Quotes by Public Speakers - Page 2

The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.
Orson Scott Card
In my dreams," said Ender, "I'm never sure whether I'm really me.
Orson Scott Card
Nero, you are an example to all the children on this shuttle. Because most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it's actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have a chance to learn.
Orson Scott Card
Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.
Orson Scott Card
One of the reasons we judge each other so harshly in this world of parenting is because... we perceive anyone else who's doing anything differently than what we're doing as criticizing our choices.
Brené Brown
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
Malcolm Gladwell
Madness, and then illumination.
Orson Scott Card
Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
Brené Brown
When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you? The two are so, so different. One is an infinite consciousness capable of being and creating whatever it chooses, the other is an illusion imprisoned by its own perceived and programmed limitations.
David Icke
No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.
Orson Scott Card
He spent the afternoon alone in the streets.
Orson Scott Card
The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.
Orson Scott Card
From you I can learn things that nobody knows.
Orson Scott Card
While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights.
Orson Scott Card
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions . . . by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.
Orson Scott Card
When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.
Donald Miller
I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not.
Fran Lebowitz
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?
Orson Scott Card
So I don't even get a chance to learn before I'm being judged.
Orson Scott Card
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.
Brené Brown
It was not about physical strength, Wit reminded himself. It was 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. That's what the SEAL instructors were looking for: men and women who could disregard the pleadings of the body. Pain was nothing, sleep was nothing. What was chaffed skin, wrecked muscles, bleeding sores? The body chooses to be sore. The body chooses to be exhausted. But the SEAL mind rejects it. The SEAL mind commands the body, not the other way around.
Orson Scott Card
four meta-movements that separately and together are redefining the American dream: living with limits, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity.
John Zogby
There is one thing that has disappeared, not just from the U.S. but from the entire world, is the idea of ever being embarrassed by anything.
Fran Lebowitz
A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a way that makes a person feel human.
Donald Miller
So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293
Malcolm Gladwell
I didn't know how you'd get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.
Orson Scott Card
That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.
Orson Scott Card
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn't come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.
Orson Scott Card
Our silence about grief serves no one. We can't heal if we can't grieve; we can't forgive if we can't grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.
Brené Brown
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.
Orson Scott Card
Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn't feel meaningless.
Donald Miller
I want to live my life to its fullest potential. I want to embrace my own purpose, however large or small it may be. I want to find my own Nehru moments and take positive steps toward becoming the person I am meant to be. The journey will undoubtedly be a winding one, filled with surprises and setbacks as well as gifts. But I'm ready to embrace it fully, wherever it may take me.
Mallika Chopra
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.
Orson Scott Card
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.
Orson Scott Card
It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.
Orson Scott Card
When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.
Orson Scott Card
If you own this story you get to write the ending.
Brené Brown
Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
Brené Brown
In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply ‘Well, why? It’s already a book.
Orson Scott Card
Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
Donald Miller
This doesn't mean that we stop helping people set goals or that we stop expecting people to grow and change. It means that we stop respecting and evaluating people based on what we think they should accomplish, and start respecting them for who they are and holding them accountable for what they're actually doing. It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are. It means that sometimes when we're beating ourselves up, we need to stop and say to that harassing voice inside, "Man, I'm doing the very best I can right now.
Brené Brown
Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief God uses it to serve his own Rigteous purposes.""So God uses wicked people as his tools?""God gives us the freedom to to do great evil, if we choose, then He uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what He chooses.""So, in the long run, God always wins?""Yes, in the short run though it can be uncomfortable.
Orson Scott Card
Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences -- good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as "ordinary courage.
Brené Brown
Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.
Brené Brown
Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him
Orson Scott Card
To a man with only a hammer, a screw is a defective nail.
Orson Scott Card
Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that’s pretty extraordinary.
Brené Brown
We were made to be distracted by life, by story.
Donald Miller
There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.
Fran Lebowitz
Thank you' is a wonderful phrase. Use it. It will add stature to your soul.
Marjorie Pay Hinckley
The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.
Donald Miller
The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
Malcolm Gladwell
Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.
Brené Brown
We're wired for story. In a culture of scarcity and perfectionism, there's a surprisingly simple reason we want to own, integrate, and share our stories of struggle. We do this because we feel the most alive when we're connecting with others and being brave with our stories - it's in our biology.
Brené Brown
All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.
Donald Miller
[Mandela] had believed all his life that you are very much in control of your own body, and, in the process of healing, your mind had to be stronger than the medicines applied. You also had to have determination to get better.
Zelda la Grange
There's no equivalent to Mozart in writing.
Fran Lebowitz
America. The enemy. The rival. The land of jeans and rock and roll, of crime and capitalism, of poverty and oppression. Of home and freedom.
Orson Scott Card
The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.
Fran Lebowitz