simple construction and ingenious formation and fiction of one motive or a few motives — may be easily recognised.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,” he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.” The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
...magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of America. They mean just about that when they preach evolution, progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the idea confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature with contraption. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever actuated any moral code, or ever will. The desire fir the biggest, the fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the "peerless," is in essence and possibility a noble passion.
Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)
11am I plan to sort out my books and record collection, which I've been trying to do since about 1959 and, of course, I never really do because then the newspapers arrive and my determination to do something constructive is wiped out by the fact it takes so long to read them. ['My Saturday', Sunday Telegraph, December 2023]
Tim Rice
Like a fighter pilot that goes full throttle, Like a bullet train that wants to lead, Like an inspiring game of spin the bottle, I desired creativity and its unique speed. Like a lady who walks with dignity and pride, Like a gentleman who stands by justice and truth, Like a loose cannon with a constructive attitude, I treasured the power of gratitude.
Aida Mandic (On The Edge of Town)
Albert Einstein wrote, “One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
Leonard Mlodinow (The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos)
When righteous desires back up your motivation, you'll find that your inner gas tank will always have fuel to spare. Brick walls cannot stand in your way, detours cannot get you off track, and road construction will not make you turn around and head back. Your strength will surprise you, and whatever it is that your heart desires will eventually be accomplished.
Lindsey Rietzsch (Successful Failures: Recognizing the Divine Role That Opposition Plays in Life's Quest for Success)
Achievement and competence. People fall prey to addiction more readily when they lack positive motivation to achieve or work. Children need to learn that accomplishment is important and within their reach, not solely for material rewards, but because people should make positive contributions to the world and other people and because it is satisfying to make such contributions and to mobilize one’s skills effectively. Participating with children in constructive activity, like reading, building, or gardening—and encouraging independent activity whenever feasible—are strong precursors to achievement and competence. Consciousness and self-awareness. Addiction is the result of accumulated self-destructive behavior that people ignore, just as unconscious acceptance of any negative syndrome ingrains that habit in people’s lives.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged." I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
The FMSF achieved prominence partly as a response to increased possibilities for women to institute criminal or civil proceedings that relate to historical abuse, and women do not often take their abusers to court. The foundation's framing of abuse serves an ulterior strategic purpose of constructing a narrative position that isolates the incest survivor in an adversarial setting of interpreter distrust and challenged.
Sue Campbell (Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Feminist Constructions))
Throughout our lives we are confronted with what seems like a never-ending task: trying to grasp the full scope of reality. As children, we adapt to circumstances by using the psychological defenses available to us. As we mature, we have to confront the defensive illusions we have constructed. If our psyches can tolerate the loss, we continue to let in more and more of human nature's reality: its dark and shadowy aspects, its limitations, and finally, recognition of the fragility of our brief sojourn on this planet. Psychological maturity involves the ongoing process of integrating into our conscious, everyday selves the full range of elements that make up the psyche inside us as well as those elements that make up the world that surrounds us. Inevitably what we must face is a mixture of our motives and deeds, and the similar paradox in others.
Betty De Shong Meador (Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna)
But in this latter event the cause probably lies in a lack of self-confidence due to early misfortune. The man who feels himself unloved may take various attitudes as a result. He may make desperate efforts to win affection, probably by means of exceptional acts of kindness. In this, however, he is very likely to be unsuccessful, since the motive of the kindnesses is easily perceived by their beneficiaries, and human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it. The man, therefore, who endeavors to purchase affection by benevolent actions becomes disillusioned by experience of human ingratitude. It never occurs to him that the affection which he is trying to buy is of far more value than the material benefits which he offers as its price, and yet the feeling that this is so is at the basis of his actions.
Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness)
Motivation, inspiration were not the problem; on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it. The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.
Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)
The uncontrolled, ungoverned use of thought and feeling has brought about all kinds of discord, sickness and distress. Few, however, believe this, and keep going on and on continually creating by their ungoverned thought and desire, chaos in their worlds; when they could as easily as a breath face about, using their thought constructively with the motive power of Divine Love, and build for themselves a Perfect Paradise within the period of two years.
Comte de Saint-Germain (The "I am" discourses)
Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation. And in the pursuit of breaking free from all the shackles of such man-made bondages, science is the most effective tool we have till this date. But in order to bring out all its effectiveness into the human society, it must be sweetened first with the touch of philosophy. Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world.
Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
AI makers tend to believe intelligent systems will only do what they’re programmed to do. But Omohundro says they’ll do that, but lots more, too, and we can know with some precision how advanced AI systems will behave. Some of that behavior is unexpected and creative. It’s embedded in a concept that’s so alarmingly simple that it took insight like Omohundro’s to spot it: for a sufficiently intelligent system, avoiding vulnerabilities is as powerful a motivator as explicitly constructed goals and subgoals.
James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era)
Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.
Graham Moore (The Last Days of Night)
Motive,” the construct said. “Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?” “Well, yeah, obviously.” “Nope. I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me, I’m not human either, but I respond like one. See?” “Wait a sec.” Case said. “Are you sentient, or not?” “Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess. . . .” The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case’s spine. “But I ain’t likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human.
William Gibson (Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1))
collective violence is almost always motivated by the perpetrators and their base of supporters responding to what they see as injustice, and pursuing a form of justice for themselves. It is perpetuated, in much the same way, by the perception that what they are doing, while it might otherwise have been immoral, is justified. Such violence is not typically caused by an absence of, or lack of attention to, justice and morality. It is, instead, caused by the direct and overriding pursuit of a misdirected view of morality and justice, constructed as justification in the minds of the perpetrators.
Eliott Behar (Tell It to the World: International Justice and the Secret Campaign to Hide Mass Murder in Kosovo)
Becoming accomplished at what you do is no easy task, nor is the goal reached in a day. The process is time consuming, requires dedication, innovative ideas, meticulous strategizing and can be quite tedious at times. For many, the ultimate objective is to challenge the status quo, change the game, chart unexplored territory, and set a new standard of excellence. Sometimes hitting those marks is its own reward. Seeing others apply your blueprint to construct their own path to success is even more fulfilling. Leaders are motivated by believers! Bask in the imitation of others. After all, it is the highest form of flattery!
Carlos Wallace
What emerges here is that the rabbis, in dwelling as much as they did on the concerns of this world, were motivated by a vision that they constructed quite deliberately. They believed that the best hope for the Jewish people to overcome their dire circumstances was to engage in the world as it was, not to retreat from it. As we will see in the next chapter, that vision helped Jews survive not just up to the year 1000 but in the late medieval and early modern periods as well, and once the modern period arrived, the same vision prepared them to achieve immense success when they were invited to become part of Western society.
Robert Eisen (Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement)
Guilt plays a pro-social function in strengthening relationships; it encourages taking responsibility, motivates amendatory behaviors such as apology or confession, leads to higher quality solutions to crises and is associated with more constructive anger management … Guilt is also associated with positive empathy and the ability to acknowledge and understand others’ points of view. In contrast shame is associated with responses that are injurious to social relationships… Shame, too, seems to be a driving force in traumatized behavior. Negotiation feels like a defeat, a reminder of the earlier violation. Giving in, adjusting, and changing feel life-threatening. Difference, as to the Supremacist, becomes a threat.
Sarah Schulman (Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair)
Following nature means following the facts. It means getting the facts about the physical and social world we inhabit, and the facts about our situation in it—our own powers, relationships, limitations, possibilities, motives, intentions, and endeavors—before we deliberate about normative matters. It means facing those facts—accepting them for exactly what they are, no more and no less—before we draw normative conclusions from them. It means doing ethics from the facts—constructing normative propositions a posteriori. It means adjusting those normative propositions to fit changes in the facts, and accepting those adjustments for exactly what they are, no more and no less. And it means living within the facts—within the realm of actual rather than hypothetical norms.
Lawrence C. Becker (A New Stoicism)
If we ourselves are clear as to exactly what is meant by taking responsibility for oneself, we will understand that it is hard, if not impossible, for any neurotic to assume it. It means in the first place to acknowledge in a matter-of-fact way—to oneself and others—that such-and-such were one's intentions, one's words or one's actions, and to be willing to take the consequences. This would be the opposite of lying or of putting the blame on others. To take responsibility for himself in this sense would be hard for the neurotic because as a rule he does not know what he is doing or why he is doing it and has a keen subjective interest in not knowing. That is why he often tries to wriggle out by denying, forgetting, belittling, inadvertently supplying other motivations, feeling misunderstood, or getting confused.
Karen Horney (Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis)
14 Ways to Become an Incredible Listener 1. Be present and provide your undivided attention. 2. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. 3. Listen attentively and respond appropriately. 4. Minimize or eliminate distractions. 5. Focus your attention and energy with singleness of purpose on what the other person is saying. 6. Quiet your mind and suspend your thoughts to make room in your head to hear what is said—in the moment! 7. Ask questions and demonstrate empathy. 8. Use your body language and nonverbal cues constructively and pay attention to theirs. 9. Follow the rhythm of their speech; hear their tone. 10. Repeat and summarize what you have heard them say to confirm understanding. 11. Be open-minded and non-defensive. 12. Respond rather than react. 13. Be respectful, calm, and positive. 14. Try to resolve conflicts, not win them.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Communication: 8 Ways to Confirm Clarity & Understanding for Positive Impact(The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #5))
The American novel claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and recapitulate the behavior of a character. This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions, and finally by acting as if men were entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension. In addition to the fact that realism in art is, as we shall see, an incomprehensible idea, it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization. It is born of a mutilation, and of a voluntary mutilation, performed on reality. The unity thus obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling off of human beings and of the world. It would seem that for these writers it is the inner life that deprives human actions of unity and that tears people away from one another. This is a partially legitimate suspicion. But rebellion, which is one of the sources of the art of fiction, can find satisfaction only in constructing unity on the basis of affirming this interior reality and not of denying it. To deny it totally is to refer oneself to an imaginary man.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
But unlike naïve Marxians, we do not believe that economic interests alone drive change. Change is often affected by the evolution of ideas, and particularly of overarching beliefs.54 Once the Enlightenment notion that “all men are created equal” was accepted (however that idea came to be accepted, whatever the drivers), it was no surprise that it evolved in directions that brought within its ambit women and slaves. Given these beliefs, it would be hard to preserve the slavery system, in spite of the economic interests in preserving slavery—and even though motivated interests may have played a role in the creation and spread of the racial “construct” in the first place.55 The uber-ideology of the Enlightenment—the questioning of authority and the belief in meritocracy, the notion that change is possible and desirable, the respect extended to science and technology—have created preconditions that are favorable to the creation of a learning society and to learning institutions (firms)
Joseph E. Stiglitz (Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress)
A house can have integrity, just like a person," said Roark, "and just as seldom." "In what way?" "Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it - and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis on the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a facade cut up into floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience." "Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house." "I intended that," said Roark. "And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but you've planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I'll need most and you've given it the dominant spot - and, incidentally, I see where you've made it the dominant mass from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won't hear too much of them - and all that. You were very considerate of me." "You know," said Roark, "I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house." He added: "Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
This book festival...grew to attract thousands of visitors every year. Now they felt like they needed a new purpose. The festival’s continuing existence felt assured. What was it for? What could it do? How could it make itself count? The festival’s leadership reached out to me for advice on these questions. What kind of purpose could be their next great animating force? Someone had the idea that the festival’s purpose could be about stitching together the community. Books were, of course, the medium. But couldn’t an ambitious festival set itself the challenge of making the city more connected? Couldn’t it help turn strong readers into good citizens? That seemed to me a promising direction—a specific, unique, disputable lodestar for a book festival that could guide its construction...We began to brainstorm. I proposed an idea: Instead of starting each session with the books and authors themselves, why not kick things off with a two-minute exercise in which audience members can meaningfully, if briefly, connect with one another? The host could ask three city- or book-related questions, and then ask each member of the audience to turn to a stranger to discuss one of them. What brought you to this city—whether birth or circumstance? What is a book that really affected you as a child? What do you think would make us a better city? Starting a session with these questions would help the audience become aware of one another. It would also break the norm of not speaking to a stranger, and perhaps encourage this kind of behavior to continue as people left the session. And it would activate a group identity—the city’s book lovers—that, in the absence of such questions, tends to stay dormant. As soon as this idea was mentioned, someone in the group sounded a worry. “But I wouldn’t want to take away time from the authors,” the person said. There it was—the real, if unspoken, purpose rousing from its slumber and insisting on its continued primacy. Everyone liked the idea of “book festival as community glue” in theory. But at the first sign of needing to compromise on another thing in order to honor this new something, alarm bells rang. The group wasn’t ready to make the purpose of the book festival the stitching of community if it meant changing the structure of the sessions, or taking time away from something else. Their purpose, whether or not they admitted it, was the promotion of books and reading and the honoring of authors. It bothered them to make an author wait two minutes for citizens to bond. The book festival was doing what many of us do: shaping a gathering according to various unstated motivations, and making half-hearted gestures toward loftier goals.
Priya Parker (The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters)
I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.
George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
THOUGHTS WHICH ARE MIXED WITH ANY OF THE FEELINGS OF EMOTIONS, CONSTITUTE A "MAGNETIC" FORCE WHICH ATTRACTS, FROM THE VIBRATIONS OF THE ETHER, OTHER SIMILAR, OR RELATED THOUGHTS. A thought thus "magnetized" with emotion may be compared to a seed which, when planted in fertile soil, germinates, grows, and multiplies itself over and over again, until that which was originally one small seed, becomes countless millions of seeds of the SAME BRAND! The ether is a great cosmic mass of eternal forces of vibration. It is made up of both destructive vibrations and constructive vibrations. It carries, at all times, vibrations of fear, poverty, disease, failure, misery; and vibrations of prosperity, health, success, and happiness, just as surely as it carries the sound of hundreds of orchestrations of music, and hundreds of human voices, all of which maintain their own individuality, and means of identification, through the medium of radio. From the great storehouse of the ether, the human mind is constantly attracting vibrations which harmonize with that which DOMINATES the human mind. Any thought, idea, plan, or purpose which one holds in one's mind attracts, from the vibrations of the ether, a host of its relatives, adds these "relatives" to its own force, and grows until it becomes the dominating, MOTIVATING MASTER of the individual in whose mind it has been housed.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however – myth, literature, and drama – portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the 'objective world' – what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter is 'the world of value' – what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action. The world as forum for action is 'composed,' essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory – the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory – the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory 'Word' and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this 'world of divine characters,' much as the 'objective world.' The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in 'reality' a forum for action, as well as a place of things. Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of 'ritual imitation of the Great Father' – as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. This 'restriction of adaptive capacity' dramatically increases the probability of social aggression and chaos. Rejection of the unknown is tantamount to 'identification with the devil,' the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian pride, which states: all that I know is all that is necessary to know. This pride is totalitarian assumption of omniscience – is adoption of 'God’s place' by 'reason' – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from hell. This hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives life much of its acceptable meaning. 'Identification with the devil' amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its own accord towards pathological stultification. Loyalty to personal interest – subjective meaning – can serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying anomaly. Personal interest – subjective meaning – reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation. Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal hero – the 'savior' – who upholds his association with the creative 'Word' in the face of death, and in spite of group pressure to conform. Identification with the hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.
Jordan B. Peterson (Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief)
We believe that the caregiver’s capacity to observe the moment-to-moment changes in the child’s mental state is critical in the development of mentalizing capacity. The caregiver’s perception of the child as an intentional being lies at the root of sensitive caregiving, which attachment theorists view as the cornerstone of secure attachment (Ainsworth et al. 1978; Bates, Maslin, and Frankel 1985; Belsky and Isabella 1988; Egeland and Farber 1984; Grossmann, Grossmann, Spangler, Suess, and Unzner 1985; Isabella 1993; Isabella and Belsky 1991). Secure attachment, in its turn, provides the psychosocial basis for acquiring an understanding of mind. The secure infant feels safe in making attributions of mental states to account for the behavior of the caregiver. In contrast the avoidant child shuns to some degree the mental state of the other, while the resistant child focuses on its own state of distress, to the exclusion of close intersubjective exchanges. Disorganized infants may represent a special category: hypervigilant of the caregiver’s behavior, they use all cues available for prediction; they may be acutely sensitized to intentional states and thus may be more ready to construct a mentalized account of the caregiver’s behavior. We would argue (see below) that in such children mentalization may be evident, but it does not have the central role in self-organization that characterizes securely attached children. We believe that what is most important for the development of mentalizing self-organization is the exploration of the mental state of the sensitive caregiver, which enables the child to find in the caregiver’s mind (that is, in the hypothetical representation of her mind that he constructs to explain her behavior toward him) an image of himself as motivated by beliefs, feelings, and intentions. In contrast, what the disorganized child is scanning for so intently is not the representation of his own mental states in the mind of the other, but the mental states of that other that threaten to undermine his own self.
Peter Fonagy (Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self [eBook])
Gandhian nonviolence as interpreted in Næss: 1. The character of the means used in a group struggle determines the character of the results. 2. In a group struggle you can keep the goal-directed motivation and the ability to work effectively for the realization of the goal stronger than the destructive, violent tendencies, and the tendencies to passivity, despondency, or destruction, only by making a constructive program part of your campaign and by giving all phases of your struggle, as far as possible a positive character. 3. Short-term violence contradicts long-term universal reduction of violence. 4. You can give a struggle a constructive character only if you conceive of it and carry it out as a struggle in favour of living beings and certain values, thus eventually fighting antagonisms, not antagonists. 5. It increases your understanding of the conflict, of the participants, and of your own motivation, to live together with the participants, especially with those for whom you primarily fight. The most adequate form for living together is that of jointly doing constructive work. 6. If you live together with those for whom you primarily struggle and do constructive work with them, this will create a natural basis for trust and confidence in you. 7. All human (and non-human) beings have long-term interests in common. 8. Cooperation on common goals reduces the chance that the actions and attitudes of the participants in the conflict will become violent. 9. You invite violence from your opponent by humiliating or provoking him. 10. Thorough understanding of the relevant facts and factors increases the chance of a nonviolent realization of the goals of your campaign. 11. Incompleteness and distortion in your description of your case and the plans for your struggle reduce the chance of a nonviolent realization of your goals 12. Secrecy reduce the chance of a nonviolent realization of your goals. 13. You are less likely to take a violent attitude, the better you make clear to yourself the essential points in your cause and your struggle. 14. Your opponent is less likely to use violent means the better he understands your conduct and your case. 15. There is a strong disposition in every opponent such that wholehearted, intelligent, strong, and persistent appeal in favour of a good cause is able ultimately to convince him. 16. Mistrust stems from misjudgement, especially of the disposition of your opponent to answer trust with trust, mistrust with mistrust. 17. The tendency to misjudge and misunderstand your opponent and his case in an unfavourable direction increases his and your tendency to resort to violence. 18. You win conclusively when you turn your opponent into a believer and supporter of your case.
Arne Næss (Ecology, Community and Lifestyle)
You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.
Elmar Hussein
The story of the good apples is surprising in two ways. First, we tend to think group performance depends on measurable abilities like intelligence, skill, and experience, not on a subtle pattern of small behaviors. Yet in this case those small behaviors made all the difference. The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
Daniel Coyle (The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups)
Be on Facebook but constructively look forward to being in the Guinness book.
Amit Abraham
look at your child next time he is watching television and ask yourself what he is doing—or, better yet, what he is not doing. , the child is not: • Scanning • Practicing motor skills, gross or fine • Practicing eye-hand coordination • Using more than two senses • Asking questions • Exploring • Exercising initiative or motivation • Being challenged • Solving problems • Thinking analytically • Exercising imagination • Practicing communication skills • Being either creative or constructive
John Rosemond
In the post-World War II era in the United States the shape of the cultural landscape has configured the self of the middle and upper classes into a particular kind of masterful, bounded self: the empty self. By this I mean a self that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning—a self that experiences these social absences and their consequences “interiorly” as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger. It is this undifferentiated hunger that has provided the motivation for the mindless, wasteful consumerism of the late twentieth century. The post-World War II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost, and unknowingly it fuels the new consumer-orientated economy: the self is empty, and it strives, desperately, to be filled up.
Philip Cushman (Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy)
The modern sitcom, in particular, is almost wholly dependent for laughs and tone on the M*A*S*H0inspired savaging of some buffoonish spokesman for hypocritical, pre-hip values at the hands of bitingly witty insurgents. [. . .] Its promulgation of cynicism about authority works to the general advantage of television on a number of levels. First, to the extent that TV can ridicule old-fashioned conventions right off the map, it can create an authority vacuum. And then guess what fills it. The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view. Second, to the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics' changes that what's on is shallow or crass or bad, since and such judgments appeal to conventional, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, quality. Too, the ironic tone of TV's self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody. As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity, with a motive.' [. . .] If television can invite Joe Briefcase into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe's need to transcend the crowd and his inescapable status as Audience-member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about 'seeing through' the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it's taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. [. . .] Television can reinforce its on queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others' ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability.
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Signed)
Marriages built on greed and materialism, where individuals seek to exploit each other's wealth, are constructed on shifting sands. God witnesses the intentions of the heart and will not perpetuate unions founded on selfishness and exploitation. True love and commitment are the cornerstones of a blessed union, not financial gain. Such marriages may flourish temporarily, but ultimately, they shall wither and perish under the weight of their own moral bankruptcy.
Shaila Touchton
Healthy habits promote a mindset where we are much further inclined to pursue constructive behaviors.
Jay D'Cee
The starting point to constructing your workout program is deciding how often you will exercise. The current general recommendations for physical activity are 150 minutes of aerobic activity week at moderate-intensity exercise. That equates to about half an hour a day, five days a week. That activity should include doing a range of physical activities that incorporate fitness, strength, balance and flexibility. However, such activities as gardening and playing sport should also be included in your total exercise count. Including these types of activities will help to make sure that you are getting the proper balance between exercise and recovery. Alternatively, it is recommended that you do 75 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise on a weekly basis. On top of that, you should do muscle strengthening activity on at least two days per week.
Nick Swettenham (Total Fitness After 40: The 7 Life Changing Foundations You Need for Strength, Health and Motivation in your 40s, 50s, 60s and Beyond)
In a professional software engineering environment, criticism is almost never personal - it’s usually just part of the process of making a better project. The trick is to make sure you (and those around you) understand the difference between a constructive criticism of someone’s creative output and a flat-out assault against someone’s character. The latter is useless - it’s petty and nearly impossible to act on. The former can (and should!) be helpful and give guidance on how to improve. And, most important, it’s imbued with respect: the person giving the constructive criticism genuinely cares about the other person and wants them to improve themselves or their work. Learn to respect your peers and give constructive criticism politely. If you truly respect someone, you’ll be motivated to choose tactful, helpful phrasing—a skill acquired with much practice.
Titus Winters (Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time)
Any attempts to trick ourselves into work with external rewards (like doing something nice after finishing a chapter) are only short-term solutions with no prospect of establishing a positive feedback loop. These are very fragile motivational constructions. Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
Think constructive , think moral cause your thoughts can unleash to action.
Baibhabi Nayak
Here are the great qualities we find in sports education: The student is the main player on the field (not a passive observer). The teacher is the mastermind guiding students from behind the lines. Theory is translated into action; action instantly supports theory (IQ). It is fun (EQ). It is interactive (CQ). It provides knowledge construction (IQ), skills and confidence (EQ). It serves students’ interests (EQ). It is constantly challenging and increases motivation (EQ). It is personal and relates to individual abilities (IQ, EQ). It involves teamwork (CQ) as a crucial, built-in requirement. It generates mind-body interaction, which is vital for effective mind functioning (IQ).
Hezki Arieli (The Future of Education: How to Evolve 'Old Schools' to Exciting & Innovative Learning Hubs)
What to Do Tonight Support autonomy, support autonomy, support autonomy. Explore where your child’s true inner motivation lies. You can do this by asking when in life he or she feels “really happy.” Kids with a healthy self-drive will commonly think of times when they perform well in school or in sports, are engaged in pleasurable pastimes, or do something fun with their friends or family. In contrast, kids who are obsessively motivated or have difficulty sustaining motivation and effort will often say that they feel happiest when they have no responsibilities, when nothing is expected of them, and when they feel no pressure. Make a point of speaking with your kids about what it is they want in life. What do they love to do? What do they feel they’re good at? If there’s a reason they’re here, what might that be? Help your child articulate (and write down) goals. We will explore this in more depth in Chapter Ten. For now, simply the act of voicing where she wants to get is a remarkably constructive step. Encourage flow in any activity by giving your kids the space and time they need to do what they love. Teach and model a love of challenge and persistence in the face of difficulty. Attribute positive motivational qualities to young kids (e.g., “I’ve noticed that you don’t give up on things.”). Teach your kids not to be overly preoccupied with pleasing others. If they’re focused on external feedback, consider occasionally saying something like, “Everybody feels good when they’re successful at things and get positive feedback from other people. It’s completely normal. My experience, though, is that the wisest thing is to evaluate your own performance and to focus on getting better at doing the right thing.” If your child doesn’t seem to have a passion, remember that there are many people and experiences that will positively influence their lives. Seek out mentors or role models in different fields, and expose them to a range of careers and life choices.
William Stixrud (The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives)
People from all cultures believe in “constructive criticism.” Yet what is considered constructive in one culture may be viewed as destructive in another. Getting negative feedback right can motivate your employees and strengthen your reputation as a fair and professional colleague. Getting it wrong can demoralize an entire team and earn you an undeserved reputation as an unfeeling tyrant or a hopelessly incompetent manager.
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
Train your lips to never pronounce words with the potential to inflict pain. In your thoughts, be compassionate. In your speech, be considerate, and in your deeds, be constructive. Steer clear of words that are negative or actions that fuel prejudice.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
Be empowered to lead, enthusiastic to pursue your goals, and encouraged to excel. Have a constructive mindset, and let your passion lead you to a place of greatness.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
In literature analysis, the constructivist approach transforms passive reading into active exploration, where students collaboratively construct meaning, fostering deeper comprehension and personal connection with the text.
Asuni LadyZeal
Through artistic expression, the constructivist theory empowers students to explore creativity freely, encouraging experimentation and self-expression as they construct their unique artistic visions.
Asuni LadyZeal
To (Cicero), pride in a job well done is vastly constructive. For instance, it motivates good conduct in early life because, in remembrance, you can make yourself happier when old. To which, aided by modern knowledge, I would add "and, besides, as you pat yourself on the back for behaving well, you will improve your future conduct.
Charles T. Munger (Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger)
In the realm of business, Timothy Driscoll stands as a professional dedicated to creating enduring impressions. Through his construction project management career, he takes satisfaction in building homes that transform into sanctuaries for families. Off-duty, he indulges in his interests such as scuba diving, fishing, and bodybuilding. Motivated by a deep love for travel and exploration, he aspires to witness more of the world's wonders.
Timothy Driscoll
If we attempt to construct a rational argument for panpsychism from these two fragments, it would go something like this: Material objects—humans, animals, wind, sea, magnets, heavenly bodies—have the power of motion; they move either themselves or surrounding things. The material object we know most intimately—our own body—possesses an energy, called psyche, that accounts for our power. Under the assumption that the world is rational and that humans are not ontologically unique, a reasonable conclusion is that all things with a motive power also possess psyche. And in light of the fact that we live in a connected, unitary cosmos, it is difficult to explain why only certain material objects are ensouled and not others. Therefore, a reasonable conclusion is that all things possess psyche, to a greater or lesser degree. I will call this the Indwelling Powers argument for panpsychism. It is the first of several that we find throughout history.
David Skrbina (Panpsychism in the West)
Our thoughts wield a profound influence over the course of our lives, shaping our perceptions, attitudes, and actions in profound ways. The patterns of our thinking not only dictate how we interpret and respond to the world around us but also play a significant role in determining our emotional well-being and overall quality of life. Positive and constructive thoughts have the power to inspire us, motivate us, and propel us toward our goals, while negative and destructive thoughts can hinder our progress, breed self-doubt, and sabotage our potential for growth. Through mindfulness and self-awareness, we can learn to harness the power of our thoughts, cultivating a mindset that fosters resilience, gratitude, and optimism. In doing so, we empower ourselves to navigate life's challenges with greater clarity, purpose, and inner peace.
Daniela Carlos
A growth mindset offers a constructive approach when individuals find themselves performing below their usual capabilities.
Asuni LadyZeal
Allow your mind to think about things that empower you to construct a better future. Do everything in your power to focus on what is truly important and let go of things that do not matter. Always strive to change your situation for the better.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
Your ultimate objective should be to have a constructive effect on humanity. Observe both your thoughts and actions consciously.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
Passive interest is simply not enough to help us grow. Only in the context of ‘active and constructive’ relationships can we establish real intimacy and a sense of being valued by others. In these relationships, we get to tell our story, and to convey our experience. It is the safe and motivated curiosity of the other person that establishes a rapport of real substance. That sort of relationship is the birth of real love and the death of our loneliness. It is the gestation of a life well lived, and food for our hearts.
Jonathan Andrews (The Reconnected Heart: How relationships can help us heal)
Love is the sweetness of life.” “Pray is gold, whereas love is a diamond.” “Love does not wear hatred and bias.” “Love is a fulfillment of life; without that, life is nothing.” Love cannot appear and become true love without respect, tolerance, empathy, sympathy, care, and sacrifice.” “One can love whoever and whenever one wants; however, expecting similar feelings from that whom one loves is a risk of self-hurting.” “Love speaks in your words, sights with your eyes, grows on your conduct, and finally resides in your heart, becoming your heartbeat.” “When your mind is rich in wisdom, and your heart is sensitive and filled with love, you are a person who can change the world.” “Love does not recognize the terms hide and seek. When it happens, it becomes visible without any fear or hesitation.” “Those who care for self-respect show real and true love, and they do not break the trust and certainty of their beloved. Love cannot stay where there is no self-respect.” “If you love someone, and you are also keeping the options, it is not fair to your lover, not even yourself. You are just an opportunist. True love knows no options.” “Love for humanity is the mother of every love; no other love can prevail over it.” “Etiquette, respect, and love embellish and beautify the character while also helping to reach and qualify for success in life.” “Love with motives does not have success and embraces shame and sorry.” “My religion is love, which I have learned from my religion.” “Beauty hits eyes, and love touches heartbeats.” “The billions of beautiful faces exist in the world, but I fell in love with one face.” “The silent love has more truth than the spoken one.” “Please pray for me. I am going to fall in love.” “I do not search for a true friend and true love. I practice becoming a true friend and giving true love.” “I can never feel again such love which I had felt for the first time in my youth.” “If there is no current, the lamp does not light up; similarly, if there is no passion, love does not become the heartbeat.” “Love with the heart validates purity and truth. Love with the mind may evidence diplomacy and tact.” “Real and pure love exists at the age of nine and ninety years; between that lies a risk. However, an exception may become a wonder.” “Love fragrances, and colors, the breath waves that inspire the heart language.” “Love bears two negative feelings; fear and jealousy, overcoming that beautify life; otherwise, these become self-hurting.” “Love is not just a remedy for sex frustration; it is a solemn life pledge to be together for all seasons and circumstances.” “How simple it is, how deep it is, and how true it is, within the two-L-that you are my Life and Love. Do we honestly make also perfumed that?” “Log in Love; log out Hatred and scan evil threats with the purity of thoughts: Life becomes secure and stays smooth and flowery.” “Anyone who indulges only in self-love remains devoid of true love.” "Your words can be constructive or destructive. Love is a positive energy that grows when it is filled up with sweet words and keeps love fresh and alive. If there are destructive words, love will go dry and finally die. "Love is a context of heartbeats; intimacy is its dictionary; use it carefully and properly; otherwise, typos can cause risks.
Ehsan Sehgal
A crisis which can be distractive, can turn out to be constructive.
Shaneen Clarke (The Lord of the Silence: Experiencing Intimacy With God In This Fast-Paced World)
The prevailing emphasis of the [Biblical] narratives, in any case, does move away from mythology. What is crucial for the literary understanding of the Bible is that this impulse to shape a different kind of narrative in prose had powerfully constructive consequences in the new medium that the ancient Hebrew writers fashioned for their monotheistic purposes. Prose narration, affording writers a remarkable range and flexibility in the means of presentation, could be utilized to liberate fictional personages from the fixed choreography of timeless events and thus could transform storytelling from ritual rehearsal to the delineation of the wayward paths of human freedom, the quirks and contradictions of men and women seen as moral agents and complex centers of motive and feeling….Because it is a literature that breaks away from the old cosmic hierarchies, the Bible switches from a reliance on metaphor … toward the indeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguities of fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history. And for that movement, I would add, the suppleness of prose as a narrative medium was indispensable.
Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative)
We are angry because we would like to change something in the world (or maybe in ourselves), something that seems to be unjust. A feeling of rage doe very little to rectify the perceived injustice. An artist sees the world and notices a difference between how she feels it should be and how it actually is. The work of art she creates is a way of bridging the gap: a physical manifestation of that discrepancy. The emotions she experiences, which might of course, be very pleasant and far from anger, are nonetheless channeled into something constructive, and the observer of the final piece might be challenged to pay attention to the issues in question and align himself with the artist's motivations.
Derren Brown (Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine)
Looking back, I feel that some hidden part of me was acknowledging that something is wrong, dangerously wrong, not just in my religion but in all the interconnected religions of the world. These dreams did not give me a sense of grim pressure or duty but a feeling of purpose, vocation, motivation, and even joy. I awoke with the feeling that people like you and me can play a part in detoxifying and healing our religious traditions, and that doubt can play a surprisingly constructive role.
Brian D. McLaren (Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It)
DisabilityPrideMonth isn't just a celebration; it's a jubilant parade of diversity, resilience, and jaw-dropping achievements from individuals who redefine what's possible every day. It's our time to tip our hats to their strengths, rally for inclusivity, and construct a world where everyone can dazzle. Let's shine a spotlight on their awe-inspiring stories, demolish the barriers holding them back, and sculpt a society where every talent is recognized and celebrated.
Life is Positive
Many people generally think of it as a sincere desire to help the other person to be more realistic, behave in more constructive ways, to help them recognize others as worthwhile, unique individuals, to show that you value the relationship, or to help that person reduce self-destructive behaviors. Our motives are praiseworthy, we are trying to help the other person. Many times what you fail to recognize is that your vision of needed changes rises from your own needs and expectations. Yes, the changes may do all that is needed to make the person more effective and loveable, but the impetus is your need to have him or her be this way—not his or her need. The person did not request or seek your assistance to change, you decided it was necessary and began to work to make him or her accept your vision.
Anonymous
we each construct our own reality by interpreting the external world on the basis of our unique experiences with it and our beliefs about those experiences.
Raymond J. Wlodkowski (Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn: A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults)