#truism

What does it mean to be the best? It means you have to be better than the number two guy. But what gratification is there in that? He's a loser—that’s why he's number two. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#best #bizarre #competing #competition #competitor

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#altruism #because #been #confer #continuing

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#sociology #sociology

Funny,’ Will said, as they picked their way through. ‘Things are absolutely awful and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling.’ ‘They are English,’ Merriman said. ‘Quite right,’ said Will’s father. ‘Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We’re an odd lot…. ↗

— Susan Cooper

#humour #the-dark-is-rising #truism #funny

Free markets and capitalism are predicated upon the definition of greed as altruistic in economics". ~R. Alan Woods [2012] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#capitalism #free-enterprise #free-markets #greed-good #r-alan-woods

Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#care #caring #designer #ego #happiness

I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either. ↗

— David Almond

#family #friendship #inspirational #judgement #love

What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty? ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#inspirational #selflessness #woman #inspirational

People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do. ↗

— Leonard Alfred George Strong

#both #distinguish #i #i do #most

In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive. ↗

— Roman Payne

#death #dying #funny #humor #humour