#pre

Mrs Forrester ... sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#cakes #humor #modesty #pretense #tea-parties

One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects. ↗

— Thomas L. Friedman

#empowerment #social-entrepreneurship #business

A true business opportunity is the on that an entrepreneur invents to grow him or herself. Not to work in, but to work on. ↗

— Michael E. Gerber

#entrepreneurship #business

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity. ↗

— Gilda Radner

#life #stories #uncertainty #unpredictability #change

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. ↗

— Paul de Man

#came #could #departure #desire #earlier

Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. ↗

— Minor White

#attention #object #presence #still #until

There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign. ↗

— Theodore White

#anywhere #campaign #excitement #match #presidential

Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world. ↗

— William Allen White

#force #made #men #never #only

The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#apprehension #deep #earliest #fears #glimpse

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings. ↗

— Rumi

#change #growth #presence #the-middle-way #beauty