Wisdom in fragments

Growing up in Pakistan, I saw so many people with heart disease and having heart attacks – it felt almost biblical – it was catastrophic. Unlike a lot of diseases, there wasn't much a cultural footprint for heart disease – it's not something you hear about on news or TV shows.

Cardiologist and author specializing in heart disease and public health

Even if there's no profound cultural difference between brown, black and white Britons… they speak the same language, eat the same food, abstain from going to the same churches… identity culture assigns significance to their bodily differences, and so race exists.

Philosopher, Cosmopolitanism Advocate & Princeton University Professor

You cannot get rid of identities, but you can reform them. You can take a form of identity that's been historically associated with repression and hierarchy, and make it more egalitarian – that's what we've been trying to do with gender.

Philosopher, Cosmopolitanism Advocate & Princeton University Professor

In today's United States, asking a republican parent if it was OK for their daughter to marry a democrat would elicit a response similar to asking parents years ago if their daughter could marry a black person – the polarization is astounding.

Philosopher, Cosmopolitanism Advocate & Princeton University Professor

Identities are useful – if you had to make everything up in your life, from the start, with no input whatsoever – that wouldn't be freedom – you'd be less free; you'd have to think constantly about what you should or should not do. There would be no structure for your life choices.

Philosopher, Cosmopolitanism Advocate & Princeton University Professor

Success really is a team sport. There are very few successful people who competed the journey solo, and figured out how to do everything themselves.

Co-Founder and CEO of Blackstone, Major Philanthropist

Speed and pace are important – the circumstances that brought people to the table can change over time, nothing is forever, nothing is static.

Co-Founder and CEO of Blackstone, Major Philanthropist

I've always felt negotiation is pretty-easy. You have to look at any situation from the perspective of all sides, and find a zone of fairness in between.

Co-Founder and CEO of Blackstone, Major Philanthropist

Excellence is almost a tactile feeling – and it starts with a vision… sometimes a vision that shows you a path that's so good that it cannot not succeed.

Co-Founder and CEO of Blackstone, Major Philanthropist

Excellence means you do the absolute best you can in every situation that you face. It's an aesthetic concept, a performance concept, and helps you create the most perfect balance for success.

Co-Founder and CEO of Blackstone, Major Philanthropist

You start by asking yourself certain questions: who am I? what is it that wants to know who I am? What do I want for myself and the world? What is my purpose? What gives me meaning and purpose in life?

Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

I do not talk about life and death – I talk about birth and death, they are opposites, and life is simply a continuum of both, and you cannot have one without the other.

Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

Most people run around like biological robots, as if we are an algorithm not a being. We become the predictable outcomes of the conditioned reflexes of our nerves, constantly triggered by people in reaction to circumstances.

Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

In higher states of consciousness, we also lose our fear of death. The transcendent you is not in time. Only thought exists in time… only perception exists in time…

Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

When you start questioning and be mindfully aware of your thoughts, you realise that you are an observer of your thoughts, not the originator. You can then extend that observer experience to emotions, sensations, perceptual experience and every aspect of mental space.

Wellness Entrepreneur & Author Promoting Mind-Body Medicine and Spirituality

The reason for having leadership is to be found in the social nature of man. As an individual being man has the ability to act and to direct his own behaviour. But man lives in a society with a complex structure in which the actions of many individuals within groups in a variety of situations have to be directed.