Inspirational Quotes Part 38

There's something about everybody living within a two-mile radius of each other that cements a bond that cannot be broken. (Lenny Henry on Dudley, June 2013)

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. (Aldous Huxley)

Put other people’s feelings ahead of your own when possible. (Yes, but not all the time.) (@etiquetteguy/Jay Remer)

While Tamara, Tallulah et al crash around being frankly annoying we are repeatedly nudged to admire their dash and daring. But there is a limit to how many times you can read about parties at which someone rode in on a baby elephant or wore gold-laced slippers or said something witty that they had almost certaily been rehearsing or days. (Kathryn Hughes on Flappers by Judith Mackrell)

Daddy worries that my lifestyle and my lesbianism will lock me out of conservative Hong Kong high society. It’s not just high society. The whole of local society here is conservative. (Gigi Chao, Times May 30 2013)

History is not about self-congratulation. History is meant to keep the powerful awake at night. (Simon Schama)

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)

Like pornography, the industry of telling women what they’re doing wrong in relationships is recession-proof. (thegloss.com in an article about a Chinese woman who claims she can train you to find and catch an “elite” foreign husband in 90 days.)

I was running a failing company in a dead-end town, I couldn’t pay my bills, I hadn’t had fun in (actual) years, my landlord was threatening to evict my startup, and I had cut out exercising and friendships in order to make more time to fail at things. So, I don’t think that was a case of my brain randomly deciding to make some depressing chemicals. I think that was a very rational reason to be bummed out. It turned out that the “solution” was to give up on a solution: close up shop, admit that the only big, adult thing I’d ever done in my life was a failure, and move to New York with $400 and zero knowledge of urban living… If you have a terrible job in a terrible city where you live with a terrible boyfriend in too-close proximity to your terrible relatives, and you try to fix everything as it stands, it’s pretty likely that you will wear yourself out early on… Go do something easy – maybe some kind of feel-good temporary job that allows you to pay your bills… Plenty of people have this idea that they want to achieve some mystical, ultimate success and glory… How many people have you known who had moderately comfortable lives, talked about breaking free and doing something riskier and more difficult but infinitely more awesome – and then they got engaged, and all you ever heard from them after that was stuff about different kinds of dresses and dishes? (thegloss.com)

New research suggests that the higher status bestowed on extroverts in new groups may drop as their contributions become better understood. In the meantime, neurotic people may see their lower status improve. (British Psychological Society Occupational Digest May 2013)

This type of non-purposeful conversation, made up mostly of freewheeling banter, relies less on its subject matter than what you can do with it, and, usually, how amusing you can be while doing it. (thepointmag.com on small talk, May 2013)

Everybody thinks they are above average. It’s been shown in loads of tests that we think we’re above average intelligence, above average attractiveness, above average sense of humour. We can’t all be. (Derren Brown, Guardian, May 2013)

Part 37, and links to the rest