"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know."

William Saroyan Literature See all quotes by William Saroyan →

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“Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.”

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”

“Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.”

“Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.”

“The bicycle is a city thing, virtually useless anywhere excepting on a pavement or hard surface of some kind. Without the road it would never have been invented. It is a little mad, both in design and purpose. Two wheels held together in a frame, with a simple mechanical system enabling a forward movement for one person.”

“To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The issue, it seems to me, is that many people think of giving the same way they think of eating broccoli: they feel obligated to, they know they should, but they'd rather not. So charities, smartly, …"

— Holden Karnofsky

Business1981

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"It seems to me that in understanding MOND and its fundamentals we have only scratched the surface. If the developments of quantum mechanics and relativity are any lesson here, departures of such magni…"

— Mordehai Milgrom

Science1946

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"It is astonishingly beautiful and interesting, how thought is absent when you have an insight. Thought cannot have an insight. It is only when the mind is not operating mechanically in the structure o…"

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Education1895–1986

#wisdom

"As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is, to use it as sparingly as possible; avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but …"

— George Washington

Politics

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