Quotessence
Home / Topics / Value Quotes

Value Quotes

Browse 2135 quotes about Value.

Value Quotes

“Every day I sit and watch random people holding the wands with the power that can turn the world either into a graveyard or into a paradise and yet roam around without believing in the magic that it possesses. And in the end, they throw it into the stash and burn it like it is nothing.”

PowerMagicValueParadiseGraveyardWand
Book:The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams
Create image

“We are a nation of shareholders," he had said more than once to Seema, trying to articulate his brand of no-nonsense but compassionate capitalism.... Several times during his Greyhound trip, Barry had paused to consider that, although he loved his fellow passengers deeply, he could not trust them at the voting booth because they were not shareholders. They did not understand the thrill and the pain and the obligation of owning a part of their country.”

CapitalismValueVotingOwnershipShareholdersStock Market
Book:Lake Success
Create image

“An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.”

EducationEconomicsInstitutionsValueConsumerismAutonomyUsefulnessIllusions
Book:The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
Create image

“Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value. The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.”

LifeArtistKnowledgeCreationMathematicsValueMathematicianMemorialPracticalTrivial
Book:A Mathematician's Apology
Create image

“A rich social life (measured by quality of experience rather than quantity of friends) contributes to good health, happiness and longevity. So many of us place value on hard work, measurable achievement and wealth, and often fail to set aside time to nurture our relationships and strengthen social ties. We make the mistake of believing that security is found in material things rather than people.”

PeopleLifeTimeSocialRichExperienceValueGoodNurtureHygge
Book:The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well
Create image

“Why do we tend to consider ourselves happier than homeless people? If there is no money, no gold, no private property, no marriage, no religion, no government, maybe there is no reason to trouble about anything, which in turn can save human life from the unnecessary anxiety associated with them. Anxiety comes mainly from the connection to external world. If you have got nothing of value in the external world, you will have no fear of losing anything there. If there is no fear, there is no reason to be unhappy and there are more reasons to enjoy just the existence of yourself.”

HappinessAnxietyValue
Author:Elmar Hussein
Create image

“The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all. (p.171)”

IdentityValueRejection
Book:The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Create image

“What we value is important to us. It rises in the finite hierarchy of things we pay attention to. We are willing to put effort and energy in it. What we value however arises from our perspective; the way our brain synthesizes reality filtering facts it sees through its library of memories, its catalogue of knowledge and its store of experience. Our perspective then determines how we see the world and sense our place in it which means it establishes our position in what I will call our known universe. The perspective we have then feeds our sense of identity; what we feel we are and our sense of how others see us modified through our need for others to see us in a specific way. Our sense of identity, in turn, gives rise to our values. Our values determine our energy expenditure and guide our attention. Our attention determines what’s important to us. You can see here how a misstep anywhere along this chain can derail us.”

ValuesAttentionSocietyIdentityPersonalityImportanceValueStatus
Author:David Amerland
Create image