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"There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni."
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"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."
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Personal Development

"Idleness is the parent of psychology."
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Personal Development

"Day or night, good or bad, all things from within."
Author Name
Personal Development

"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."
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Personal Development

"I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary."
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Personal Development

"I don't need psychologyI am not a sociopathNeither and Psychopath."
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Personal Development

"You must give permission for people to alter your thoughts. No matter how hard they knock, they can't get into your brain unless you open the door."
Author Name
Personal Development

"When we hold-on to someone's imperfections we become emotionally pair-bonded to their maladies."
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Personal Development

"Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: 'Perhaps I need someone else to control me."
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Personal Development

"When you build a fence around yourself, you'll wonder why people are afraid to approach you, because the pride in the fence is the cause of your blindness."
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Personal Development
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"What we have, we all must lose-that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth-nothing more."
Life

"There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride."
Emotion

"She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating."
Forgiveness

"There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni."
Psychology

"Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it."
Morality

"Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer."
Memory

"People don't talk about mercy very much these days-it has a rather old-fashioned ring to it. but it exists and its power is quite extraordinary."
Ethics

"There are many sadnesses in the hearts of men who are far away from their countries."
Emotion

"To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way."
Culture

"Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else."
Awareness
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