Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'll pit my God against your god any day, I say to the Calvinists. It's not their god I'm praying to.... The God I'm praying to is neither male nor female. My God is the one who exists apart from all of men's agendas, the God who takes you away when there is no possible place you can go.
A teacher in a differentiated classroom does not classify herself as someone who ‘already differentiates instruction.’ Rather that teacher is fully aware that every hour of teaching, every day in the classroom can reveal one more way to make the classroom a better match for its learners.
I grew to understand or really grasp a sense of what the power of being humble is - that becomes a practice. Otherwise you'll be crushed by your fear of being humiliated. It'll control you the rest of your life. I really understood that. I haven't mastered it, I haven't come close to it.
It was like I saw your soul in the notes of the music. And it was beautiful." She leaned forward and touched his face lightly, the smooth skin over his hard cheekbone, his hair like feathers against the back of her hand. "I saw rivers, boats like flowers, all the colors of the night sky.
And as for the Lightwoods," Simon said, "it's not that I like them that much. I mean, I like Isabelle, and I sort of like Alec and Jace, too. But there's this girl. And Jace is her brother." When Samuel replied, he sounded, for the first time genuinely amused. "Isn't there always a girl.
Blue does not go with everything," Will told her. "It does not go with red, for instance." "I have a red and blue striped waistcoat," Henry interjected, reaching for the peas. "And if that isn't proof that those two colors should never be seen together under Heaven, I don't know what is.
[Today's left] would have left us with Slobodan Milosevic in power, Bosnia ethnically cleansed, Kosovo part of Greater Serbia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Iraq the property of a psychopathic crime family. Now, I'm sorry to say, I've no patience with that leftist mentality anymore.
Without illusions. I love you because you are fallible and because your poor misguided testosterone-corrupted brain has you doing cartwheels trying not to be. I love you because of all you are and because of all you're not. And because, no matter what, you are all the man I'll ever need.
I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.
When you’re in love, your brain secretes endorphins into your blood. Organic morphine leaks out of a gland in your skull, feels like a low-grade opium rush. Some people confuse the two, the head rush and the love. You think you’re in love with a person, but you’re in love with a syringe.
I tend to be a person who, when I get interested in something, I get obsessed by it... What happens to me is that I will fall in love with a particular ingredient or a particular dish... Once I make the decision that something has intrigued me enough to draw me in, there is no end to it.
One of the noblest words in our language is "grace," defined as "unearned blessing." We live by grace far more than by anything else. Accordingly, I find that the one thing which I want to put into practice in my own life is the conscious and deliberate habit of finding someone to thank.
Healing blessings come in many ways, each suited to our individual needs, as known to Him who loves us best. Sometimes a ‘healing’ cures our illness or lifts our burden. But sometimes we are ‘healed’ by being given strength or understanding or patience to bear the burdens placed upon us.
A sportswriter's life means never sitting with your wife or family at the games. Still working after everyone has gone to the party... Digging beneath a coach's lies, not to forget those of athletic directors and general managers and owners of pro teams. Keeping a confidence. Risking it.
Anarchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State.
Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.
When you are in love with a man or a woman, the love you feel does not come from him or her; it is the love flowing from you own heart that you feel. Your partner is simply giving you an excuse to love. Love is always found flowing in your heart, not in your family, lover, career or art.
Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force...But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become.
Republicans are already on seriously thin ice, having presided over an era of unprecedented spending and consistently failing to articulate conservative principles on a wide variety of issues. But what Obama has in store will make President Bush appear, in retrospect, like a libertarian.
Turkey Hollow is a small country town in Sullivan County, a remote region of the Catskill Mountains. Surrounded by forests, it counts 10 full-time residents, has no mail service, and no cell phone reception. However, what it lacks in amenities, it compensates for in sheer natural wonder.
There are seeds of happiness in every soul. Our mental attitude and dispositions constitute the environment in which these seeds germinate. There is as much need for sunshine in our heart as for sunshine in the world. Today, as perhaps never before, mankind needs encouragement and cheer.
Only the human heart can live in present moment awareness. The human mind cannot, because its essential nature is to ponder the past and plan the future. This is why all wise beings encourage us to go beyond the mind into the timeless, boundless transcendence of heart-centered awareness.
We're now seeing levels of inequality raise their heads that we haven't seen since the age of the robber barons. If somebody watched The Deuce, and understood the allegory about capital and labor, and understands what happens when one side is vulnerable to the other, that would be swell.
We didn't create the culture of film. We certainly market it better than anyone in the world, but film could have happened anywhere. It's not distinctly American, as witnessed by the fact that there are film communities throughout the world that tell stories to their own cultural liking.
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.
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.
My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.
I resolve to venture into the city on my own. I look at maps in the library—subway maps, bus maps, and regular maps—and try to memorize them. I’m afraid of getting lost; no, I’m afraid of sinking into the city as in a quicksand, afraid of getting sucked into something I can never escape.
You have a talent that is unique in its expression, so unique that there's no one else alive on this planet that has that talent, or that expression of that talent. This means that there's one thing you can do and one way of doing it that is better than anyone else on this entire planet.
The joy in what I do is mostly creativity. I think creativity is an ecstatic impulse that we all have. And there's nothing more joyful than having a moment of creative insight and actually creating, or rather manifesting or incarnating your creative insight into actual, physical reality.
Real happiness comes from having an unassailable connection to the deep state of unbounded awareness at our core. This state of being is our own inner joy that expresses the exuberance and wonder of being alive at this moment; it is our own self-luminous essence made conscious of itself.
Enjoy that?' Tanith said with a little grin. Valkryie grinned back, her eyes bright. 'I keep telling Skulduggery he should get a bike.' What does he say?' He says people who wear leathers, like you, should ride motorbikes. People who wear exquisite suits, like him, should drive Bentleys.
At one point, some years ago, a nice gentleman had it in mind to do 'Outlander' the musical. His idea was to start with a CD of what you call a song cycle, with a dozen high points of the projected show. It turned out very well, though we had to stop doing it when the TV show came along.
The stagnation of the Japanese economy in the past 20 years is eloquent testimony to the fact that government usually gets it wrong. Sometimes it makes the wrong decision because it fails to anticipate the market (as Japan did when it downplayed laptop computers and stressed mainframes).
Sometimes nationalism can be jingoistic - even fascistic - but it can also be a constructive impetus that helps to unify a nation. Those whose nationalist critique of parties finds resonance with masses of voters can acquire vast power. We can only hope that they know what to do with it.
America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being—confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented—is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced.
If Obama came by his liberalism in the faculty lounge, then sure, he can see it hasn't worked, and he can modify it. But if Obama got his formative ideas when he was very young, and if they are the result of his traumatic relationship with his father, then they are built into his psyche.
The argument is not between adding features and simplicity, between adding capability and usability. The real issue is about design: designing things that have the power required for the job while maintaining understandabili ty, the feeling of control, and the pleasure of accomplishment.
I don't believe that we are what we do although many thinkers argue otherwise. I believe that what we do is, very often, a poor approximation of what we are -- an imperfect manifestation of a much better totality. Even the best of us sometimes bite off, as it were, less than we can chew.
I believe the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. I was into habit.
When I started studying the issue and issues related to fatherlessness, I realized I had all of them. Fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, poor work ethic, just stuff that you don't have when you don't have a man in your life to look you in the eye and say, "You're good," or "Good job."
Placing limits on carbon pollution from power plants is about ensuring that we have clean air to breathe and communities that are safe to live in. Carbon pollution limits are about defending families who have borne the heaviest burden of the main pollutant that is driving climate change.
In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks - everybody, it seems - now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country.
When you know who you truly are, there is an abiding alive sense of peace. You could call it joy because that's what joy is: vibrantly alive peace. It is the joy of knowing yourself as the very life essence before life takes on form. That is the joy of Being - of being who you truly are.
Ask yourself what problem you have right now. Not next year, tomorrow or five minutes from now. You can always cope with the now, but you can never cope with the future. Nor do you have to. The answer, the strength and the right action will be there when you need it. Not before or after.
Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis. The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand. (it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
Or perhaps you notice a congregation of ladybugs on a rose stalk. Don't invoke the old nursery saying and ask them to fly away home. Their house is not on fire. Your roses are, with aphids, which the ladybugs are feeding on - and you can bless yourself that they have come to your rescue.
I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny... I forgive him everything.