Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.
I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.
It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.
A gentleman can always be told by the way he speaks to those that he thinks are his inferiors in some respect. His equals he does not wish to offend, his superiors he does not dare to offend, and of those whom he considers his inferiors he would be all the more considerate.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know that I definitely don't want to be a consistent plastic surgery, cosmetic kind of scenario. I don't like going to the hospital. I don't want to put myself through pain. So I'm very limited; I know what I need, and then I call it a day.
My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.
The key to lasting happiness and real pleasure in this world is not found in seeking gratification, but in pleasing God. And while the Lord desires that we enjoy His gifts and the people to whom we are joined, He wants us to know that we were created first for His pleasure.
I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday, I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary.
Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he or she is in. That person must reflect what is projected upon him or her.
When I go visit my brother monks in Japan and sit down with other Zen Masters, they look at my crazy clothes and my strange expression, but they feel the power that emanates from my dedication to the practice. So they are comfortable with me, yet they're very uncomfortable.
Fear is about survival. When you drop under that and experience the fear without trying to change it, just letting it be, then it becomes still. When you open your heart to fear, rather than trying to fight it or deny it or even overcome it, then you find it is just energy.
Every decision that you make either moves you toward your personality, or toward your soul. Each decision you make is an answer to the question, 'How do you choose to learn love?', 'How do you choose to learn authentic empowerment-through doubt and fear, or through wisdom?'
The real Jack Johnson was both more and less than those who loved or those who hated him ever knew. He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing - no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female - could keep him for long from whatever he wanted.
Suppose you didn't know him, would that make any difference?' 'No,' said Willie, after thinking a little. 'Other people would know him if I didn't.' 'Yes, and if nobody knew him, God would know him, and anybody God has thought worth making, it's an honor to do anything for.
There's also something about your bed; it's sort of a symbol of yourself and of your marriage, if you're married. Making your bed doesn't seem to be an important thing in a happy life, and yet it can be that tiny foothold into a more orderly life that sometimes people need.
I learned to see myself and my role as a capitalist... as somebody who's trying to harness, for myself and for society, the power of greed and the power of the will to acquire into something that makes the world a better place. That's the version of capitalism that we want.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.
As educators, we are only as effective as what we know. If we have no working knowledge of what students studied in previous years, how can we build on their learning? If we have no insight into the curriculum in later grades, how can we prepare learners for future classes?
Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing everyone a disservice by perpetuating the idea that beautiful is better than plain, because having done everything just about that you can do, sparing no expense, and not effort, to become better looking, I know that only so much can be done.
Many of us delude ourselves with the thought that if we could stand in the lot of our more fortunate neighbor, we could live better, happier and more useful lives. ... It is my experience that unless we can succeed in our present position, we could not succeed in any other.
The best counsel for us to give young people is that they can arrive back to Heavenly Father only as they are guided and corrected by the Spirit of God. So if we are wise, we will encourage, praise, and exemplify everything which invites the companionship of the Holy Ghost.
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
It is far more independent to travel on foot. You have to sacrifice so much to the horse. You cannot choose the most agreeable places in which to spend the noon., commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse.
Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.
An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancyfor building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.
It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.
The implausible, well-nigh-miraculous functioning anarchy that we know as New York is adorned with every excellence of Western art. It is a city of manifold suggestions, which ministers to every ambition, engenders a thousand talents, nurtures ingenuity and experimentation.
I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death
Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.
He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetness of spirit did not exist.
We need to actually teach kids that books aren't like broccoli. You don't have to eat every bit on your plate. It's like secret adult's business. It's the secret we never, ever tell our children. No adult ever read a book because it's good for us. We read because it is fun.
There is something else that is trying to come through - that lure of becoming - and it does come from the realm of spirit, it does come from the quantum universe, it does come from the great spark that is the threshold of time and history trying to emerge and electrify us.
Journalists are among a select group, along with warriors and executioners who are authorized to do harm. As James Fallows says, a lot of journalists think that isn't so, and that everything will wash out ultimately. But I don't think they are aware of the long-term damage.
When you don't take responsibility, when you blame others, circumstances, fate or chance, you give away your power. When you take and retain full responsibility - even when others are wrong or the situation is genuinely unfair - you keep your life's reins in your own hands.
In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.
Truth is we must plant and we must water if we are to make progress with our children in holiness but only the Holy Spirit can change our children more and more into the likeness of Jesus. Our problem is we tend to depend upon our planting and watering rather than the Lord.
Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information ... explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.
There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.
If I lived through the next day or so, I needed to start keeping track of where these jokers liked to get their bloodthirsty freak on. It might give me an edge someday. Or at least a list of places that could use a nice burning down. I hadn't burned down a building in ages.
If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down.
An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm.
I had a lot of fun with those guys from the Wall Street. The laughter is unlike most settings you'll find. The level of intensity, the adrenaline, the stakes are incredible. I mean it is addictive. I can understand why people end up spending 23 or 24 hours a day hitting it.
Loving others in a biblical manner involves your thoughts, words, and actions and is a sign of your being a disciple of Christ. Loving others biblically is dependent on your commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and is not dependent on people, circumstances, or your feelings.
Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.
Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
The cell was the first invention of the animal kingdom, and all higher animals are and must be cellular in structure. Our tissues were formed ages on ages ago; they have all persisted. Most of our organs are as old as worms. All these are very old, older than the mountains.
Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it, too, is dead.
Senator, my answer is that the independence and integrity of the Supreme Court requires that nominees before this committee for a position on that court not forecast, give predictions, give hints, about how they might rule in cases that might come before the Supreme Court,.