Best 9 quotes of Jessica Weisberg on MyQuotes

[Chesterfield] introduced an ethical question that Americans continue to grapple with: Is it okay to say one thing while believing another? Or to put it another way: What's more important, honesty or politeness? Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, picked up on this question in 1972 when he published /Sincerity and Authenticity/, in which he defines two distinct terms that he believed Americans had conflated. He describes sincerity as the "congruence between avowal and actual feeling." A sincere work is literature is one in which the author seeks to convey exactly what she's thinking-- your comfort be damned. Authenticity, meanwhile, is a matter of personal integrity: you know what you're being authentic, even if other people don't. It's a virtue that puts little stock in what other people think and instead emphasizes determination and self-awareness. Using this parlance, Chesterfield urged his son to be authentic but never sincere. He wanted his son to be purposeful when he chose to imitate someone. "I would much rather have the assent of your reason to my advice than the submission of your will to my authority. This, I will persuade myself, will happen," he wrote Phillip. He hoped that Phillip would learn to calibrate his behavior in service of his goals. But sincerity, for Chesterfield, was for chumps. He instructed his son to never share his true feelings or thoughts, to never appear vulnerable or emotional. There is no need for sincerity if you have no self to begin with. And Chesterfield had no self, only a resume.

Down the hall where free day care was being offered, children of parents in the workshops were likewise learning Imago dialogue, and I stopped in to watch. 'What I'm hearing you saying is my bike was in the driveway and you hurt your leg,' one second grader told another kid. 'Did I get that right?

I can't speak to whether vegetarianism is healthy. But as Alcott realized, it offers something that other diets cannot: an identity. Once can be a vegetarian, while most other diets are something one can do. He recognized that a diet wasn't merely how one ate, but how one lived.

In 1859, the author Samuel Smiles published a book called Self-Help. (It's the first known use of the term.) In it, he explains that perseverance is the key to success. Accomplished people work harder than regular people. Success is anyone's for the taking. All you have to do was drill down-- get up earlier, stay up later, and apply yourself. Carnegie applied this same ethos to popularity. Anyone can be popular if they smile a lot and perfect the art of the compliment. All self-help, Carnegie included, promises that the world isn't rigged. That no dream is too big. That we can re-create ourselves to be prettier, smarter, more productive and more likable. Self-help recasts personality traits as skills. It posits that anything can be learned.

Onstage, Hendrix was trying to get a young couple to engage in a dialogue sequence. The pair sat in armchairs facing each other, and Hendrix old the man, Michael, to pay his wife of three months, Tara, a compliment. 'What I appreciate most about you is that you're a good cook,' Michael said. 'So what I'm hearing you saying is that you appreciate that I'm a good cook,' Tara said, She seemed bored. To prompt Michael, Hendrix began, 'When I think about you as a good cook, I feel--' 'When I think about you as a good cook,' Michael said, 'I feel full, sleepy, and-- sexy.' 'Really?' asked Tara, a little annoyed. The woman sitting next to me groaned. Hendrix jumped in, 'When I think about you as a good cook, it reminds me of... try to find something from your childhood.' 'When I think about you as a good cook, I--' Michael stopped, then started over. 'When the house smells good, it reminds me of home and when my mom cooked and I feel loved.' Tara repeated him, her eyes now glassy with affection. Unprompted, she spoke the next line in the sequence: 'Is there anything more to that?' There wasn't. They hugged for sixty seconds as the rest of us watched. Hendrix told the crowd that the length of the average hug is three to nine seconds, but that a good hug, one that 'pushes the boundaries of relationship,' takes a whole minute.

Probity, virtue, honor, though they should have not received the polish of Europe, will secure to an honest American the good graces of his fair countrywomen.' In America, , in other words, sincerity mattered more than style. And Chesterfield had become synonymous with all the vapid formality that Americans had fought to free themselves from.

The neccissity of joy and the so-called body check remain the basic tenets of the Martha Beck life coaching method... Beck and her acolytes bristle at the word advice-- only you, your body, can know what brings it joy. But she has a fairly definitive dos-and-don'ts list for joyful living. Do meditate. Do use agential verbs, as in 'I choose to pull an all-nighter.' Don't use passive words, as in 'I have to pull an all-nighter.' Do what you love. Don't succumb to other people's expectations. She believes the body is your friend and the brain is not, that language is the root cause of most psychic pain. 'We're the only species that can create a belief in reality because of the use of abstract language,' she said.

This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career-- something to work at, work on, 'make an effort' for and subject an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interest of not attaining grace, but of improving one's 'relationships'-- is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited by adolescents,' Didion wrote. 'The message that large numbers of people are getting... is that this kind of emotional shopping around is the proper business of life's better students, that adolescence can now extend to middle age.

Thy say that regular belly laughs are key to a happy marriage, even if they're forced. Like Dale Carnegie, they believe that smiling can make you happy.