The Opposite of Truth

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

 - Niels Bohr, Danish physicist

Your Reputation Begets You

When people know what they are looked upon as, they become the same.

- From a blog

A person may not be as good as you tell him he is, but he'll try harder thereafter.

- Anonymous

If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.

- Haim Ginott

Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Gradually, Then All At Once

A reporter once asked Ernest Hemingway how he went broke. He replied, "gradually, then all at once."

Things fail gradually, then all at once.

That's how paradigms shift - gradually, then boom - at the tipping point.

Limitation of Human Sensitivity

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

- William Hazlitt

Practical Wisdom

Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

- From the Net

I think "practical wisdom" is different from "conventional wisdom" and the two should not be mixed. The former is "improvisation-based wisdom" whereas the latter is "internalization-based wisdom".

Life Isn't Fair

One does not always get what they deserve. There are undeserved experiences and people one has to meet and go through. Learn through them.

- From a blog

What to Be: Giver or Receiver?

I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality that far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed--a present, a thought, anything.

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver...It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

It requires self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.

- John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, in an eulogy for a deceased friend, Ed Ricketts

Death Brings Life into Perspective

Death brings life into perspective.

- From a blog

Fragility of Morals

Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.

- Robert Wright

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral...

- Henry David Thoreeau

Quotes on Friendship

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

- Elie Wiesel, “The Gates Of The Forest” (1966)

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is ANYTHING you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.

- Edgar Watson Howe

There is a murderous feeling stronger than any friendship and it’s called envy.

- Janos Bokay

दोस्त अगर फेल हो जाए, तो दुख होता है, पर अगर दोस्त फर्स्ट आ जाए, तो ज्यादा दुख होता है.

- Three Idiots से

Anyone can sympathise with the suffering of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.

- Oscar Wilde

[My diary entry dated 8th August, 1988]

Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.

- Erica Jong (From the book How to Save Your Own Life)

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

- Octavia Butler / Gloria Naylor

The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.

- Cicero

One does not make friends. One recognizes them.

- Garth Henrichs

 “Friendship,” a slim, sometimes piercing novel, is a sharply observed chronicle of the inequality inherent in even the most valued friendships.

- From a review

In The Oxford Book of Friendship, D.J. Enright, one of England's best known poets, and David Rawlinson bring together some of the world's best thoughts on friendship, found in excerpts from Shakespeare and the Bible, novels and poems, autobiographies, letters, and diaries, even personal ads from The New York Review of Books. The selections across a wide spectrum offer a literary buffet of historic and literary friendships of all kinds--from David and Jonathan in the Bible to Damon and Pythias, from Goethe and Schiller to Huck Finn and Jim--and under all circumstances, from friendships forged in concentration camps to the bonds we form with our pets. Concluding with a delightful potpourri of short sayings, like: "It is easier to visit friends than to live with them", the editors provide an amusing, enriching, and reflective anthology on a central theme in everyone's life.

In my view, friendship is born out of shared:

• Values and views
• Tastes and interests (likes and dislikes)
• Experiences (memories)



Trained Incapacity

Trained Incapacity: You are so good at something you can't do anything else.

Straddling Business and Scholarship

I live a secret, split life.

By day, I walk on the practitioner side of the street. I’m practical and results-oriented; I speak the language of business and work hard to support and promote learning in organizations, especially among those whose job it is to support and promote learning (like the learning leaders and practitioners at my company and the graduate students I encounter in instructional design programs).

But at night, I quietly look both ways and cross over to the other side of the street – the scholar side. There I find endless fascination with the kind of theory and research that others shrink from…

I would so love to find a way to walk more down the middle of the street rather than having to constantly switch sides… But as we know, walking down the middle of a street can be quite dangerous.

- From a blog

Money's Worth

It is one of the major energies of the world, along with sex; although in many cases, the two go together.

Money spells:
• power
• control
• comfort
• security

- Mohini Kent, The Economic Times, 5 July 2009

I would like to add two more to this list:
• Status
• Self-esteem

Details of Victory

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

In Urdu, this idea is expressed as jannat ki haqeeqat.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good (Voltaire)

I swear I’ve only been alive for almost 24 years but perfectionism has nearly destroyed me several times already! It’s a deadly trap that actually has the reverse results of what it intends.

- From a blog

Why Not To Read

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

- Albert Einstein

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

- Thomas Edison

Ignore Objections

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

- Samuel Johnson

Safely Insane

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.

- William Dement

Why Need Heroes?

A hero is only necessary when systems fail.

- Rahul Gandhi

True!

Why It's Not Worth Paying Peanuts

“If you get one of the best teachers, you will learn in six months what an average teacher will take a year to teach you. If you get one of the worst teachers, that same learning will take you two years. There’s a four-fold difference in the speed of learning created by the most and the least effective teachers. And it’s not class size, it’s not between class grouping, it’s not within class grouping – it’s the quality of the teacher.” - Professor Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director of the Institute of Education

I'm sure he's right, although my contention would be that, if you have a really bad teacher, you'll never learn however long the experience lasts, because you just give up.

I learned long ago that it pays to choose your specialist help with care. The best graphic designers are at least four times better and quicker than the second best. The best programmers create almost error-free code in no time at all, whereas the worst will never get rid of the bugs. That's why it's always worth paying above the average - in the end you get what you pay for.

- From a blog

A Dream That Will Catch Your Heart

…Yogi Berra once said, "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."…

But even if you know where you want to end up, do you REALLY WANT to be there? I'm not talking about traveling now, but where we're going with our lives. Is the dream you are following really that important to you?

Most people are not lazy. They simply have uninspiring goals. They don't accomplish what they set out to do because they lose interest. The dream they are following is simply not that important to them.

…The truth is -- we are always highly motivated when something means a great deal to us…

And that goes for anything that is truly important to us. If we want something badly enough, we will find necessary energy, excitement and drive to grasp it.

Writer Tim Redmond says this about following worthwhile dreams: "There are many things that will catch my eye, but there are only a few that catch my heart...it is those I consider to pursue."

Is your dream big enough -- important enough -- to catch your heart?

- From a blog

"Life is too short to waste time doing things that do not make you happy..."

- From an interview on the Net