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When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.
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Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
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Confidence is what we get when we take fear, face it and replace it.
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Tim Fargo
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Do the things you like to be happier, stronger & more successful. Only so is hard work replaced by dedication.
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Rossana Condoleo
“
The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to fill the void. In the average person in our culture, who has been only "normally" deprived of touch, anxiety and an insatiable hunger for posessions replace the missing eros. The child lacking a sense of welcome, joyous belonging, gratuitous security, will learn to hoard the limited supply of affection. According to the law of psychic compensation, not being held leads to holding on, grasping, addiction, posessiveness. Gradually, things replace people as a source of pleasure and security. When the gift of belonging with is denied, the child learns that love means belongin to. To the degree we are arrested at this stage of development, the needy child will dominate our motivations. Other people and things (and there is fundamentally no difference) will be seen as existing solely for the purpose of "my" survival and satisfaction. "Mine" will become the most important word.
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Sam Keen (The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving)
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A smile is the best way to get oneself out of a tight spot, even if it is a fake one. Surprisingly enough, everyone takes it at face value. I read that in a book."
"If you keep staring at me, I'll hit you."
"I only became part of your team recently when I replaced Sasuke, so I don't know everything that's going on. I don't really understand people either. But even I can tell that Naruto really loves you. Naruto's been shouldering that promise for a long time...I think he means to shoulder it for the rest of his life. I don't know what you said to him, but it's just like what's been done to me - it feels like a curse. Sasuke causes Naruto pain, but I think you do too."
"Sasuke is only helping spread his darkness across the world. Letting him live will only sow the seeds of another war. He's just another criminal now. Sasuke lost all hope of coming back when his group, Akatsuki, attacked our village. Your fellow Konoha shinobi would never accept him now. Sakura's not stupid, either. She understands the position he's put us all in. That's why she came out here, to tell you herself.
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Masashi Kishimoto
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If you are feeling unhappy in life for any reason and often getting negative results, try this -> start replacing negative thoughts with the positive one, make a plan and act on them. The more positive thoughts you have the more positive and happy your will become and results are bound to be positive sooner or later.-Subodh Gupta author "Stress Management a Holistic approach - 5 steps plan
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Subodh Gupta (Stress Management A Holistic Approach)
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There is genuine Hip Hop; a message that connects, rocks a crowd, and motivates a people and then there is what is left... instead of Hip Hop we have Hip replacement.
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Johnnie Dent Jr.
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To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw. We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem.
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William Glasser
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Replace the word can’t with can. Know that you can, believe that you can, and know will ALL of your heart that you will. You will succeed in spite of any obstacles that may try to hinder you! There’s so much power in having a positive attitude, positive mindset, and positive outlook.
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Stephanie Lahart
“
Love of Truth is one of the strongest motives for replacing what really happens by a streamlined account or, to express it in a less polite manner -- love of truth is one of the strongest motives for deceiving oneself and others.
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Paul Karl Feyerabend (Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being)
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Competence makes the rules,
intelligence follows the rules,
excellence bends the rules,
and brilliance breaks the rules.
Skill follows the rules,
talent replaces the rules,
mastery shatters the rules,
but genius makes its own rules.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
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Statistics show that the nature of English crime is reverting to its oldest habits. In a country where so many desire status and wealth, petty annoyances can spark disproportionately violent behaviour. We become frustrated because we feel powerless, invisible, unheard. We crave celebrity, but that’s not easy to come by, so we settle for notoriety. Envy and bitterness drive a new breed of lawbreakers, replacing the old motives of poverty and the need for escape. But how do you solve crimes which no longer have traditional motives?
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Christopher Fowler (Ten Second Staircase (Bryant & May, #4))
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I profoundly believer, as Grammen's experience over twenty years has shown, that personal gains is not the only possible fuel for free enterprise. Social goals can replace greed as a powerful motivational force. Social-consciousness-driven enterprises can be formidable competitors for the greed-based enterprises. I believe that if we play our cards right, social-consciousness-driven enterprises can do very well in the marketplace.
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Muhammad Yunus (Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty)
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Our schools will not improve if we continue to focus only on reading and mathematics while ignoring the other studies that are essential elements of a good education. Schools that expect nothing more of their students than mastery of basic skills will not produce graduates who are ready for college or the modern workplace.
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Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure. The tests we have now provide useful information about students' progress in reading and mathematics, but they cannot measure what matters most in education....What is tested may ultimately be less important that what is untested...
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Our schools will not improve if we continue to close neighborhood schools in the name of reform. Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bond of community among neighbors.
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Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools.
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Our schools will not improve if we continue to drive away experienced principals and replace them with neophytes who have taken a leadership training course but have little or no experience as teachers.
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Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children's ability to learn. Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care.
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Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education)
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The Transhumanist Party aims to motivate and mobilize both female and male scientists and engineers to take on additional responsibilities as rational politicians. It does not mean replacing democracy with technocracy. It means that our government needs help in making the right policies and investing in science, health, and technology for the improvement of the human condition and the long-term survival of the human race.
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Newton Lee (The Transhumanism Handbook)
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You can replace negative self-talk with optimistic thoughts. It is possible to change a negative perspective on life into a positive life force if you keep a sense of proportion.
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Lynn C. Tolson (Beyond the Tears: A True Survivor's Story)
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When you look up and don’t see the stars, the universe may have cleared the sky for you to replace them.
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Matshona Dhliwayo
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Evidently, then, a not-so-subtle shift had occurred in the original love motive; compassion and solidarity had been replaced by pity and condescension.
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David J. Bosch (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission)
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We Can See The Whole World Around Us Change When We Choose To Replace Fear With Gratitude And Depression With Appreciation”.
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Venugopal Acharya
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One simple change – replacing news and mass media with books – can produce dramatic changes in your life. No matter what your ambition in life is, you can find books that will inspire you to work on your goals.
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Martin Meadows (How to Think Bigger: Aim Higher, Get More Motivated, and Accomplish Big Things)
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The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry.
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Karen Blixen (Out of Africa)
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The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal.
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E. Stanley Jones (The Christ of the Mount: A Living Exposition of Jesus' Words as the Only Practical Way of Life)
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I thank you, Walton," he said, "for your kind intentions towards to miserable a wretch; but when you speak of new ties and fresh affections think you that any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was, or any woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives." -- Victor Frankenstein; Frankenstein
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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If you are capable, but not available, nature will raise a person with lesser ability to replace you soon.
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Israelmore Ayivor (Become a Better You)
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Nothing can replace confidence and single-minded pursuit of purpose.
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Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
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Replace cyber-bullying with cyber-believing.
Let us build eachother up instead of bringing others down. BELIEVE & BUILD
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Janna Cachola
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Replace your ‘I can’t’ with ‘let me try.
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Sarvesh Jain
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Choose to be the beautiful, unique you and not compare yourself with others. Stay in your lane and replace competitive energy with a picture of success for you.
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Jackie Cantoni (ARE YOU READY? A GUIDE TO BE THE BEST VERSION OF YOU: A Self-Help Book for Becoming Your Best Self)
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AI won’t replace designers, but designers who use AI will replace those who don’t.
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Qudama Rafiq
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The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.
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Andrew S. Grove (Only the Paranoid Survive)
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He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6))
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Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories, and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporation and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principal of the separation of powers.
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness.
. . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen.
The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive.
All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.
The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature.
. . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.
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Mary Midgley (Beast and Man)
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No longer will I doubt my abilities… I will give myself a chance. I commit to believing in myself, encouraging myself, and loving myself. I will see the best in myself and NOT be afraid to move forward in my purpose. I will replace the word can’t with can. I won’t be easily influenced, distracted, or discouraged by other people’s opinions. I will NOT give up! I will be brave in my journey, have confidence in who I am, and keep a positive attitude. I am success!
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Stephanie Lahart
“
Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic. Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument, or a position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive.
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Christopher Hitchens (No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton)
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Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia.
And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy.
More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’.
And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you.
‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.
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Peter Pomerantsev (This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality)
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Getting to your full potential is impossible if you carry destructive habits from the past with you. By lighting the torch of redemption, you can make sure your nefarious deeds are put away and replaced with noble deeds that will eventually transform you into a healthier individual.
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D.L. Lewis
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Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies!
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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It is striking that motivation plays virtually no role in Hegel’s theory of action, because Hegel’s theory of action in effect replaces motives with intentions or (internal) reasons. Instead of asking what psychic factors motivated me, Hegel asks for an explanation of my action in terms of the act-descriptions that supply the reasons I had for doing what I did.
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Allen W. Wood (Hegel's Ethical Thought)
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I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.
Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.
Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.
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Ashim Shanker (Sinew of the Social Species)
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So many marriages are filled with resentment, but voluntary acts of service can be the quickest way to replace resentment with love. When we act in service with godly motives, resentment suffocates and dies. It is only when we see that our pride and selfishness are the greatest barriers to our joy (rather than our spouse’s sins or shortcomings) that our marriages will fully express the character of Christ.
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Gary L. Thomas (Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?)
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For Paul, a new creation meant a total renovation of the inner self, a change of mind and heart. It meant far more than the passive union achieved in water baptism. To be “in Christ,” he told the Philippians, means to have in you the mind of Christ Jesus, to think as Christ thought, to have the ideals Christ had, to throb with the desires that filled Christ’s heart, to replace all your natural actions to persons, events and circumstances with the response of Jesus Christ. In a word, a christocentric life means to live in the heart of Jesus, to share His tastes and aversions, to have the same interests, affections and attitudes, to be motivated in everything by His loving compassion. It means making the habitual thought patterns of Jesus Christ so completely your own that truly “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
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Brennan Manning (The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus)
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But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility—their own, that of others—slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.
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Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance)
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Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs.
In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production.
Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal.
Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occupation. They provide employment to many people in their factories, newspapers, insurance firms, and supermarket chains, yet their financial success is an empty happiness because it is not motivated by understanding or compassion. Caught up in their small world of profit and loss, they are unaware of the suffering and poverty in the world. When we are not int ouch with this larger reality, we will lack the compassion we need to nourish and guide us to happiness.
Once you begin to realise your interconnectedness with others, your interbeing, you begin to see how your actions affect you and all other life. You begin to question your way of living, to look with new eyes at the quality of your relationships and the way you work. You begin to see, 'I have to earn a living, yes, but I want to earn a living mindfully. I want to try to select a vocation not harmful to others and to the natural world, one that does not misuse resources.'
Entire companies can also adopt this way of thinking. Companies have the right to pursue economic growth, but not at the expense of other life. They should respect the life and integrity of people, animals, plants and minerals. Do not invest your time or money in companies that deprive others of their lives, that operate in a way that exploits people or animals, and destroys nature.
Businesspeople who visit Plum Village often find that getting in touch with the suffering of others and cultivating understanding brings them happiness. They practise like Anathapindika, a successful businessman who lived at the time of the Buddha, who with the practise of mindfulness throughout his life did everything he could to help the poor and sick people in his homeland.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World)
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Every office worker is just a little puppet, and when the puppet breaks or gets mangled in the machinery gears, well, that’s no problem at all for the office system. The office is really just a machine like me, its staff easily replaceable components. People tend to overestimate their own value and importance, but I understand that this is crucial for the employee’s psychological motivation. Only if they feel this way will they show up for work, day in, day out.
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Fien Veldman (Hard Copy)
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And this is apparently not without merit. Because in our countries for some time now a great hurricane of subversion has arisen, pushed forward by I do not know what vicious demons—and doubtless in accord with the life-style that we have made our own, unfortunately. This hurricane tries to reverse our traditional order of values, to throw out all that we put forward as being unselfish, gracious and open to the world, open to things and to others, all that is active in dilating our minds and our hearts. It wants to replace it by the single, brutal, arithmetic, and inhuman motivation of profit. Henceforth, all that counts, all that is to be considered and preserved, is what brings profit. The truly ideal aspects of knowledge will not be more valuable than those of interest rates and of financial laws. The only sciences that are to be encouraged are those that teach us how to exploit the earth and the people. Besides that, everything is useless.
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Jean Bottéro (Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods)
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It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. He
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed)
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You search for something that can give you solace, that can motivate you to begin your day, that can be a sense of pride in an oftentimes ugly world. But it is not just combat. It is daily life that needs this same sense of structure. Nothing can replace the strength and comfort of one’s faith, but sometimes the simple act of making your bed can give you the lift you need to start your day and provide you the satisfaction to end it right. If you want to change your life and maybe the world—start off by making your bed!
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William H. McRaven (Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World)
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What replaced feelings when there were none to be had? The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought then. She suggested they fill the space something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential snare, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was functional paralysis. To want neither to live nor die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.
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Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
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Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most of us, such confidence does not come easy. It’s understandable. So many people in our lives have preached the need to be realistic or conservative or worse—to not rock the boat. This is an enormous disadvantage when it comes to trying big things. Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible. Our
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage)
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Social psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are intuitively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one’s opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don’t change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don’t immediately capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.
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Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
“
It’s worth stressing that wealth and success are never the top motivators for geniuses. Most geniuses have ended up in poverty, obscurity and failure. Genius has its price and that price is normally the total blank incomprehension, or even active contempt, of the world. A genius is invariably an outsider, rebel and revolutionary. All new ideas threaten the Old Order, and the Old Order is never interested in losing its power and prestige. The currently rich and successful do not want to open the doors to their own replacements. They’re not stupid. Geniuses never get along with the Old Order. After all, geniuses are here precisely to change the Old Ways.
”
”
David Sinclair (Transcendental Magic: The Rise of the New Magicians)
“
As Einstein once said, “One of the strongest motives that lead persons to art or science is a flight from the everyday life. . . . With this negative motive goes a positive one. Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.
”
”
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History)
“
The key trait of a Sperm Pirate is that she is not driven by desperation. Escaping poverty or hardship is not her motive. She usually has a good education and access to the same opportunities as the man she tries to trap. However, she understands that it is more efficient to enjoy a lavish lifestyle through the sweat of another’s labour. But the Sperm Pirate is acutely aware that the infatuation of a hormonal man has a brief shelf life. This poor collateral must be cashed in before it expires. A pregnancy is the best way to convert this volatile resource into a stable asset. Babies are reliable insurance policies. They create legal obligations for financial support, even when the sweet milk of passion turns sour.
”
”
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko (The Hangman's Replacement: Sprout of Disruption)
“
Marx defines the commodity form of circulation (commodity—money —commodity, or C—M—C, for short) as an exchange of use values (the use of shoes against bread, for example) which depends essentially upon the qualities of the goods being exchanged. Money functions here as a convenient intermediary. We now encounter a form of circulation, M—C—M, which begins and ends with exactly the same commodity. The only possible motivation for putting money into circulation on a repeated basis is to obtain more of it at the end than was possessed at the beginning. A quantitative relation replaces the exchange of qualities. Money is thrown into circulation to make more money — a profit. And money that circulates in this way is called capital.
”
”
David Harvey (The Limits to Capital)
“
The loss of political power by what the Census Bureau calls "non-Hispanic Whites" as they dwindle from a majority to a minority is only the most apparent such change, and it is hardly unreasonable to expect that what will follow from the transfer of power will be the outright dispossession and political and legal persecution of the white minority by a non-white and non-Western majority that has little experience of constitutional government, little respect for the rights of minorities and oppositional groups, and little love for whites or the West. Indeed, we already see the beginnings of that dispossession in affirmative action programs, hate crime laws, multiculturalist curricula, calculated insults to and vituperation of whites, and the proliferation of racially motivated atrocities against them.
”
”
Samuel T. Francis (Revolution from the Middle)
“
The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
”
”
Ayn Rand
“
He spent the morning at the beach. He had no idea which one, just some open stretch of coastline reaching out to the sea. An unbroken mantle of soft grey clouds was sitting low over the water. Only on the horizon was there a glimmer of light, a faint blue band of promise. The beach was deserted, not another soul on the vast, wide expanse of sand that stretched out in front of him. Having come from the city, it never ceased to amaze Jejeune that you could be that alone in the world. He walked along the beach, feeling the satisfying softness as the sand gave way beneath his slow deliberate strides. He ventured as close to the tide line as he dared, the white noise of the waves breaking on the shingles. A set of paw prints ran along the sand, with an unbroken line in between. A small dog, dragging a stick in its mouth. Always the detective, even if, these days, he wasn’t a very good one.
Jejeune’s path became blocked by a narrow tidal creek carrying its silty cargo out to the sea. On each side of it were shallow lagoons and rock pools. When the tide washed in they would teem with new life, but at the moment they looked barren and empty. Jejeune looked inland, back to where the dark smudge of Corsican pines marked the edge of the coast road. He traced the creek’s sinuous course back to where it emerged from a tidal salt flat, and watched the water for a long time as it eddied and churned, meeting the incoming tide in an erotic swirl of water, the fresh intermingling with the salty in a turbulent, roiling dance, until it was no longer possible to tell one from the other.
He looked out at the sea, at the motion, the color, the light. A Black-headed Gull swooped in and settled on a piece of driftwood a few feet away. Picture complete, thought Jejeune. For him, a landscape by itself, no matter how beautiful, seemed an empty thing. It needed a flicker of life, a tiny quiver of existence, to validate it, to confirm that other living things found a home here, too.
Side by side, they looked out over the sea, the man and the bird, two beating hearts in this otherwise empty landscape, with no connection beyond their desire to be here, at this time. Was it the birds that attracted him to places like this, he wondered, or the solitude, the absence of demands, of expectations? But if Jejeune was unsure of his own motives, he knew this bird would have a purpose in being here. Nature always had her reasons.
He chanced a sidelong glance at the bird, now settled to his presence. It had already completed its summer molt, crisp clean feathers having replaced the ones abraded by the harsh demands of eking out a living on this wild, windswept coastline. The gull stayed for a long moment, allowing Jejeune to rest his eyes softly, unthreateningly, upon it. And then, as if deciding it had allowed him enough time to appreciate its beauty, the bird spread its wings and effortlessly lifted off, wheeling on the invisible air currents, drifting away over the sea toward the horizon.
p. 282-3
”
”
Steve Burrows (A Siege of Bitterns (Birder Murder Mystery, #1))
“
Westcliff paused at the bedside and glanced at the two women. “This is going to be rather unpleasant,” he said. “Therefore, if anyone has a weak stomach…” His gaze lingered meaningfully on Lillian, who grimaced.
“I do, as you well know,” she admitted. “But I can overcome it if necessary.”
A sudden smile appeared on the earl’s impassive face. “We’ll spare you for now, love. Would you like to go to another room?”
“I’ll sit by the window,” Lillian said, and sped gratefully away from the bed.
Westcliff glanced at Evie, a silent question in his eyes.
“Where shall I stand?” she asked.
“On my left. We’ll need a great many towels and rags, so if you would be willing to replace the soiled ones when necessary—”
“Yes, of course.” She took her place beside him, while Cam stood on his right. As Evie looked up at Westcliff’s bold, purposeful profile, she suddenly found it hard to believe that this powerful man, whom she had always found so intimidating, was willing to go to this extent to help a friend who had betrayed him. A rush of gratitude came over her, and she could not stop herself from tugging lightly at his shirtsleeve. “My lord…before we begin, I must tell you…”
Westcliff inclined his dark head. “Yes?”
Since he wasn’t as tall as Sebastian, it was a relatively easy matter for Evie to stand on her toes and kiss his lean cheek. “Thank you for helping him,” she said, staring into his surprised black eyes. “You’re the most honorable man I’ve ever known.” Her words caused a flush to rise beneath the sun-bronzed tan of his face, and for the first time in their acquaintance the earl seemed at a loss for words.
Lillian smiled as she watched them from across the room. “His motives are not completely heroic,” she said to Evie. “I’m sure he’s relishing the opportunity to literally pour salt on St. Vincent’s wounds.” Despite the facetious remark, Lillian went deadly pale and gripped the chair arms as Westcliff took a thin, gleaming lancet in hand and proceeded to gently open and drain the wound.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3))
“
Great writers and my mom never used food as an object. Instead it was a medium, a catalyst to mend hearts, to break down barriers, to build relationships. Mom's cooking fed body and soul. She used to quip, "If the food is good, there's no need to talk about the weather." That was my mantra for years---food as meal and conversation, a total experience.
I leaned my forehead against the glass and thought again about Emma and the arrowroot. Mom had highlighted it in my sophomore English class. "Jane Fairfax knew it was given with a selfish heart. Emma didn't care about Jane, she just wanted to appear benevolent."
"That girl was stupid. She was poor and should've accepted the gift." The football team had hooted for their spokesman.
"That girl's name was Jane Fairfax, and motivation always matters." Mom's glare seared them.
I tried to remember the rest of the lesson, but couldn't. I think she assigned a paper, and the football team stopped chuckling.
Another memory flashed before my eyes. It was from that same spring; Mom was baking a cake to take to a neighbor who'd had a knee replacement.
"We don't have enough chocolate." I shut the cabinet door.
"We're making an orange cake, not chocolate."
"Chocolate is so much better."
"Then we're lucky it's not for you. Mrs. Conner is sad and she hurts and it's spring. The orange cake will not only show we care, it'll bring sunshine and spring to her dinner tonight. She needs that."
"It's just a cake."
"It's never just a cake, Lizzy."
I remembered the end of that lesson: I rolled my eyes----Mom loathed that----and received dish duty. But it turned out okay; the batter was excellent.
I shoved the movie reel of scenes from my head. They didn't fit in my world. Food was the object. Arrowroot was arrowroot. Cake was cake. And if it was made with artisan dark chocolate and vanilla harvested by unicorns, all the better. People would crave it, order it, and pay for it. Food wasn't a metaphor---it was the commodity---and to couch it in other terms was fatuous. The one who prepared it best won.
”
”
Katherine Reay (Lizzy and Jane)
“
These georgoi in turn shaped the ideals, institutions, and culture that gave rise to the polis. Unlike any prior civilization, the culture of the Greek polis combined citizen militias with the rule of law. That involved having a broad middle class of independent small landowners that met in assemblies where the votes of these nonelite determined laws, and foreign and domestic policy. These smallholders gained in status as population growth in the ninth and eighth centuries forced an agricultural revolution. Labor-intensive farming of marginal lands came to replace the Dark Age pastoral economy. This required a growth in private landownership, which motivated georgoi to assume the risks involved in cultivating land that was unproductive using traditional farming techniques. These farmers created the ritual of hoplite warfare to decide disputes in a manner that did not contradict their agrarian agenda. The georgoi and their agrarian ideology became the driving force behind the hoplite revolution during the early seventh century.
”
”
Donald Kagan (Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece)
“
Well brought up folks no longer believe in the devil, but as their ideas are no more rational than those of our nurses, they do but disguise devil and angel under a pedantic wordiness honored with the name of philosophy. They do not say "devil" nowadays, but "the flesh," or "the passions." The"angel" is replaced by the words "conscience" or "soul," by "reflection of the thought of a divine creator" or "the Great Architect," as the Free- Masons say. But man's action is still represented as the result of a struggle between two hostile elements. And a man is always considered virtuous just in the degree to which one of these two elements --the soul or conscience-- is victorious over the other --the flesh or passions. It is easy to understand the astonishment of our great-grandfathers when the English philosophers, and later the Encyclopedists, began to affirm in opposition to these primitive ideas that the devil and the angel had nothing to do with human action, but that all acts of man, good or bad, useful or baneful, arise from a single motive: the lust for pleasure.
”
”
Pyotr Kropotkin (Anarchist Morality)
“
Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette!
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
“
As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself.
Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money.
What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-corroding.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
“
We have therefore to inquire what there is about Machiavelli to impress the mind of Europe so prodigiously and so curiously, and why the European mind felt it necessary to deform his doctrine so absurdly. There are certainly contributing causes. The reputation of Italy as the home of fantastic, wanton and diabolical crime filled the French, and still more the English, imagination as they are now filled by the glories of Chicago or Los Angeles, and predisposed imagination toward the creation of a mythical representative for this criminality. But still more the growth of Protestantism — and France, as well as England, was then largely a Protestant country — created a disposition against a man who accepted in his own fashion the orthodox view of original sin. Calvin, whose view of humanity was far more extreme, and certainly more false, than that of Machiavelli, was never treated to such opprobrium; but when the inevitable reaction against Calvinism came out of Calvinism, and from Geneva, in the doctrine of Rousseau, that too was hostile to Machiavelli. For Machiavelli is a doctor of the mean, and the mean is always insupportable to partisans of the extreme. A fanatic can be tolerated. The failure of a fanaticism such as Savonarola's ensures its toleration by posterity, and even approving patronage. But Machiavelli was no fanatic; he merely told the truth about humanity. The world of human motives which he depicts is true — that is to say, it is humanity without the addition of superhuman Grace. It is therefore tolerable only to persons who have also a definite religious belief; to the effort of the last three centuries to supply religious belief by belief in Humanity the creed of Machiavelli is insupportable. Lord Morley voices the usual modern hostile admiration of Machiavelli when he intimates that Machiavelli saw very clearly what he did see, but that he saw only half of the truth about human nature. What Machiavelli did not see about human nature is the myth of human goodness which for liberal thought replaces the belief in Divine Grace.
”
”
T.S. Eliot (For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern)
“
Robert Rosenthal found a way. He approached a California public elementary school and offered to test the school’s students with a newly developed intelligence-identification tool, called the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, which could accurately predict which children would excel academically in the coming year. The school naturally agreed, and the test was administered to the entire student body. A few weeks later, teachers were provided with the names of the children (about 20 percent of the student body) who had tested as high-potentials. These particular children, the teachers were informed, were special. Though they might not have performed well in the past, the test indicated that they possessed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.” (The students were not informed of the test results.) The following year Rosenthal returned to measure how the high-potential students had performed. Exactly as the test had predicted, the first- and second-grade high-potentials had succeeded to a remarkable degree: The first-graders gained 27 IQ points (versus 12 points for the rest of the class); and the second-graders gained 17 points (versus 7 points). In addition, the high-potentials thrived in ways that went beyond measurement. They were described by their teachers as being more curious, happier, better adjusted, and more likely to experience success as adults. What’s more, the teachers reported that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than any year in the past. Here’s the twist: the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was complete baloney. In fact, the “high-potentials” had been selected at random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students. What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors.
”
”
Daniel Coyle (The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups)
“
Until knowledge becomes part of you, it is not possible to talk about awareness, or true understanding. Everything must come from and into an organism. Theories are only valid when made organic — ”organic” as in "part of the body".
The knowledge that has to be learned and followed like a discipline is useless. It doesn't matter which amount of knowledge you absorb or in which variety. Knowledge can’t be remembered all the time in the same proportion that is kept, not all of it, and not all of it at the same time. As a matter of fact, when knowledge is not assimilated above personal interests, that same knowledge is already corrupted.
When knowledge is seen as a means to a goal, either it is in obtaining something from the outside world, or passing some test, this knowledge has not become organic but merely used as a tool. That's why so many people avoid being confronted with their ignorance and react angrily when faced with their contradictions, which is quite obvious when we compare what they learn and what they say.
You see this everywhere, in teachers, politicians, religious groups, and so on. And then you wonder why are people not honest. But they can’t understand honesty as much as they can’t understand their own ignorance. The stupid are not aware they are stupid, and that’s what really makes them stupid.
When someone is too stupid, ignorance is replaced by arrogance. And then this person feels like the world is a bit threat to survival at an individual level. We call this attitude being egotistic. But you can’t stop being an egotistic when suppressing your emotions, or imagining that everyone is a source of negative energy but you. As a matter of fact, you commonly see the egotistic drop into apathy precisely because they confuse the work they must do on themselves with the anger they feel for the world as a whole.
Have you ever noticed how easily people turn to anger when you ask them a question? That’s a reaction of someone moving from apathy to fear. On the surface this person is acting like a rude individual, but the emotions behind this behavior are those one feels when watching a horror movie. They are afraid of their own feelings, and project this fear as an aggression.
Now comes the interesting part: Who are they attacking? They are attacking precisely the one that can help them, because only such individual will ask the right questions. An individual on apathy and lack of interest, can’t ask anything that is interesting or motivating.
So we come to an interesting paradox in society, that those who can uplift others, end up being perceived as a threat to them. And that’s the simplest way to explain insanity.
”
”
Dan Desmarques
“
Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.
”
”
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
“
only the dead keep secrets."
"it is not easy. Taking a life, even when we knew it was required."
"most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I'd get nowhere at all."
"a flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness."
"someone always gains, just like someone always loses."
"most women are less in love with the partners they choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion. They want most often to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance. But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another, that we can experience rapture without being someone's other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures, then we're free, aren't we? "
" enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else. "
" there was no stopping what one person could believe. "
" I noticed that if I did certain things, said things in certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her... Soften toward me. "
" I think I've already decided what I'm going to do, and I just hope it's the right thing. But it isn't, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn't matter, because I've already started, and looking back won't help. "
" luck is a matter of probabilities. "
"you want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, make you feel better? It doesn't. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don't you see it's because we're riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal, that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn. "
" ask yourself where power comes from, if you can't see the source, don't trust it. "
" an assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his own choice? Unimportant. He didn't raise an army didn't fight for good, didn't interfere much with the queen's other evils. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision because life was the only thing that truly matters. "
" the truest truth : mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn't buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In term of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. "
" humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. My intention is as same as others. Stand taller, think smarter, be better. "
" she couldn't remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn't anymore. "
" conservative of energy meant that there must be dozens of people in the world who didn't exist because of she did. "
" what replace feelings when there were none to be had? "
" the absence of something was never as effective as the present of something. "
"To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight."
"apology accepted. Forgiveness, however, declined."
"there cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck."
"no life without death?"
"Everything collapse, you will, too. You will, soon.
”
”
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
“
The most comprehensive survey yet of research into the impacts of payments to promote ecological conservation—whether to collect more litter and plant more trees or harvest less timber and catch fewer fish—finds that most of the schemes studied were unintentionally crowding out, rather than crowding in, people’s intrinsic motivation to act.57 Instead of engaging existing intrinsic commitments, such as pride in cultural heritage, respect for the living world, and trust in the community, some schemes inadvertently serve to erode those very values and replace them with financial motivation. ‘Using money to motivate people can throw up surprising results,’ says Erik Gómez-Baggethun, one of the study’s authors. ‘We often don’t understand the complex interplay of human values and motivations well enough to anticipate what will happen, and so that calls for caution’.
”
”
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
“
Abdulaziz wanted settled farmers whom he could tax rather than wandering nomads whom he could often not even locate. He wanted to replace the divisive tribalism that motivated the Bedu with a unifying Islamic identity, and, above of all, he wanted a dependable military force.
”
”
David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
“
By contrast, the constellations of unwillingness, of repulsion and disgust, are more solid than ever. It seems that this has generated a new energy, a counterenergy, a force that has taken the place of desire in us, a viral abreaction in response to whatever has replaced the world, the body and sex for us. Today only distaste is determined - tastes are determinate no longer. Only rejections are violent - projects are violent no longer. Our actions, our undertakings, our sicknesses have less and less in the way of 'objective' motives: they arise for the most part from a concealed self-disgust, an unacknowledged empty legacy which causes us to try to get rid of our energy by whatever means. A kind of exorcism, then, rather than a will to action. Could this be the principle of Evil in a new form, one not far removed from magic - whose epicentre, as we know, is, precisely, exorcism?
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
“
A shame culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is perceived to reside in other people, in their ridicule, criticism, or contempt (so that one is shamed in other people's eyes). The feeling of shame actually occurs in oneself, of course, and can occur when one is alone, but it characteristically perceived as something that occurs before an audience, an external judge in whose eyes (and by comparison with whom) one appears weak, failed, foolish, incompetent, ridiculous, rejected, inferior, contemptible — in short, shameful. Thus, shame motivates concealment of those traits in oneself of which one is ashamed, since shame is only intensified by exposure to others.
A guilt culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is oneself, one's own internalized conscience and the moral law one imposes on oneself, violation of which leaves one feeling guilty and sinful in one's own eyes. By contrast with shame, the feeling of guilt or sin is actually relieved by exposure, which is why guilt cultures institutionalize the practice of confession of sins. This is understandable, since the person who feels guilty perceives his sin (evil) as being "inside" himself, so to speak, so letting it "out" through confession can feel like draining a moral abscess, bringing a relief of painful pressure.
But why would the perceived source of moral sanctions and disapproval affect either the likelihood or the direction of violent impulses? The answer, I believe, is that what the feeling of shame motivates most directly is the wish to eliminate the feeling of shame, since it is a very painful feeling; and since shame is seen as emanating from other people, that can be done most directly by eliminating other people. It is true that one could also eliminate the feeling of shame, at lower cost to oneself and others, by means of achievements of which one could feel proud, and which would elicit approval, admiration, respect and honors from others. But that is not always possible, and when it is not, eliminating others may be seen as the only alternative.
What the feeling of guilt motivates, correspondingly, is the wish to eliminate the feeling of guilt, since it is a very painful feeling; and since the feeling of guilt emanates from the self, the only way to eliminate it may be by eliminating the self (as in suicide, or by provoking or passively submitting to martyrdom). Another way to understand why shame motivates anger and violence toward others, and why guilt directs those same feelings and behaviors toward the self, is to remember that in a shame ethic the worse evil is shame, the source of which is perceived as other people (the audience in whose "evil eyes" one is shamed). Therefore evil resides in other people, and to the degree that one feels shame, it is other people who deserve punishment.
Punishing others alleviates feelings of shame because it replaces the image of oneself as a weak, passive, helpless, and therefore shameful victim of their punishment (i.e. their shaming) with the contrasting image of oneself as powerful, active, self-reliant, and therefore admirable, and unshameable.
In a guilt ethic, by contrast, the worst evil is to be guilty or sinful, and guilt and sin (to the degree that one feels guilty and sinful) are perceived as residing within oneself. Thus, people who feel guilty see themselves as deserving punishment. And receiving punishment, whether from oneself or from others, relieves guilt by expiating it. Indeed, that is the purpose of punishment, both in the criminal law (in which punishment is the means by which the criminal "pays his debt" to society and thus discharges his guilt) and in the religious sacrament of penance (the self-punishment by which the sinner expiates his sins, that is, relieves his guilt-feelings). Thus, whereas punishment intensifies feelings of shame, it relieves feelings of guilt.
”
”
James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
“
In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
Consider how many conservatives are motivated by hatred of the wealthy or elites. They do not know who these elites are, and have never met them, which is why they cannot comprehend that these elites are simply getting wealthy by following the trend cascade.
Such “conservatives” talk about guillotines and revolutions as if these would solve the situation, forgetting that what got us into this situation was overthrowing our natural leaders and replacing them with the temporary favorites of the mob.
The people who succeed in this society do so by taking advantage of trends. If a lot of people believe something, there is money and power in it. Therefore, if you want to succeed, you repeat the dogma and intensify it without considering that it is true.
Nothing else explains why you suddenly have circus freaks walking the streets, working in government, and dominating what is left of your arts and culture. The elites, Freemasons, Jews, Bilderbergers, Davos, and Illuminati did not do this to you; you did it to yourselves.
”
”
Brett Stevens
“
AI is a tool and, like any tool, it can be used for positive and negative ends. It depends on the motives of the operator(s). There are benefits; it could revolutionise crime detection if utilized correctly, speed up and focus investigations and secure convictions. New technology will always be exploited before it is harnessed. That's human nature. With the internet as the perfect delivery mechanism, the effect of AI is multiplied infinitely. The danger is we may have invented our replacement that will one day outgrow us and evolve beyond us.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
Inside each of us is untapped potential just waiting to be discovered. But first, you need to replace those negative voices in your head with uplifting messages of self-belief.
”
”
Pep Talk Radio (LinguaVerse: A Journey through Language Realms)
“
After the initial shock, I'm left with a bodily fear, a sense of vulnerability more acute than at any other point in investigating Jane's story. The single bogeyman is replaced by a pervasive, expansive evil--one capable of killing without reason or motive.
”
”
Becky Cooper (We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence)
“
Success is the best feeling in the world
The world is full of successes
Successes repeat for those who succeed
Succeed and you will never regret
Regret is replaced with deeds
Deeds are not equal but greater than Success
Success Exist
”
”
Isaac Nash (SUCCESS EXIST)
“
Replace your worries with luxuries
Luxuries do not have to cost you a lot
A lot of times a clean and organized place or space is a luxury
Luxury creates moments of relaxations
Relaxations lead to rebirth
Rebirth of those restlessness cells aim for Success
Success Exist
”
”
Isaac Nash (SUCCESS EXIST)
“
With age, it is easy for arrogance to replace the curiosity of youth.
”
”
Jay D'Cee
“
Ears and eyes are the avenues of data and information
Information is absorbed and never used carefully
Carefully organize, replace, and change your data
Data must be up to date for current use
Use what you have learned along ago and today
Today you must learn and collect new information
Information and data helps to clear eyes and hear well
Well, you may hear and see your Happiness
Happiness Exist
”
”
Isaac Nash (HAPPINESS EXIST)
“
Replace the guilt with pride, the sorrow with smiles, gather the broken pieces of the heart, and dance.
”
”
Shah Asad Rizvi (The Book of Dance)
“
There is a limit that must be released and replaced in one of three areas: A limit in your Mindset—you entertain a low belief in yourself, your capabilities, what you deserve, or what is possible. A limit in your Motivation—you lack the drive, purpose, or energy to take action. A limit in your Methods—you were taught and are acting on a process that is not effective to create the results you desire.
”
”
Jim Kwik (Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life)
“
Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.
All these beliefs of mine put me firmly into the anti-military party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built -- unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gain by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form.
”
”
William James (The Moral Equivalent of War)
“
Impressions comes at a cost of you losing something , in a trade for admiration, likes or love. The more you try to impress others. The more you lose somethings. Now don’t lose what you can’t replace nor lose what is valuable to you or something you can’t live and progress without. Mostly don’t lose yourself, trying to impress others. Don’t compete with people whom their loss is nothing to them, because they have everything or plenty , while your loss is everything to you ,because you have nothing.
”
”
D.J. Kyos
“
I've replaced my anxiety with curiosity. Well, this is my revolution.
”
”
Bhuwan Thapaliya (Safa Tempo: Poems New & Selected)
“
Thinkers powerfully influenced by Marx and overwhelmingly influential in much of the academy today (such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) modified the Marxist simplification essentially by replacing “economics” with “power”—as if power were the single motivating force behind all human behavior (as opposed, say, to competent authority, or reciprocity of attitude and action).
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
“
To be a mystic without a monastery means that you make a conscious decision to stop being motivated by fear—fear that you don’t have enough, that you have to have more to meet your basic needs. And you replace that fear with faith and compassion. In effect, you become a powerful instrument of God’s grace. Infused with a force greater than our own—a divine intention, assistance, or insight that is spiritually rejuvenating—grace is energy that can fill you with a luminous awareness different from everyday consciousness. It motivates your spirit and lights your path from within.
”
”
Caroline Myss (Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul (Spirituality for Women))
“
Be INTENTIONAL in CREATING who YOU want to be so that you are not REPLACED and DISPLACED.
”
”
Adeleke Aishat - Tashia0
“
Coincidence cannot replace motivation. [...] A string of coincidences culminating in character stupidity do not make a believable story.
”
”
Debra Dixon (GMC: Goal, Motivation and Conflict: The Building Blocks of Good Fiction)
“
Humbled to know they can replace you with someone else, and humble enough to know the person they replace you with will replace them with someone else.
The cycle
”
”
Widline Jean Jules (Daily Motivational Quotes: Inspirational & life-changing thoughts, Volume 3)
“
I once had a very talented designer on my team. She was creative and thoughtful and happened to be the most experienced person in an important product area. Everyone on her team naturally went to her for advice on big decisions. I thought to myself, Obviously she should be a manager! When the team expanded, I asked her if she would step up into the role. She said yes, and I gave myself a hearty pat on the back for setting her up to have even more impact.
About a year later, she quit.
I’ll never forget what she told me right before she gave notice. She admitted that every morning as she lay in bed, she dreaded the prospect of going to work and managing people. As she said this, I could see that it was true. Her curious and thoughtful spark had been replaced by glassy-eyed exhaustion. Her team had issues that needed sorting through, and she was so burned out that she couldn’t muster the motivation. Her everyday responsibilities were not what she was passionate about. At her core, she was a maker; she wanted long periods of uninterrupted time to go deep on a problem and create something tangible with her hands.
”
”
Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
“
Almost all governments supported the single currency project, on political grounds even more than economic ones. The most powerful commitment came from France, where a tradition of support for exchange-rate stability was bolstered by the desire to share in the control of a European central bank and thus recover some of the monetary autonomy that had in practice been lost to the Bundesbank. Other member states, apart from Denmark and the UK—both of which secured opt-outs from any commitment to join a single currency—accepted such arguments, especially in the context of a newly unified Germany. For Germany, however, while the political motive for accepting the single currency as a French condition of unification was decisive, there were still reservations about replacing the Deutschmark, with its well-earned strength and stability, by an unproven currency. However, the possibility of building a similar system across the EU was clearly an important motivating factor for an export-driven economy like Germany’s; if other states would accept the logic of macroeconomic coordination alongside the currency itself, then this would ultimately serve Germany’s interests.
”
”
Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Never underestimate the value of time. It has more value than money does. You can replace lost money, but that can never be the case with lost time.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (The Precious Gift of Time: Inspirational Quotes and Sayings)
“
Time is more valuable than money because it cannot be replaced. So do not waste your valuable time on things that add no value to your life.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (The Precious Gift of Time: Inspirational Quotes and Sayings)
“
Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)