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"Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, 'When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightning and I am the thunder."
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"I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based."
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Personal Development
"Know the other person's viewpoint first and then talk. To Talk after comparing it or mixing it with our viewpoint is an offence."
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Personal Development
"Silence is an arguement hard to refute."
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Personal Development
"Never speak unless you can improve upon the stupidness of people's silence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A bad handwriting is as annoying to a reader - as an irritating voice is to a listener."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Not every single way of saying the right thing is right."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Are you being approachable when you are around new people? Ever not know what to say? Simply smile when you make eye contact. This is a subliminal invitation to help others feel safe-allowing a conversation to follow naturally."
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Personal Development
"Few realize how loud their expressions really are. Be kind with what you wordlessly say."
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Personal Development
"Human life is not for suffering criticism. If it is the truth and there is no nagging or insistence upon it, others will accept it in their hearts. And if it is the truth and you nag or insist upon it, it will not touch others."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A good oration is good and a good understanding is better, but a good action in the right direction that gets the best results is the best!"
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Personal Development
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"I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days."
Society
"Because what my gradmother did with her fine coat (the loveliest thing she would ever own) is what all women of that generation (and before) did for their families and their husbands and their children. They cut up the finest and proudest parts of themselves and gave it all away. They repatterned what was theirs and shaped it for others. They went without. They were the last ones to eat at supper, and they were the first ones to get up every morning, warming the cold kitchen for another day spent caring for everyone else. This was the only thing they knew how to do. This was their guiding verb and their defining principle of life: They gave."
Sacrifice
"Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that--whatever the outcome--you have traveled a noble path."
Passion
"I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives."
Psychology
"Which is - you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?"
Success
"Devo farmi le ossa is how they say it in Italian. "I need to make my bones."
Growth
"We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder."
Courage
"But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pictures of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone?"
Faith
"The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?"
Philosophy
"All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies."
Society
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