The Japanese have a term called Ikigai. Ikigai is the Japanese translation of the French 'raison d'etre' or 'reason for being.' When Plato wrote about government, what Plato said was that the most preferred form of governor was what we know as the true statesman. -- The philosopher king who knows his place and his task. My purpose is to be a builder of new ideas and companies. I live to put new ideas together and advance the conversation. It is my Ikigai. I simply love to do it. There is nothing more exciting to me than helping new ideas spring up out of the ground.
Robert AgrestaRelated topics
advance builder conversation exciting form french government governor ground helping japanese king live love nothing philosopher place preferred purpose reason say spring statesman task term translation ikigai platoRelated quotes
It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control. [...] This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.
Ron Paul
I am not [...] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. [...] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Stephen Jay Gould
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land Whose heart hath neer within him burnd, As home his footsteps he hath turnd From wandering on a foreign strand If such there breathe, go mark him well For him no Minstrel raptures swell High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonord, and unsung.
Walter Scott
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
Ernest Hemingway
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
