Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are twelve good reasons for failure. The first one is the avowed intention of doing no more than one is paid to do, and the person who makes this avowal may see the other eleven by stepping before a looking glass.
In politics we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big-business agents on one hand; and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
The Ultimate Reality is that everything you think you need, you already have. It exists inside of you. Indeed, it is you. You are what you need - and therefore, you give yourself everything you need in any given moment.
Remember, you are constantly in the act of creating yourself. You are in every moment deciding who and what you are. You decide this largely through the choices you make regarding who and what you feel passionate about.
You cannot know God until you've stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you've already heard God. I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.
Christianity is more than history; it is also a system of truths. Every event which its history records, either is a truth, or suggests a truth, or expresses a truth which man needs to assent to or to put into practice.
Every person, if he is to have mental health and live successfully, must move away from past failures and mistakes and go forward without letting them be a weight upon him. The art of forgetting is absolutely necessary.
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
It is time to stop talking so much about what kind of leaders we want, to give less lip service to what Washington or Wall Street or Hollywood should do, and to act a lot more like citizens who actually deserve freedom.
There never will be a trust in excellence or a combination in superiority. As long as you can do a thing a little better than anybody else can do it, you need no bond or trade-mark to protect the product of your brains.
She's easy to lead around, a shiny present here, a pretty compliment there, and you have true love and a popped cherry sacrificed to the god of deception and hormones. Young girls are so ridiculous--so predictably easy.
Like at the DMV when you've passed your driver's test and had a really bad picture taken and you're waiting for them to bring you your license?" Jack said. "Exactly, only without the filth and peasants," Aphrodite said.
If your hope disappoints you, it is the wrong kind of hope. You see, hope in God never disappoints, precisely because it is hope *in God.* This means that hope placed in any other thing will always end up disappointing.
If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. —THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS
Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
Concentration is the key to economic results. No other principle of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.... Our motto seems to be, "Let's do a little bit of everything."
We can ill afford to have activities conducted as "non-profit," that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.
The world economy is not yet a community--not even an economic community...Yet the existence of the "global shopping center" is a fact that cannot be undone. The vision of an economy for all will not be forgotten again.
We take life for granted, sleepwalking until a shattering event knocks us awake. Zen says, don't wait until the car accident, the cancer diagnosis, or the death of a loved one to get your priorities straight. Do it now.
Man has learned how to challenge both Nature and art to become the incitements to vice! His very cups he has delighted to engrave with libidinous subjects, and he takes pleasure in drinking from vessels of obscene form!
Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.
No, no, don't let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration.
Or maybe, he thought now, he just didn't recognize all those other girls. The way a computer drive will spit out a disk if it doesn't recognize the formatting. When he touched Eleanor's hand, he recognized her. He knew.
When secularization has had its full sway, it will leave a generation devoid of shame. And if you show me a generation that lacks shame, I will show you a generation that is monstrous in its appetite... never satisfied.
I have always marveled that so many religions exact such revenge against dissenters. It only weakens the appeal of their faith and contradicts any claims they might have made that 'all religions are basically the same.'
I would have thought that one of the things one should learn from college is that nothing is guaranteed. Even if you study something as vocational as accountancy, you still may end up not getting a job as an accountant.
One wonders how people in primitive societies, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Pure experimentation? Perhaps not.
Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. But when praying, we come "underneath," where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent.
One remarkable feature of the devotional masters is the incredible sense of uniform witness in the midst of such diverse personalities... and the necessity of Christian simplicity is one of their most consistent themes.
Research suggests that exposure to the natural world - including nearby nature in cities - helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.
Almost everyone believes that at some level birthmothers make a choice to give their babies away. ...Adoption is rarely about mothers' choices; it is, instead, about the abject choicelessness of some resourceless women.
The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences.
When you wish for so long that you could hear something, and then suddenly, with no warning, you do, it is like a lightning strike and rain on parched ground at the same time. You're stunned, but you cannot hear enough.
There are countless books written on self-defense. Not all are non- sensical, but many are. Nathaniel Cooke has clearly thought a great deal about the subject and distilled its essence in a way that is wholly admirable.
Priestly stewardship suggests that creation is not just for us, that it has purpose independent of the uses we can make of it. All of creation-human and nonhuman alike-exists ultimately for God and to the praise of God.
Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.
I think that ultimately the Christian vision of sexuality - the New Testament vision - is not compatible with same-sex marriage. And I don't see a way to change that without entering into a kind of deception, basically.
I'm not a type of grandmother sitting in a rocking chair. I'm a lot in the theater. I'm a lot at concerts. I'm a lot at friends.' I like to go out for dinner. I don't have to be home one night a week if I don't want to.
I just had a thought that perhaps religion is so vibrant here is because of the melting pot aspect to our society. WE have so many cultures here in the US and they all bring something new to their religious experiences.
An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
He raked his fingers through his hair. "She doesn't need me." Ralston smirked. "You are laboring under that mistaken impression that it is their job to need us. In my experience it is almost always the other way around.
I discovered that Robert Todd Lincoln was there for each of the first three assassinations. I wanted to write about the Lincoln Memorial, so when I found out he had attended its dedication, that helped focus it further.
Being an artist isn't a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It's an attitude we can all adopt. It's a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you're an artist.
People with little money seldom realize that people who have a lot of money are also frightened. ... If security is based on having money, it doesn't matter whether you have a little or a lot, you're going to be afraid.