Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I felt like someone had ripped my heart out and tossed it across the other side of the room. There was a burning, agonizing pain in my chest, and I had no idea how it could ever be filled. It was one thing to accept that I couldn't have Dimitri. It was something entirely different to realize someone else could.
I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you must write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.
Many books belong to sunshine, and should be read out of doors. Clover, violets, and hedge roses breathe from their leaves; they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn, while the blackbird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse.
There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.
People ask me why I work so hard and why I have this compassion to reach the top and be great. I respond by telling them, "I work insanely hard because people said I couldn't do it." When someone tells me I can't do something, or that I'll never achieve my goals and visions, I am determined to prove them wrong.
If only the scientific experts could come up with something to get it out of our minds. One cup of fixit fizzle that will lift the dirt from our lives, soften our hardness, protect our inner parts, improve our processing, reduce our yellowing and wrinkling, improve our natural color, and make us sweet and good.
Synthetic or inorganic substances do not contain any 'life force'; they are not dynamic. Everything is made of chemicals, but organic substances like essential oils have a structure which only mother nature can put together. They have a life force, an additional impulse which can only be found in living things.
I try to find clues in the documented record - from the subject's own testimony, from the testimony of other people. When you're writing a biography, you're trying to understand your subject in the same way that you try to understand one of your friends, and that effort at understanding is always very imperfect.
We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).
Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.
After writing several Nutbrown Hare stories, I thought: what might happen when a little hare begins to explore the space around him? (Think of rivers, mountains, fields and trees!) Will there be fun? Oh yes. Will there be trouble ahead? Could be. For you, here are some of the adventures of Little Nutbrown Hare.
The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!
What we've been finding is people are afraid of happiness. They're afraid of happiness because they think we'll stagnate or we'll be blind: that if I'm happy now, I won't keep fighting as hard. If I'm happy now, I won't push as hard to make a better world. That's what pleasure does. Joy does the exact opposite.
The decision to use recognition as an on-the-spot bonus instead of merely pay increases is a fascinating one, because pay increases can create new mental anchors for how much the person feels happy earning, whereas the social recognition program is ongoing, unexpected, and harder to form a mental anchor around.
There are people who have never been taught anything, and know everything, have never been anywhere, and understand everything, have never given a moment's thought to anything, and comprehend everything. 'Blessed hands' is the name bestowed on these fortunate beings. The world envies, honours and respects them.
We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.
If you spend time with crazy and dangerous people, remember – their personalities are socially transmitted diseases; like water poured into a container, most of us eventually turn into – or remain – whoever we surround ourselves with. We can choose our tribe, but we cannot change that our tribe is our destiny.
Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.
Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.
Believing you are worthy of love means that you believe I deserve to be treated well - with respect and dignity. I deserve to be cherished and adored by someone. I am worthy of an intimate and fulfilling relationship. I won't settle for less than I deserve. I will do whatever it takes to create that for myself.
Not even the deepest sleep will give you such a rest as meditation can. The mind goes on jumping even in deepest sleep. Just those few moments in meditation your brain has almost stopped. ... You forget the body. ... You feel such pleasure in it. You become so light. This perfect rest we will get in meditation.
The Vedas give information on various subjects. They have come together and form one book. And in later times, when other subjects were separated from religion - when astronomy and astrology were taken out of religion - these subjects, being connected with the Vedas and being ancient, were considered very holy.
I believe that if the silent majority were to protest against those who believe in irrational blind faith - who want to go backwards instead of forward, who are for tradition not innovation, who oppose individualism and plurality of thought - then the world would become a truly civilized world in which to live.
People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.
That was always the dream, wasn't it? 'I wish I'd known then what I know now'? But when you got older you found out that you NOW wasn't YOU then. You then was a twerp. You then was what you had to be to start out on the rocky road of becoming you now, and one of the rocky patches on that road was being a twerp.
We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute.
Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and fagot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.
We forget how the Greeks and Romans prevailed magnificently in a barbaric world and how that triumph ended-how a slackness and softness finally overcame them to their ruin. In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security and a comfortable life; and they lost all-comfort and security and freedom.
Vast volumes of mixed media surround us, from music to games and videos. Yet almost all of our online actions still begin and end with writing: text messages, status updates, typed search queries, comments and responses, screens packed with verbal exchanges and, underpinning it all, countless billions of words.
The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.
The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
I start out giving characters archetypes and parameters. Once I know the basics and have a rudimentary model, it's easier to carve unique curves and edges. It's quite easy to guess how a character is going to react if you know their background, and at a certain point, you realize you understand them personally.
It usually just comes to committing your whole day to the Lord from when you first wake up in the morning. Just being totally available to God and leaving the results to Him. We don't work for answers or trying to convince someone of something. It is just being available to share and leaving the results to God.
There's not a day I live that doesn't start with me getting up and first saying, "What can I do for somebody else?" Whether that means sending something to one of my children or picking up the phone and calling a stranger who is in the hospital, I start every day by wanting more for others than I do for myself.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, among the world's richest men, believes his personal fortune can erase the liberty of every American who would exercise the right to keep and bear arms. He plans liquidation of our rights a step-at-a-time - spending millions of dollars of his bottomless personal fortune at a time.
Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: 'You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?' But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.
[The taxidermist is] a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future (...) The indifference of the many, combined with the active hatred of the few, has sealed the fate of animals.
And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.
I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity.
You'll never meet a happy ungrateful person, or an unhappy grateful person because gratitude and happiness go together. Sometimes happiness precedes gratitude but often gratitude precedes happiness. The latter is achieved by realising things could be worse but aren't and so feeling relieved, grateful and happy.
When you do more than you're paid for eventually you will get paid for more than you do. This is a basic truth that also applies to Business, Sales or anything you do. Whatever your endeavor always provide more service than you get paid for and you will develop a reputation that will separate you from the rest.
Sometimes she wished for someone she could tell about her problems, just to be able to say, ‘I’m in love with a man and I can’t have him.’ But that would only lead to questions she couldn’t answer, so she kept the secret and the pain inside, hoping someday she would no longer feel as if half of her were missing.
You know, by 1936, Hitler was already talking very loudly about his desire to expand to the east. Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony. So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.
Prayer is never an acceptable substitute for obedience. The sovereign Lord accepts no offering from His creatures that is not accompanied by obedience. To pray for revival while ignoring or actually flouting the plain precept laid down in the Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble.
Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of that most Ancient Mystery, that Majesty which philosophers call the first cause, but which we call our Father which art in heaven.
For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.
I hope the two of you will descend from your love bubble long enough to learn something today," he sniped cuttingly and the other kids snickered. Embarrassed, I ducked my head to avoid eye contact with them. "It's all right, sir," Xavier replied. "The bubble's been engineered to allow us to learn from within it.
I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was 'The Little Mermaid,' and I don't know if you remember 'The Little Mermaid,' but it's dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.
I love my own culture. I love my African-American culture very deeply, and I know it deserves to be honored. You have to be aware that people are suffering unjustly, and given our own history we have a duty to stand for the people who are being treated like our parents and grandparents and children were treated.
Altruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesn’t stipulate whether those others should be one’s family, or the homeless, or society as a whole. Collectivism states that, in politics, society comes first and the individual must obey. Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics.