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Modesty is related to diffidence, diffidence is related to shyness, Shyness is a synonym for timidity, timidity is a characteristic of the meek, the meek do not inherit the Earth, they serve those who are self confident and self assertive.
The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.
He is different, and there will be many people you love who will be unhappy with you. You don’t want them to feel you’ve dishonored them. Yes, I know how it is. But life is short. A chance for great happiness doesn’t come along all that often.
What popped up more than that was the realization that I made as an adult that the world is this incredibly complex, layered, and mysterious place and if you stop and think about it the human cell is literally more complex than a fleet of 747s.
All I asked was that I be spared surprises, although, in this world of six billion souls, all acting with free will and too many with audacity, surprises are inevitable, too few of them are the kind that make you smile and that lift your heart.
In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we alow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things extraordinary.
The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness is an opportunity for a lost and selfish heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls
If we were always conscious of the fact that people precious to us are frighteningly mortal, hanging not even by a thread, but by a wisp of gossamer, perhaps we would be kinder to them and more grateful for the love and friendship they give to us.
I'm small, I'm young - and I'm so different. You've always respected that difference, and you've always trusted it. Trust me now. There's a reason I am the way I am, and there's a reason I was born to you. There's always a reason. We belong together.
They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.
Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.
I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.
Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.
When things are baffling they usually don't unbaffle themselves.There's just, you know, a certain amount of baffling stuff that always, like, really baffles you, and I've found that it's best to accept bafflement whenever it comes along, and then move on.
I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.
The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.
I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.
All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.
Change isn't easy... changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That's hard... When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change because the misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.
...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.
After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.
Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity. Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.
Little mouse, you were so quick, so bright, so sweet, so full of life. And you still are everything you were then. None of it’s lost forever. All that promise, all that hope, that love and goodness—it’s still inside you. No one can take the gifts God gave you. Only you.
Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.
All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls.
This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.
As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.
That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.
No one's life should be rooted in fear. We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.
But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.
The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them, is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest. We carry within us a divine spark, and if we chose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope.
Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.
Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent," said Dusty. "But the word isn't accurately descriptive of a person." Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, "Oh, really, not accurately descriptive? Be careful housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if I were a cannibal?
There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.
In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.
Have fun, entertain yourself with your work, make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you'll have a happy life.
I am the One, and I see all. But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.
The retriever took each bit of meat from his master's hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love with which the angels regard God.
We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.
Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a relentless force. Family is a relentless force. Faith is relentless force. The human spirit is relentless, and the human heart outlasts - and can defeat - even the most relentless force of all, which is time.
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
All I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.... The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are the most humorless, though in the movies they frequently get some of the best lines.
The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss.
There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?
If I waited until I felt creative, I would never have had a career. I long ago learned that a day that starts out badly, when nothing comes out on the page or comes out wrong, can suddenly turn into a good day a few hours later, when suddenly everything starts to click. The brain can be cajoled into being creative.
Another way to be awakened by the beauty and complexity of the word is to get a dog. Small Things like a plant that I had passed a thousand time and never given a second thought to. But the dog is curious. And the dog stops and wants to smell this and smell that. And the dog makes you look and focus and take the time.
The more you expect from life, the more your expectations will be fulfilled. By laughing, you do not use up your laughter, but increase your store of it. The more you love, the more you will be loved. The more you give, the more you will receive. Life proves that truth every hour, every day. And life continues to surprise.
When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.
Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, bro.
The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.