“Society is not like a machine that is created at some point in time and then maintained with a minimum of effort; a society is being continuously re-created, for good or ill, by its members. This will strike some as a burdensome responsibility, but it will summon others to greatness.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 127)
Archives
“Young people do not assimilate the values of their group by learning words (truth, justice, etc.) and their definitions. They learn attitudes, habits and ways of judging. They learn these in intensely personal transactions with their immediate family or associates. They learn them in the routines and crises of living, but they also learn them through songs, stories, drama, and games. They do not learn ethical principles; they emulate ethical (or unethical) people. They do not analyze or list the attributes they wish to develop; they identify with people who seem to them to have these attributes. That is why young people need models, both in their imaginative life and in their environment, models of what—at their best—they can be.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 124)
“Only birth can conquer death… Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’ to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.”
Joseph Campbell, via Self-Renewal (Page 123)
“Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.”
Stephen Jay Gould, via Graceful (Page 14)
“The first time you bake cupcakes, you will certainly follow the recipe with rigor. The third time, you might improvise and screw up. Learning your lesson, you will follow the recipe again and again as closely as you can. At this point, by the fifth time, some people actually learn to bake. They improvise successfully. They understand the science and the outcomes. They develop a kind of gracefulness in the kitchen. Others merely plod along. They’re cooks, not chefs. We have too many cooks. The world is begging for chefs.”
Seth Godin, Graceful (Page 5)
“The commitments you make determine who you can become… and the commitments you honor define who you are.”
Seth Godin, Graceful (Page 9)
“No society is likely to renew itself unless its dominant orientation is to the future. This is not to say that a society can ignore its past. A people without historians would be as crippled as an individual with amnesia. They would not know who they were. In helping a society to achieve self-knowledge, the historian serves the cause of renewal. But in the renewing society the historian consults the past in the service of the present and the future.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 105)
“A good many of the most valuable people in any society will never burn with zeal for anything except the integrity and health and well-being of their own families—and if they achieve those goals, we need ask little more of them. There are other valuable members of a society who will never generate conviction about anything beyond the productive output of their hands or minds—and a sensible society will be grateful for their contributions. Nor will it be too quick to define some callings as noble and some as ordinary. One may not quite accept Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dictum—’Every calling is great when greatly pursued’—but the grain of truth is there.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 104)
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”
Richard Feynman
“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”
Mitch Albom
“There are those who think of the meaning of life as resembling the answer to a riddle. One searches for years, and then some bright day one finds it, like the prize at the end of a treasure hunt. It is a profoundly misleading notion. The meanings in any life are multiple and varied. Some are grasped very early, some late; some have a heavy emotional component, some are strictly intellectual; some merit the label religious, some are better described as social. But each kind of meaning implies a relationship between the person and some larger system of ideas or values, a relationship involving obligations as well as rewards. In the individual life, meaning, purpose and commitment are inseparable. When one succeeds in the search for identity one has found the answer not only to the question ‘Who am I?’ but to a lot of other questions too: ‘What must I live up to? What are my obligations? To what must I commit myself?'”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 103)
“We pretend that so many courses, so many credits, so many hours in a classroom, so many books read add up to an education. The same is true of research, on which we now spend billions of dollars annually. We seem immensely satisfied with the outer husk of the enterprise—the number of dollars spent, the size of laboratories, the number of people involved, the fine projects outlined, the number of publications. Why do we grasp so desperately at externals? Partly because we are more superficial than we would like to admit. Perhaps partly because we are too lazy or too preoccupied to go to the heart of the problem. But also because it is easier to organize the external aspects of things. The mercurial spirit of great teaching and great scholarship cannot be organized, rationalized, delegated or processed. The formalities and externals can.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 82)