Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.
Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft–and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.
If you want to feel safe, healthy, and hopeful, try to act as if you did feel that way. "Fake it 'till you feel it." maybe start with health -- try to walk energetically, speak energetically, do physical things.
Life is a rush into the unknown. You can duck down & hope nothing hits you, Or stand as tall as you can, show it your teeth & say: "Dish it up, baby, and don't be stingy with the jalapenos." - must be female ;-)
Know that TODAY, and each and everyday literally becomes the BEST day of your life, when YOU choose to see that it is. It doesn't matter what's going on around you, it only matters what's going on inside of you.
One of the most common outcomes of a depressive illness is a mistreated body. Now is the time to treat your body well. The more you learn to treat yourself well now, the less treatment you'll need down the road.
a true gentleman ... was characterized as the man that asks the fewest questions. This trait of refined society might be adopted into home-like in a far greater degree than it is, and make it far more agreeable.
Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.
Anybody who runs for public office today has got to know his life or her life will be an open book. I've decided that if you want to run for public office you have to decide at the age of 5 and live accordingly.
Heavenly Father has perfect foresight, knows each of us, and knows our future. He knows what difficulties we will pass through. He sent His Son to suffer so that He would know how to succor us in all our trials.
However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?
Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?--to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.
Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge college is as solitary as a dervis in the desert.
Methinks I am never quite committed, never wholly the creature of my moods, but always to some extent their critic. My only integral experience is in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity than I feel.
Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure… For already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale of those.
I ate supper after Dad saw the evening shift down the shaft, and I went to sleep to the ringing of a hammer on steel and the dry hiss of an arc welder at the little tipple machine shop during the hoot-owl shift.
There is much that makes one pause in 'If This is a Man', the record of Levi's 11-month incarceration in Auschwitz, much one cannot read without needing to lay aside the book and inhale the breath of common air.
There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea.
The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.
Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.
Thirty-nine years of my life had passed before I understood that clouds were not my enemy; that they were beautiful, and that I needed them. I suppose this, for me, marked the beginning of wisdom. Life is short.
I suppose there is hardly any one in the civilized world - particularly of those who do just a little more every day than they really have strength to perform - who has not at some time regarded bed as a refuge.
We are at this moment as close to God as we really choose to be. True, there are times when we would like to know a deeper intimacy, but when it comes to the point, we are not prepared to pay the price involved.
What we have to get straight in our heads is that owning the money doesn't mean ANYTHING. "It's the DOING with money that develops us - it's not in the having. And when you have more, you're enabled to DO more."
I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.
It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as "passion" as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept.
Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.
KILL ME!" And then Newt's eyes cleared, as if he'd gained one last trembling gasp of sanity, and his voice softened. "Please, Tommy. Please." With his heart falling into a black abyss, Thomas pulled the trigger.
The capacity for growth depends on one's ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be 'solved,' then no change will occur.
Destiny commands... and imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a normal, casual life... there are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the dimmest of understandings.
We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be ignored when it becomes self-evident that we cannot build stuff that way anymore.
Some kids get called "bundles of joy" or "slices of heaven" or "dreams come true." We got "the fifty-fourth generation of DNA experiments." Doesn't have the same warm and fuzzy feel. But maybe I'm oversensitive.
I knew how good love could be -- I knew it was the best thing I'd ever done in my life -- and yet here I was alone. I was taking chances with my life. I kept telling everybody that I was all right, but I wasn't.
I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.
The paranormal bad boy is usually a fiercely loyal partner for the heroine. Once his sights are set on her, he doesn't notice other women, and he's utterly unconcerned with what anyone else thinks of his choice.
We cannot carry the gospel to the poor and lowly while emulating the practices of the rich and powerful. We’ve been invited into a story that begins with humility and ends with glory; never the other way around.
The message of body acceptance built on Jennifer Lawrence's soundbites only empowers those who are willing to ignore the fact that her statements reinforce our current cultural views rather than subverting them.
Thus Nero went up and down Greece and challenged the fiddlers at their trade. Æropus, a Macedonian king, made lanterns; Harcatius, the king of Parthia, was a mole-catcher; and Biantes, the Lydian, filed needles.
It seems to me that the experiences that stay with you, the things you'll always remember, aren't the ones you can force, or go looking for. I've always thought of those things as the ones that somehow find you.
I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.
I've been fascinated with the subject of loss for a long time. In particular, I'm interested in how people, consciously or unconsciously, spend their lives replacing the things they lost when they were children.
I think that any time a person comes face-to-face with their own mortality - close enough to Death that they can smell its breath - they have a choice: 1) Fall to pieces; 2) Reassemble yourself and keep walking.
It is how we feel about ourselves that provides the greatest reward from any activity. It is not what we get that makes us valuable, it is what we become in the process of doing that brings value into our lives.
Since you cannot control the weather, or the traffic, or the one you love, or your neighbors, or your boss, then you must learn to control you... the one whose response to the difficulties of life REALLY counts.
Amid the push to excellence, with its measurement and accountability, it is easy to lose sight of a key ingredient in reading a book - the pleasure it bring us, something too many boil down to a dirty word: FUN.
When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea.
In pregnancy, there are two bodies, one inside the other. Two people live under one skin. When so much of life is dedicated to maintaining our integrity as distinct beings, this bodily tandem is an uncanny fact.
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe -- to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it -- is a wonder beyond words.