An Idealist View of Life

"The roots of all great thinking and noble living lie deep in life itself and not in the dry light of mere reasoning. All creative work in science and philosophy, in art and life, is inspired by intuitive experience. While we all possess intuitive perception and exercise it to some extent, in exceptional minds it is well developed. Intuitive life, spiritual wisdom at its highest, is a type of achievement which belongs only to the highest range of mental life. The great scientific discoveries are due to the inventive genius of the creative thinkers and not the plodding processes of the intellect. The latter might give us more precise measurements, more detailed demonstrations of well-established theories, but they cannot by themselves yield the great discoveries which have made science so wonderful. Creative work is not blind imitation or mechanical repetition. It is synthetic insight which advances by leaps. A new truth altogether unknown, startling in its strangeness, comes into being suddenly and spontaneously owing to the intense and concentrated interest in the problem. When we light upon the controlling idea, a wealth of unco-ordinated detail falls into proper order and becomes a perfect whole. Genius is extreme sensibility to truth. Scientific discovery is more like artistic creation in its reaching out after new truth…. A new law in mathematics is just as much a bit of spontaneous intuition as is a composition in music by Mozart."

(S. Radhakrishnan in 'An Idealist View of Life,' p. 176 Harper)

An Idealist View of Life

Viral Loop

"People devote only 5 per cent of their time online on search engines. The rest is spent on social networks and browsing other sites. If marketers could follow us without actually eavesdropping, they would be able to compile comprehensive dossiers based on the types of sites we visit, the things we read, the videos we watch, the products we shop for. It sounds spooky, of course, and people claim they do care about the lack of privacy…"

"Over the course of a day the typical American is caught on camera two hundred times: at traffic lights, paying highway tolls, walking the dogs, taking money from ATMs, shopping in convenience stores, and a tiny fraction are caught committing crimes. Within a twenty-block radius of New York University, there are more than five hundred surveillance cameras, which catch students and professors doing everything from buying a falafel, racing past the iconic fountain in Washington Square Park on the way to class, or purchasing allergy medicine like Claritin-D, for which they are required by law to show their driver's licences because it contains a common substance used in meth."

(Adam L. Penenberg in 'Viral Loop: The power of pass-it-on,' p. 224 Hachette)

Hachette-Viral Loop revised

The Heart of a Leader

"Moneymaking is about what you can get; perpetual prosperity is about what you can give. Success at the money level is about what you can achieve; perpetual prosperity is about how you can serve. There are many good reasons to earn money, but some people seek money because of the power and status it will give them to control events and other people."

"While some of us never get beyond money or the things money buys, most of us know a void in our lives needs to be filled if we only pay attention to making money."

"When we reach out to help someone else, we often get more back in return. That's not why we help people; that's just how it works sometimes."

(Ken Blanchard in 'The Heart of a Leader: Insights on the art of influence,' p. 127 Jaico)