Doing More With Less Quotes & Sayings

People that don't want to get down to the business at hand. Instead of just doing less, we have to find ways of doing more with less. That's the key to the future. — Bill Nye

If time be of all things most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again; and what we call time enough always proves little enough. Let us then be up and doing, and doing to a purpose; so by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity — Benjamin Franklin

We can get so busy doing urgent things and so preoccupied with what comes next that we don't experience now. Afraid of being late, we rush from the past to the future. The present moment becomes a crack between what we did and what we have yet to do. It is virtually lost to us. We don't get to our futures any faster if we hurry. And we certainly don't become better people in haste. More likely than not, the faster we go the less we become. — Adele Ahlberg Calhoun

We come to the page with too many expectations. Each poor little story is like a trembling donkey upon which we heap tons of weight. We don't just want a good book, we want a bestseller. If it isn't perfect, we hate it. If it isn't 100% right, it's 1000% wrong. Problem: we care too damn much. It's all or nothing with us and that's the kind of dichotomy that shanks our happiness right in the kidneys. So: care less. Ease off the stress stick. Have more fun with what you're doing. When your kids and dogs play in the mud, you can either freak out that they're too dirty, or you can laugh and jump in the mud, too. So, fuck it: jump in the damn mud already. — Chuck Wendig

To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory! — Ezra Jack Keats

I just wish the crowd I was associated with was more passionate about what they were doing and less consumed with the commerce of the art form. — Shia Labeouf

I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss "the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,"6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding "political correctness" becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don't like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words — Joan C. Williams

I often look to men to model behavior," she goes on after a pause. "Not because I want to squelch what's feminine about me, but because sometimes I want a little more action, a little less feeling in my interactions. I've been doing this thing lately where I try to talk slower at meetings. I take a lot of meetings with women and we all talk really fast. But every guy talks so much slower. Maybe there's a scientist who could tell me why, but I think men are just a little bit more comfortable taking up conversational real estate. So I've been seeing how slow I can tolerate talking. I'm doing it now. Let me tell you, it's really hard for me. — Amy Poehler

Doing the same things you did when the economy was good is not good enough. You will have to put more coals on the fire in a poor economy to get the same heat you received in a good economy. You must give more energy, more thought, more service, and get into positive thinking material more frequently. Become more selective about who you spend time with. Love a little more, hate a little less. Think about it. You can progressively move on an upward path toward any goal. The choice is yours as to who or what controls you! — Bob Proctor

I have run large organizations, I know what it takes to create a healthy business climate, and I have more experience than Jerry Brown doing that. So it'll be a stark contrast, a career politician vs. someone who has met a payroll, gotten a return on investment, knows how to use technology to do more with less. — Meg Whitman

I was doing acting work at Fox - bit pieces with Greg Peck in The Gunfighter and things like that - and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years. — Larry Buchanan

I have been teaching my own kids math Full-Contact for years. I know from personal experience that 10 minutes of math time with me and my undivided attention is far more productive for my kids than an hour spent doing exercises off on their own. I firmly believe in the idea of '"less time, more connection" as an effective way to teach math. — Robin Padron

Persistence trumps talent.
What's the most powerful force in the universe? Compound interest. It builds on itself. Over time, a small amount of money becomes a large amount of money. Persistence is similar. A little bit improves performance, which encourages greater persistence which improves persistence even more. And on and on it goes.
Lack of persistence works the same way
only in the opposite direction.
Of course talent is important, but the world is lit erred with talented people who didn't persist, who didn't put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone. Meanwhile, people who might have less talent pass them by.
That's why intrinsic motivation is so important. Doing things not the get an external reward like money or a promotion, but because you simple like doing it. The more intrinsic motivation you have , the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed. — Daniel H. Pink

Look at the world of books nowadays. People just download books. They don't go to a bookstore. Amazon is wiping out Borders and Barnes and Noble. Those are brilliant examples of ephemeralization doing more with less at a better price. — Robert Kiyosaki

Priorities versus Posteriorities Setting priorities requires setting posteriorities as well. A priority is something that you do more of and sooner, whereas a posteriority is something you do less of or later. You are probably already overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time. Because of this, for you to embark on a new task, you must discontinue an old task. Getting into something new requires getting out of another activity. Before you commit to a new undertaking, ask yourself, "What am I going to stop doing so that I have enough time to work on this new task?" Go through your life regularly and practice "creative abandonment": Consciously determine the activities that you are going to discontinue so that you have more time to spend on those tasks that can really make a difference to your future. — Brian Tracy

In short, avoiding the scourge of unemployment may have less to do with chasing after growth and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society. — Tim Jackson

It's not just about being small, it's about doing more with less. — Greg McAdoo

Rock stars have many of the same qualities as athletes - millions for doing what they love, fans, easy pussy, fame, status, the ability to do whatever they want when they want. While what they do is still cool, the main difference is that it's less masculine. You connect with your fans in this intense, intimate, emotional way that is less about you and more about them, how you make them feel. When you're an athlete, it's all about you. They cheer you on. When you make music, you cheer them on, provide the soundtrack to their little lives, and all they do is cheer you back to say "Thanks. — A.D. Aliwat

No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No — Emily St. John Mandel

If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. ... We're going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you've made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars. — Douglas Rushkoff

I know I'm not the person I used to be. I'm not better or worse but I am more awake, more conscious if you like. I'm more aware of the texture of my days, the light and the dark that shades them. I waste less time, in worry, in fear, in anger, in pleasing people I don't like and don't wish to like. I spend more time with people I love and doing the things that I love such as gardening, reading, hanging out with friends. Work now takes second place. I don't mean that I work any less hard but success or even failure have lost the importance they once had. If I mess up, I mess up. — Sally Brampton

The falseness of the seventeenth century became a large measure of the truth by the nineteenth. Money made the man, or at least went a long way toward doing so; and death became the occasion for a final accounting, a stocktaking of worldly success. Of course, there were other metrics: virtue, martyrdom, political standing, fraternal ties. But it took money to publicize them. The funeral became more and more a standardized commodity whose cost could be matched with exquisite precision to the class and degree of 'respectability' of the deceased. When one bought a funeral, one bought a more or less splendid parade, each additional bauble, each horse, each feather or set of nails adding to the base price. Bit by bit, finery accumulated, and by looking at the account books of an undertaker who specialized in pauper funerals, we can begin to see the bounds of decency in death. — Thomas W. Laqueur

I usually base my characters on composites of people I know. One trumpet player in SIDE MAN is really a mix of four different guys I knew growing up. Patsy , the waitress, is a mix of about three different people. I like doing it that way. I start with the characters, as opposed to plot, location, or some visual element. I write more by ear than by eye. I always work on the different sound of each character, trying to make sure each has a specific voice and speech pattern, which some writers could care less about. — Warren Leight

Today, the lay midwife is a response to a growing home-birth movement. In my own community most physicians have decided to withhold prenatal care from the home-birther. This is judgmental and vindictive. These doctors have decided that home birth is not safe, and by withholding prenatal care they are doing their best to make sure it is unsafe. Often it is lay midwives who step forward to fill the void and help eliminate the unnecessary dangers of home birth. They are essential for screening out women who really should not have a home birth. For considerably less money than a physician charges, they spend many more hours with a pregnant woman before, during, and after the birth. and in most places they courageously face the opposition of the established medical community. — Susan McCutcheon

Such women as you a hundred men always convet - your eyes will only bewitch scores on scores into the unvailing fancy for you - you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in the world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more - the suspectible person myself possibly among them - will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all of these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race (Ch. 26) — Thomas Hardy

Doing more and more with less and less is one form of being generous. In fact, the easiest way to become rich is by being generous. — Robert Kiyosaki

The biggest secret that traders don't want the world to know is that anyone with a more or less sane disposition can do what they're doing. The trick is getting access to the trough, to the P&L, to the "book." The road toward it is tough, treacherous and crowded. On the way there, you will be misled into believing that in order to be a trader you must have a physics PhD, or know how to write code and build models, or have a top-school MBA, or, when all else fails, just be a young Caucasian male. But in the end, it doesn't matter who made it to the top. In the end, it all comes down to merely placing a bet. — Katya G. Cohen

I wonder what Lena is doing now. I always wonder what Lena is doing. Rachel, too: both my girls, my beautiful, big-eyed girls. But I worry about Rachel less. Rachel was always harder than Lena, somehow. More defiant, more stubborn, less feeling . Even as a girl, she frightened me - fierce and fiery-eyed, with a temper like my father's once was.
But Lena . . . little darling Lena, with her tangle of dark hair and her flushed, chubby cheeks. She used to rescue spiders from the pavement to keep them from getting squashed; quiet, thoughtful Lena, with the sweetest lisp to break your heart. To break my heart: my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart. I wonder whether her front teeth still overlap; whether she still confuses the words pretzel and pencil occasionally; whether the wispy brown hair grew straight and long, or began to curl.
I wonder whether she believes the lies they told her. — Lauren Oliver

Stop doing stuff that doesn't help you reach your goals. It sounds simple, doesn't it? It's a shame almost no one does it. The most common way we work more and do less is by working on the wrong stuff. We spend our time doing, doing, doing, even if the doing has nothing to do with our goals, business, or life. — Stever Robbins

The word "holistic" is meant to distinguish their method from the purely numerical process at less-selective state universities or community colleges, where a committee will automatically admit any applicant with scores or grades above an explicit threshold. It's a cagey word, "holistic," borrowed from New Age yogis, Gestalt therapists, makers of herbal toothpaste, and other mystifiers whose prestige depends on your not being able to figure out exactly what they're doing. A more practical and accurate term for holistic admissions is "completely subjective." Kat — Andrew Ferguson

The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive. — Paul Hawken

Economic disaster begins with a philosophy of doing less and wanting more. — Jim Rohn

but if you have studied that, everything since will seem like repetition and all the particulars as to how the Saecular Power of my day was organized will remind you of more or less ancient forerunners, but with less majesty and clarity since the ancients were all doing it for the first time and believed they were on to something. — Neal Stephenson

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned. — Peter Thiel

Is there any place you think is better?" asked Shep. "No," Jackson said readily. "Of course not. They're all the same. It's human nature, man. You give anybody the power to take other people's money, as much as they want, you think over time they'll start taking less? Or work more for it, when they can get away with doing practically nothing? Governments are all the same, man. They eat their own countries until there's nothing left. They're cannibals." Carol — Lionel Shriver

You see, Dash
I was never the girl in your head. And you were never the boy in my head. I think we both knew that. It's only when we try to make the girl or boy in our head real that the true trouble comes. I did that with Carlos, and it was a bad failure. Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head. — David Levithan

In fact, even fleeting feelings of delight can lead to dramatic increases in creativity. After watching a short, humorous video - Beeman uses a clip of Robin Williams doing standup - subjects have significantly more epiphanies, at least when compared with those who were shown scary or boring videos. Because positive moods allow us to relax, we focus less on the troubling world and more on these remote associations. Another ideal moment for insights, according to Beeman and John Kounios, is the early morning, shortly after waking up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. — Jonah Lehrer

The Chinese are not programmed to make decisions quickly, and attempts to force them to do so, wittingly or unwittingly, invariably backfire. Instead, they view things from all angles, over and over again, and while doing so make judgments about the sincerity and trustworthiness of the people they are dealing with. The more impatience Westerners demonstrate, the less trustworthy they are judged to be. — Mente, Boye Lafayette De

Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly. — Amelia E. Barr

The race to make more money to keep up with the rich, he says, is the reason Americans are spending less time with children and less time sleeping. It's also the reason Americans feel less happy, since happiness is partly determined by how well we're doing compared with those around us. The race, he said, will only get more destructive as the rich get richer and more numerous — Robert Frank

You have deep within you the power to fulfill your highest vision of your life. To engage this power you must develop a solid personal relationship with yourself. By doing so, you'll tap into a wealth of inner strength that will allow you to take the necessary actions that build confidence and self-esteem. When you learn to stop hiding your power and use fear to your advantage, you'll become less attached to what others want for you and more attached to what you want for yourself. As this shift occurs, you'll naturally begin to lead a more authentic and passionate life. — Cheryl Richardson

I think one key part of doing more with less is to be more strategic, to realize what the objectives you're truly trying to accomplish are and then to drive with greater focus towards those objectives. — Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

The climb is not for everyone. We all have different gifts, and not everyone is
called to this kind of intellectual climb. I don't mean that the nonclimbers
will see less glory or worship with less passion. There are glories in the valleys. And there are paths into beauties of God that
are less intellectual. I would not dare to claim that those who do this sort of climbing always see or savor more glory than those with wider eyes for the glory that is right there in the meadow. Nevertheless, some of us are wired to make this climb. There
is not much choice in it. We should no more boast about doing it than one should boast about being a morning person. Almost
every time we open our Bibles, we see challenges. Puzzles. Mysteries. Paradoxes. Mountain paths beckon us, but seem to lead in opposite directions. We move toward these paths like bumblebees toward morning glories. — John Piper

He decides he wants both more or less. He'd like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other's brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning. — Ben Fountain

I got to draw monsters, robots and write funny stories. I loved doing that stuff and working with the actors. But it got to be less and less that stuff and more about trying to be everywhere and not being able to do one thing very enjoyably. — Jhonen Vasquez

Socrates claimed famously that one never loses by doing the right thing. Stephen Post and his contributors claim, a little less boldly, that at least the generous will, probably, stay healthy - and, improving on Socrates, they support this claim with careful empirical science, impressive for its comprehensive detail. Here ethics and religion join science and enjoin us to be more caring and healthy. A seminal work, with an urgent message. — Holmes Rolston III

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
--Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive--you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,--
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. — Robert Browning

Again, the most effective (and least destructive) way to help a child succeed - whether she's writing or skiing, playing a trumpet or a computer game - is to do everything possible to help her fall in love with what she's doing, to pay less attention to how successful she was (or is likely to be) and show more interest in the task. That's just another way of saying that we need to encourage more, judge less, and love always. — Alfie Kohn

Success has less to do with what we can get ourselves to do and more to do with keeping ourselves from doing what we shouldn't. — Kenneth Cole

Look at a skilled blacksmith working steel. To the untrained eye, he's merely repeating the same hammer blows, but anyone trained in the art of calligraphy knows that each time the blacksmith lifts the hammer and brings it down, the intensity of the blow is different.
The hand repeats the same gesture, but as it approaches the metal it understands that it must touch it with more or less force. It's the same thing with repetition: it may seem the same, but it's always different. The moment will come when you no longer think about what you're doing. You become the letter, the ink, the paper, the word. — Paulo Coelho

The mental game of business is understanding this Paradox: the better you think you are doing, the greater should be your cause for concern: the more self-satisfied you are with your accomplishments, your past achievements, your 'right moves', the less you should be. — Mark McCormack

Modern medicine has presented us with a Faustian bargain: Our aging bodies can bankrupt our children and grandchildren. We have run into the 'law of diminishing returns' in health care, where we are often doing more and more, with higher and higher technology, at more and more cost, for less and less benefit. — Richard Lamm

I chose to be a photographer twenty-two years ago, but I don't know that I'd make that choice again. Back in the early eighties, I still thought I was doing okay, trying to order and shape the world with my camera. Now that I know a bit more about living and dying, about our planet and its complex problems, I'm a lot less comfortable with my images of people. Still, I haven't a clue what else to do. — Eugene Richards

My personal style comes from jugaad, a Hindi word meaning doing more with less. — Leila Janah

Simplified living is about more than doing less. It's being who God called us to be, with a wholehearted, single-minded focus. It's walking away from innumerable lesser opportunities in favor of the few to which we've been called and for which we've been created. — Bill Hybels

Doing more with less. — R. Buckminster Fuller

It's less about what you do and more about who you are doing it with. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The purpose of time management and getting more done in less time is to enable you to spend more face time with the people you care about and doing the things that give you the greatest amount of joy in life. — Brian Tracy

Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with - and tend to be less skeptical of - social media than adults. They don't try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given. — Danah Boyd

As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid. — Jill Lepore

The less unnecessary effort you put into learning, the more successful you'll be ... Doing the wrong thing with more intensity rarely improves the situation. — Tony Buzan

Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry - banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up, — David Byrne

If you're the dad of a daughter, your job is particularly important, affecting her self-esteem, her autonomy, and her aspirations (according to one study, out of the University of British Columbia, daughters who see their dads doing chores are less likely to limit their
career aspirations to stereotypically female industries, like teaching or nursing). But you can't just talk the talk, you have to actually walk it. We promise, it'll pay off for you, too! Working dads who spend more time with their kids are happier in their jobs. They're also more patient, empathetic, and flexible - and at least one study claims it might just help them live longer. — Jessica Bennett

Oh, Jesus," he said, wheezing with the effort it took to control
himself. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "You little
innocent. I'm fluent in French, but it isn't my first language." It
was plain by the mortified expression in those green eyes that she
didn't understand, so he explained. "Baby , if I can still think
clearly enough to speak French, then I'm not totally involved in
what I'm doing. It may sound pretty , but it doesn't mean
any thing. Men are different from women; the more excited we are,
the more like cavemen we sound. I could barely speak English with
you, much less French. As I remember, my vocabulary
deteriorated to a few short, explicit words, 'fuck' being the most
prominent."
To his amazement, she blushed, and he smiled at this further
evidence of her charming prudery. "Go to sleep," he said gently.
"Lindsey didn't even rate a replay. — Linda Howard

The quest for a contemplative life can actually be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. If we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life, it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer business we can develop an inner quiet. Because we are less hectic on the inside, we have a greater capacity to love ... and thus to be busy, which in turn drives us even more into a life of prayer. By spending time with our Father in prayer, we integrate our lives with his, with what he is doing in us. Our lives become more coherent. They feel calmer, more ordered, even in the midst of confusion and pressure. — Paul E. Miller

That's been one of the best things about doing 'Game of Thrones.' My social circle in London has more or less doubled just by doing it because nearly everyone is based in London. And I hadn't long moved to London before doing it, so it's been really great in terms of meeting people to hang out with while I'm there. — Joe Dempsie

Again, the American people expect us to do what they are doing. It's tightening the belt, it's learning how to do more with less. That's a reality today, and we've got to do that in order to get the private sector growing. — Eric Cantor

The less people that are on the stage, there's more drama. You start living the music with each individual. When you see a band with ten people on stage, just a huge ensemble, you don't know who's doing what. — Greg Lake

You've been striking at her ghost, screaming, 'If you didn't want me to turn out like him, you should have stayed to stop me!'
As his throat worked convulsively, she covered his hands with hers. 'But she can't hear you. So all you're doing is trudging a path that isn't your own, growing more weary of it by the day, wanting more from your existence but believing you're cursed to having less. That is no sort of life for anyone ... '
'How can you have such faith in me?' he asked hoarsely. 'How can you believe in me when I've given you no reason?'
'You've given me plenty of reasons, but there's only one that matters. I love you, Oliver. I can't help myself. That is my reason. — Sabrina Jeffries

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post-Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers...were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action. In the buoyant atmosphere of that moment, confidence in the efficiency of American arms left little room for skepticism and doubt. As a result, senior military leaders left unasked questions of fundamental importance. What if the effect of projecting U.S. military power was not to solve problems, but to exacerbate them? What if expectations of doing more with less proved hollow? What consequences would then ensue? Who wear bear them? — Bacevich

I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him. — Neil Gaiman

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars. — Anonymous

He decides he wants both more and less. He'd like to hang out with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things like going out for icecream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other's brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning. Has the war done this to him, he wonders, inspired by these deeper sensitivities and yearnings of his? Or is it just because he's going on his twentieth year of life? — Ben Fountain

Winston Churchill, who abhorred laziness in other people, himself took a nap every afternoon. He defended his afternoon doze in practical terms as an absolute necessity: You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one - well, at least one and a half, I'm sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities. — Tom Hodgkinson

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, and so on. A few Wall Street CEOs had been fired for their roles in the subprime mortgage catastrophe, but most remained in their jobs, and they, of all people, became important characters operating behind the closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next. With them were a handful of government officials - the same government officials who should have known a lot more about what Wall Street firms were doing, back when they were doing it. All shared a distinction: They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger's syndrome. — Michael Lewis

To most people any radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that yb doing so one is accomplishing one's duty / one's duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the church. For, of course, poor Hansen's case wasn't in any way unique; on a smaller scale, and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates who go through life spreading misery and destruction in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives. — Aldous Huxley

The [economic crisis] means that we have to address the challenges and the risks, and we need to take into account the level of resources. Doing better with less means doing it more together. — Stephane Abrial

It was all a construct that Lawrence's biographers - at least those in the lionizing camp - have been more than willing to accept. Yet in doing so they have glided past one of the most important and fascinating riddles of T. E. Lawrence's life. How was it that a man less than four months in Arabia had come to so identify with the Arab cause that he was willing to betray the secrets of his own nation to assist it, to in effect transfer his allegiance from his homeland to a people he still barely knew? — Scott Anderson

He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business - a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him - which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose. — Neal Stephenson

The law is a crude machine at best, and only spits out something approaching justice of its attendants are committed to justice. As lawyering has become less about doing right and more about doing what you can get away with, our standards of acceptable shenanigans-as-usual seem to be in a free fall. — Holman W. Jenkins Jr.

Doing more with less, is a crucial principle to learn; especially if you're going to be in business in this rapidly changing world. — Robert Kiyosaki

Are we allowing individuals to develop their talents with our current teaching methods? Is there more or maybe less we should be doing? — Adele Devine

The class focuses intensely on making people more comfortable with doing a wider range of things - such as networking, self-promotion, building their own personal brand, cleverly acquiring resources, getting known - that they may have been less comfortable with before. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

It must not be supposed that happiness will demand many or great possessions; for self-sufficiency does not depend on excessive abundance, nor does moral conduct, and it is possible to perform noble deeds even without being ruler of land and sea: one can do virtuous acts with quite moderate resources. This may be clearly observed in experience: private citizens do not seem to be less but more given to doing virtuous actions than princes and potentates. It is sufficient then if moderate resources are forthcoming; for a life of virtuous activity will be essentially a happy life. — Aristotle.

So love goes from feeling like I'm doing cocaine to feeling how I feel about my uncle? I don't want to make companionate love sound like a bummer. It is love, just less intense and more stable. There is still passion, but it's balanced with trust, stability, and an understanding of each other's flaws. — Aziz Ansari

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there's a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you're writing your poem, there's one less scoundrel in the world. And I'd like a world, wouldn't you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I'm certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don't think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say 'We loved the earth but could not stay. — Ted Kooser

Nathaniel kissed me and then Micah good-bye. Normally he would have kissed Micah more thoroughly, because he might not get another chance for hours, but we'd started doing less of the tonsil-cleaning kisses in front of Matthew - not just between the men, but between me and the men, or anyone and anyone. Why? Because Matthew liked to imitate, and he'd gotten sent home with a note from preschool. We'd been left having to explain that certain kinds of kissing was grownup kissing, and he had to be a grownup to do it. He'd accepted our reasoning and filed it away on the same list as driving a car, drinking liquor, or being able to lift weights. It made perfect sense to him that it was just one more thing he wasn't old enough to do, yet. — Laurell K. Hamilton

"The shaking of my butt can never compare to the shaking of my heart. I have no idea what I'm doing or why I'm doing it... ever. I'm scared as hell of being alone but even more frightened of having anyone know it. So with the spotlight shining above my head, I force myself to dance, waiting for the day when a boy won't edit me out for fear of public approval. I can't settle for less. I won't settle for less. And someday, I'll find him, my true love. — Anthony Paull

I'm making 20 times more with Vessel for doing the same amount of work, if not less, than with YouTube. — Anna Akana

Microinteractions are an exercise in restraint, in doing as much as possible with as little as possible. Embrace the constraints and focus your attention on doing one thing well. Mies van der Rohe's mantra of "less is more" should be the microinteraction designer's mantra as well. — Dan Saffer

I think when you're younger, as an actor you have much more of a notion that you are doing something to the audience. But with experience, I think you begin to worry less about what the audience's experience is and concentrate on working with the other actors, and that tends to let the audience do more work. — Peter Riegert