Thomas Nagel Quotes

A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.

Thomas Nagel

• motivation
• Behaviour
• Intelligible

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Quotes to Explore

• The only thing worse than an active conscience is one that's retroactive.

  

  Harold Coffin
  • Conscience
  • Active
  • Worse

• From my own internal fanboy perspective, there's nothing that I hate more than seeing a three minute trailer for a movie where I feel like it's shown me the entire movie.

  

  Damon Lindelof
  • Movie
  • Hate
  • Feel

• Your papers are marked when you go to school, but you can't mark the character.

  

  T. B. Joshua
  • School
  • Character
  • You

• When I went to Juventus, I was young, but in training, I had legends like Fabio Cannavaro and Lilian Thuram marking me. I had to work hard to get my respect.

  

  Zlatan Ibrahimovic
  • Work
  • Respect
  • Training

• I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it's still a work in progress.

  

  Ed Asner
  • Work
  • Progress
  • Acting

• I'm not even kind of a lesbian.

  

  Oprah Winfrey
  • Kind
  • Lesbian
  • Even

• If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

  

  Irving Babbitt
  • Man
  • Democracy
  • saw

• Like I said, I'm just trying to continue to improve and get better.

  

  Karrie Webb
  • Trying
  • Better
  • Said

• But if I keep my core and back strong, the scoliosis doesn't really bother me.

  

  Usain Bolt
  • Strong
  • Me
  • Bother

• As a young boy, scouting gave me a confidence and camaraderie that is hard to find in modern life.

  

  Bear Grylls
  • Life
  • Me
  • Confidence

• I have done the company lifestyle for 16 years, and ballet has changed.

  

  Carla Korbes
  • Done
  • Company
  • Ballet

• Twitter is the marriage of full-tilt narcissism and full-tilt voyeurism that has finally collided in 140 words.

  

  Adam Goldberg
  • Words
  • Marriage
  • Twitter

• Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all.

  

  Adam Gopnik
  • Feeling
  • Accomplishment

• A friend of mine told me a bunch of stuff on Buddhism and about Avicii being the lowest level of Buddhist hell, and it just sort of got stuck in my head. Later on when I went to setup a MySpace, I tried a bunch of names and they were all taken so I just kind of ended up with Avicii and then I got really attached to it.

  

  Avicii
  • Up
  • Friend
  • Taken

• You should never doubt yourself because you never, ever know what's around the corner.

  

  Kellie Pickler
  • Doubt

• The West is not producing enough engineers.

  

  Azim Premji

• First create jobs, and then provide skills to people.

  

  Kumar Mangalam Birla
  • People

• You have to be very careful. If you over-commercialize a social mission, it completely loses its soul.

  

  Daniel Lubetzky
  • Soul

• So much of the world's suffering results from the sinful action or inaction of ourselves and others. For example, people look at a famine and wonder where God is, but the world produces enough food for each person to have 3,000 calories a day. It's our own irresponsibility and self-centeredness that prevents people from getting fed.

  

  Lee Strobel
  • People
  • World
  • God

• If there is not a united policy, this mechanism will not work: it will collapse, and it will... undoubtedly be the end of Schengen, the return of national borders.

  

  Francois Hollande
  • Work

• I always want to abandon myself to my characters, and I never knew if I was actually abandoning myself to Lady Macbeth. I was scared to enter the darkness. Almost every day, I would go back home and be like, 'Oh my God, what am I doing?' I had no idea.

  

  Marion Cotillard
  • God
  • Home

• All early entrepreneurs fall prey to the same problem, which is everyone believes that if you are super intense in the beginning, work long hours, that you can create something quickly and that entrepreneurship is almost something that happens overnight.

  

  Jennifer Hyman
  • Work
  • Long
  • Fall

• A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.

  

  Thomas Nagel
  • motivation
  • Behaviour
  • Intelligible