Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What was so moving for [Diane Wilson], and also for me, is that she felt the Bay itself was like her grandmother. She said, "I don't think there's a woman alive who would give up fighting for her child, or her mother, or her grandmother."
Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation. [However disappointment can always be removed if we remember it could have turned out worse.]
Whether it's a fully enlightened Christ or Buddha, or just a more aware Martin Luther King, Kennedy or Gandhi, what did they do with them here? They shoot them, crucify them, and get them out of the way because people are afraid of truth.
Qualityless simply means there is no way to discuss it. There is no way to pin it down. It could be anything at any given moment since infinity is not bound even by itself, nor the words that human beings choose to try and talk around it.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago a very powerful civilization lived in what we now call North America. They congregated around power places - interdimensional vortexes where it is very easy to shift from one plane of reality to another.
All of the systems that present different worlds, planes of being and energy centers ultimately fail if you try to make them all-inclusive. They are symbolic representations of something that lies beyond the world of thought and analysis.
A teacher of knowledge and power gives you experiences in other dimensions. They show you that the universe is much bigger and more fascinating than you had ever imagined. They give you direct and immediate experiences in other realities.
There are dimensions of power, there are dimensions of knowledge, and there are dimensions of confusion. The universe is a very, very big place. To think the universe is only composed of the physical universe is to be rather shortsighted.
The dialectical change of mind that occurs in Buddhism is not simply the assimilation of a new philosophical basis or religious basis for viewing and interpreting experience. Rather it is the complete structural revision of that which is.
Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.
The theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.
Religion embarrasses the commentators. It is offbounds. An editor of the old Life magazine once assigned me a book on religion with remark that I was the only 'religious nut' - his term for a believer - in his stable of regular reviewers.
Rain amplifies your mistakes, and water on the track can make your car handle unpredictably. When something unpredictable happens you have to react to it; if you’re reacting at speed, you’re reacting too late. And so you should be afraid.
The black asphalt wouls shimmer with vapors I had a theory about those vapors...not released by the sun but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry... I thought about the giant onion, that remarkable bulb of sadness.
Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started 'Wine Library TV.' They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.
Most people use their energy attempting to rearrange circumstances that trigger painful emotions. Changing external circumstances will not change your rigid patterns of emotional response. That requires looking at the patterns themselves.
With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.
There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.
I do have shout-outs to bands and musicians I like in my books, but the musical references can be misunderstood. Often, I have people listening to music that I would never listen to personally, because it fits and defines their character.
The pope [Francis] speaks with great passion about the shame we should all feel when, as he puts it, "a man does not have the dignity of earning bread for his family," but is turned into a peripheral person, a welfare client, a dependent.
For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent.
To the world's most perfect woman. It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.
I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.
It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.
Defy the crowd. The crowd isn’t always wise. It can also lead you down a path of silliness, sub-optimal choices, and downright destruction. Enchantment is as necessary for people to diverge from a crowd as it is to get people to join one.
I started my career counting diamonds and schlepping gold jewelry around the world. The jewelry business is a very, very tough business - tougher than the computer business. You truly have to understand how to take care of your customers.
Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it, piece by piece - by thought, choice, courage, and determination.
There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin - your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.
Know that wherever you are in your life right now is both temporary, and exactly where you are supposed to be (otherwise you would be somewhere else). Be at peace with where you are while taking your next step toward where you want to be.
Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us; but most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.
I find the concept of intelligent design rather dishonest. One should openly stand up for the existence of Allah, should sincerely stand up for religion, for Islam. Or, if one is a Christian, one should honestly stand up for Christianity.
The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm.
"Do you believe in intuition?" "No, but I have a strange feeling that someday I will." People who take cold baths never have rheumatism, but they have cold baths. Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
If we look for human frailty in humans, we will always find it. When we focus on finding the frailties of those who hold priesthood keys, we run risks for ourselves. When we speak or write to others of such frailties, we put them at risk.
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.
If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there.
The artist, viewing his fellows through his personal vision, has through the ages attempted to portray what he sees and to present his understanding of it. Censorship in his case has perpetrated heavy and sometimes reprehensible blunders.
People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.
Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.
Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
We are all these things [...]. Pride, desire, compassion, cleverness, belligerence, fruitfulness, loyalty...and guilt. But above it all stands love. And if we desire to be more than human, that is the star by which we must set our sights.
A politician thinks of the next election; a statement of the next generation. A politician looks for the success of his party; a statesman for that of his country. The statesman wishes to steer, while the politician is satisfied to drift.
As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good.
I became an author because I love words. I enjoyed playing with them when I was a kid, writing stories and plays, and doing whatever I could think to do with words. I kept my love of them growing up and still love to see what they can do.