Saurabh Kushwaha > Saurabh's Quotes

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted—and their knowledge deepened—by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.”
― Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

“Great performance is in our hands far more than most of us ever suspected.”
― Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

“you learn ten times more in a crisis than during normal times.”
― Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
― Sigmund Freud

“A woman should soften but not weaken a man.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.”
― Sigmund Freud

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.'
That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked.
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“The highly sensitive [introverted] tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive. They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions--sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments--both physical and emotional--unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss--another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“What the world calls sorrow is really joy to the poet.”
― Premchand, Godan

“There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.”
― William Randolph Hearst

“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower