All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
A central notion in the Affordable Care Act was we had an inefficient system with a lot of waste that didn't also deliver the kind of quality that was needed that often put health care providers in a box where they wanted to do better for their patients, but financial incentives were skewed the other way... We don't need to reinvent the wheel; you're already figuring out what works to reduce infections in hospitals or help patients with complicated needs.
Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.
I believe that just as everyone inherits a particular form so does he inherit the particular characteristics and qualities of his progenitors, and to make this admission is to conserve one's energy.
My good qualities are under your protection, and you are to exaggerate them as much as possible; and, in return, it belongs to me to find occasion for teasing and quarreling with you as often as may be.
Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.
This, and no other, is justice: to consider, under all the circumstances and consequences of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action ... there is no other justice.
The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself.