β
No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Hereβs a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages
1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didnβt stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5.
3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on βBright Eyes.β
4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank.
5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13.
6) Nadia ComΔneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14.
7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15.
8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil.
9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19.
10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961.
11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936.
12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23
13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24
14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record
15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity
16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France
17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures βDavidβ and βPietaβ by age 28
18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world
19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter
20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean
21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind
22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest
23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech βI Have a Dream."
24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics
25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight
26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions.
27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon.
28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas
30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driverβs order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger
31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States
32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out.
33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games"
34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out.
35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa.
36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president.
37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels.
38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat".
40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived
41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise
42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out
43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US
44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats
45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President
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Pablo
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Politeness is the first thing people lose once they get the power.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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All worries are less with wine.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The job of feets is walking, but their hobby is dancing.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Great losses are great lessons.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Take care of your costume and your confidence will take care of itself.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Suicide is a form of murderβ premeditated murder. It isnβt something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
Itβs important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If thereβs a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If thereβs a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If thereβs a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remarkβwhy not kill myself? Missed the busβbetter put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movieβmaybe I shouldnβt kill myself.
In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
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Susanna Kaysen
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Anger gets you into trouble, ego keeps you in trouble.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Seeing the mud around a lotus is pessimism, seeing a lotus in the mud is optimism.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Be a worthy worker and work will come.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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If you want the motivation back, you must feed it Feed it everything. Books, television, movies, paintings, stage plays, real-life experience. Sometimes feeding simply means working, working through nonmotivation, working even when you hate it.
We create art for many reasons - wealth, fame, love, admiration - but I find the one thing that produces the best results is desire. When you want the thing you're creating, the beauty of it will shine through, even if the details aren't all in order. Desire is the fuel of creators, and when we have that, motivation will come in its wake.
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Francesca Zappia (Eliza and Her Monsters)
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Father has a strengthening character like the sun and mother has a soothing temper like the moon.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Hunger gives flavour to the food.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Music shouldn't be just a tune, it should be a touch.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Respect cannot be inherited, respect is the result of right actions.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The decision is your own voice, an opinion is the echo of someone else's voice.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?
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John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse)
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Networking isn't how many people you know, it's how many people know you.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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During your struggle society is not a bunch of flowers, it is a bunch of cactus.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Health is hearty, health is harmony, health is happiness.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides, it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Your good friends can write a book on you; but Your best friends can create an embarrassing full fledged 3 hours movie on you, with silliest jingles and animation made ever.
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Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
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A slip of the foot may injure your body, but a slip of the tongue will injure your bond.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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For a long while I have believed β this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Camaβs belief in a fourth function of outsideness β that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as βnaturalβ a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity.
And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongersβ seal of approval.
But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
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Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)
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Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Music is the fastest motivator in the world.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Travelling shouldn't be just a tour, it should be a tale.
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Amit Kalantri
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With right fashion, every female would be a flame.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Travelling the road will tell you more about the road than the google will tell you about the road.
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Amit Kalantri
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Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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If she says goodbye, someone else will say hi.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie.
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Amit Kalantri
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Fashion doesn't make you perfect, but it makes you pretty.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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It's time to shop high heels if your fiance kisses you on the forehead.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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During a conversation, listening is as powerful as loving.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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If thinking should precede acting, then acting must succeed thinking.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Audience can live without a movie but a movie cannot live without an audience.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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You teach the reader that heβs way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that youβre dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and youβre the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we needβ¦ is seriously engaged art that can teach again that weβre smart. And thatβs the stuff that TV and movies β although theyβre great at certain things β cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of artβ¦ Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you donβt want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.
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David Foster Wallace
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Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether weβre actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.
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John Green
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The smell of the sweat is not sweet, but the fruit of the sweat is very sweet.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Time spent for temporary happiness like movie or outing or weekend on a beach is all synthetic; with shelf life of a day or two. Work for your bigger dreams that should last for whole life. Then movie and beach would seem more interesting, realising that you have done something.
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Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
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Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Faster is fatal, slower is safe.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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He who sacrifices his respect for love basically burns his body to obtain the light.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Good becomes better by playing against better, but better doesn't become the best by playing against good.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The mistakes of the world are warning message for you.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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In the business people with expertise, experience and evidence will make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition and imagination.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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My instinct was always have your gun in your hand. Especially when you are telling somebody to do something.
But, in fact, the police academy discourages this. They feel your gun should rarely, if ever, be brought out of its holster. Most certainly not when children are involved, which is exactly when I saw myself using my gun most often. A truant teenager loitering outside a movie theater is going to be far more motivated to return to school when he has the barrel of a .45 pressed against his cheek.
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Augusten Burroughs (Possible Side Effects)
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Be a true traveller, don't be a temporary tourist.
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Amit Kalantri
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If the farmer is rich, then so is the nation.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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You can not control the thought, but you can control the tongue.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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You cannot intimidate people with real bullets, but you can intimidate them with fake gun.
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Amit Kalantri
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In general, poor is polite and rich is rude.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Any girl with a grin never looks grim.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know weβre rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks weβre so ready for our rebellious phase we canβt help but feel itβs safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it.
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Daniel Handler (The Basic Eight)
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Gillette--The best a man can get."
I stared at the screen. What happened to me? I was meant to be one of those guys, vigorous and athletic and successful and, most of all, American. I was going to walk on the moon, be a movie star or a rock got or a comedian. I was going to have an amazing life and kids with Helen and die like Chaplin a thousand years from now in my Beverly Hills mansion surrounded by my adoring family, with the grieving world media standing by. Instead, I was just another show-business mediocrity. A drunk who shat his pants and ran for help.
My life had been careless and selfish. Pleasure in the moment was my only thought, my solitary motivation. I had disappointed whoever had been foolish enough to love me, and left them scarred.
I was a very long way from being the best a man can get.
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Craig Ferguson (American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot)
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Just keep Swimming!
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Ellen DeGeneres
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My spouse is my shield, my spouse is my strength.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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What luck has gave you will probably leave you.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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A professional who doesn't deliver as committed is not just lazy, he is a liar.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Power does not pardon, power punishes.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Texting is not talking and a phone is not a friend.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Passion makes you good, but pride stops you to get better.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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In a democracy, there will be more complaints but less crisis, in a dictatorship more silence but much more suffering.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Travel teaches as much as a teacher.
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Amit Kalantri
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Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Dresses don't look beautiful on hangers.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The wrong man is not always wrong because of his wrong actions, often he is wrong because of no actions.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Sacrifice of the self is sheer stupidity if sacrifice is not for the self.
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Amit Kalantri
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Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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You cannot choose your face but you can choose your dress.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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A true professional not only follows but loves the processes, policies and principles set by his profession.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Iβve asked myself that a thousand times over and Iβm no closer to an answer now than I was when it began. I think thatβs why I always loved movies so much. In a movie, everything has to make sense. The characters always have to have motivation. Good, solid motivation for everything they do. They canβt be a dickhead without reason. If someone turns on a character, they have to have a hardcore, believable reason for it. Unfortunately, in real life you donβt. People turn on each other for anything from catching a constipated look on your face when you had gas and thinking it was directed at them, to not liking the brand of shoes youβre wearing. People are sick. (Aiden)
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Upon the Midnight Clear (Dark-Hunter, #12; Dream-Hunter, #2))
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...for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celbrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
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Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)
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It is always healthy to be honest.
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Amit Kalantri
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With discipline, you can lose weight, you can excel in work, you can win the war.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.
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β
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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A good swordsman is more important than a good sword.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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You say you've a life, but i see it as movie being directed by someone else, being edited often here and there.
life is when you've the remote control of it, and its been controled by the person you love.
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Yaqub khan
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because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywoodβs Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined βsettling down,β not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldnβt imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.
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Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station)
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The conference is geared to people who enjoy meaningful discussions and sometimes "move a conversation to a deeper level, only to find out we are the only ones there." . . . When it's my turn, I talk about how I've never been in a group environment in which I didn't feel obliged to present an unnaturally rah-rah version of myself. . . .
Scientists can easily report on the behavior of extroverts, who can often be found laughing, talking, or gesticulating. But "if a person is standing in the corner of a room, you can attribute about fifteen motivations to that person. But you don't really know what's going on inside." . . .
So what is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren't very pleased about it? . . .
The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive . . . . They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions--sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear.
Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments--both physical and emotional--unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss--another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly. . . .
[Inside fMRI machines], the sensitive people were processing the photos at a more elaborate level than their peers . . . . It may also help explain why they're so bored by small talk. "If you're thinking in more complicated ways," she told me, "then talking about the weather or where you went for the holidays is not quite as interesting as talking about values or morality."
The other thing Aron found about sensitive people is that sometimes they're highly empathic. It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. They tend to have unusually strong consciences. They avoid violent movies and TV shows; they're acutely aware of the consequences of a lapse in their own behavior. In social settings they often focus on subjects like personal problems, which others consider "too heavy.
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Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
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...it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theatre so sure, let's get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too.
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Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)
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Letβs say that you have committed to running every day for two weeks, and at the end of those two weeks, you βrewardβ yourself with a massage. I would say, βGood for you!β because we all could benefit from more massages. But I would also say that your massage wasnβt a reward. It was an incentive. The definition of a reward in behavior science is an experience directly tied to a behavior that makes that behavior more likely to happen again. The timing of the reward matters. Scientists learned decades ago that rewards need to happen either during the behavior or milli-seconds afterward. Dopamine is released and processed by the brain very quickly. That means youβve got to cue up those good feelings fast to form a habit. Incentives like a sales bonus or a monthly massage can motivate you, but they donβt rewire your brain. Incentives are way too far in the future to give you that all-important shot of dopamine that encodes the new habit. Doing three squats in the morning and rewarding yourself with a movie that evening wonβt work. The squats and the good feelings you get from the movie are too far apart for dopamine to build a bridge between the two. The neurochemical reaction that you are trying to hack is not only time dependent, itβs also highly individualized. What causes one person to feel good may not work for everyone. Your boss may love the smell of coffee. When she enters a coffee shop and inhales, she feels good. And her immediate feeling builds her habit of visiting the coffee shop. But your coworker might not like the way coffee smells. His brain wonβt react in the same way. A real reward β something that will actually create a habit β is a much narrower target to hit than most people think. I
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B.J. Fogg (Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything)
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Weβre in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--βDonβt ask any questions!β "No discussion!" βGay is exactly equivalent to straight!β And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. Thereβs nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.
So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.
Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! Itβs too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century.
It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So thatβs exactly whatβs happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. Sheβs too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women donβt understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman whoβs passed out at a fraternity house. But itβs necrophilia--this fear and envy of a womanβs power.
And itβs the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--Iβm not trying to blame the mother! What Iβm saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesnβt allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They donβt understand men, and they demonize men.
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Camille Paglia
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I hope you'll make mistakes. If you make mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I could become the writer I wanted to be, seemed stifling. I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it all up as I went along. They just read what I wrote and they paid me for it or they didn't. The nearest thing I had, was a list I made when I was about 15, of everything I wanted to do. I wanted to write an adult novel, a children's book, a comic, a movie, record an audio-book, write an episode of Doctor Who, and so on. I didn't have a career, I just did the next thing on the list. When you start out in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing. This is great. People who know what they're doing, know the rules, and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not, and you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts, were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible, by going beyond them, and you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do, and because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again. That's much harder than it sounds, and sometimes, in the end, so much easier than you might imagine, because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. When you start out, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned. The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I've never regretted the time I spent on any of them. If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that, whether you're a musician or a photographer, a fine artist, or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, singer, a designer, whatever you do, you have one thing that's unique, you have the ability to make art. For me, for so many of the people I've known, that's been a lifesaver the ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times, and it gets you through the other ones. The one thing that you have, that nobody else has, is you! Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw, and build, and play, and dance and live, as only you can. Do what only you can do best, make good art.
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Neil Gaiman