Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too--unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child's trouble.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
For, contrary to the common opinion, it is the wealthy who are greedy of wealth; while the populace are to be gained by talking to them about liberty, their unknown god. And so much are they enchanted by the words liberty, freedom, and such like, that the wise can go to the poor, rob them of what little they have, dismiss them with a hearty kick, and win their hearts and their votes for ever, if only they will assure them that the treatment which they have received is called liberty.
For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats.
Here is my wish for you and every other child, woman, and man on the face of the earth: Spend one week saying only kind, caring things to yourself. Say thank you at least ten times an hour, direct five toward yourself and five to the world at large. Compliment yourself (and others) each time an effort is made. Notice all the wonderful qualities and characteristics about yourself and those around you. One week. You will never go back. And your whole life will be a glorious meditation.
The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community.
Let us instill into the hearts of our children the love of freedom. Teach them that to be free is as precious as life itself. Fight every influence - Socialist, communist, whatever it may be - that would deprive an American citizen of the liberty vouchsafed by the Constitution. Liberty is truth. In truth we find liberty. You teachers, feel it in your hearts; instill it into the hearts of these precious children. May the Church of Jesus Christ ever stand true to the ideals of freedom.
A risk-free life is far from being a healthy life. To begin with, the very word "risk" implies worry, and people who worry about every bite of food, sip of water, the air they breathe, the gym sessions they have missed, and the minutiae of vitamin doses are not sending positive signals to their cells. A stressful day sends constant negative messaging to the feedback loop and popping a vitamin pill or choosing whole wheat bread instead of white bread does close to zero to change that.
Get away from my ex-girlfriend, you moany little whinge-bag.' Caelen took a deep breath, like he was in pain, and stood up. His voice was low, guttural. 'I was hoping I'd get the chance to kill you.' 'You won't be killing anyone, you sad little emo git.' 'You've stood in the way of our love for long enough.' 'Just listening to you makes me want to top myself, you self-pitying Paranormal Romance novel reject.' Caelen glared. 'Stop insulting me.' 'Why? If you cry will your mascara run?
Clarabelle...Clarabelle... You worked as Kenspeckle Grouse's assistant, did you not?' 'One of the. He fired all the others.' 'But not you?' 'He fired me on the second day, but I kept coming in. I had nowhere else to go.' 'And then you killed him.' 'Yes.' 'A Remnant squirmed inside you, and you killed Kenspeckle Grouse.' 'Yes.' Nye grinned. 'You're hired. But I have warn you, if you try to kill me, I will dissect you and sing along to your screams.' 'Can I have Mondays off?' 'You may.
I prayed all the way up that hill yesterday, he said softly. Not for you to stay; I didna think that would be right. I prayed I'd be strong enough to send ye away. He shook his head, still gazing up the hill, a faraway look in his eyes. I said 'Lord, if I've never had courage in my life before, let me have it now. Let me be brave enough not to fall on my knees and beg her to stay.' He pulled his eyes away from the cottage and smiled briefly at me. Hardest thing I ever did, Sassenach.
If your dominant intent is to feel joy while you are doing the work, your triad of intentions - freedom, growth and joy - will come quickly and easily into alignment. See your "career" as one of creating a joyful life experience. You are not a creator of things or a regurgitator of what someone else has created or a gatherer of stuff. You are a creator, and the subject of your creation is your joyful life experience. That is your mission. That is your quest. That is why you are here.
The Risen Christ proclaimed not that we 'have to forgive,' but rather, that at last we CAN forgive-and thereby free ourselves from consuming bitterness and the offender from our binding condemnation. This process requires genuine human anger and grief, plus-and here is the awful cost of such freedom-a humble willingness to see the offender as God sees that person, in all his or her terrible brokenness and need for God's saving power. I would never tell another, 'You have to forgive.'
To translate kinesics or paralinguistic messages into words is likely to introduce gross falsification due not merely to the human propensity for trying to falsify statements about "feelings" and relationship and to the distortions which arise whenever the products of one system of coding are dissected onto the premises of another, but especially to the fact that all such translation must give to the more or less unconscious and involuntary message the appearance of conscious intent.
While the foods were being prepared, I watched as men dragged a foot-operated grinding wheel into an open space, and the groom devoted a tense hour to putting a razor's edge to a large, ornate dagger. The bride's father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man. The groom has just sharpened the knife that the bride's father will use on him, if he ever mistreats the girl.
Frequently also some fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near the coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw fastened to a shed near the lighthouse a long new sign with the words "ANGLO SAXON" on it in large gilt letters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the same time with the pilot. But it interested somewhat as if it had been a part of the Argo, clipped off in passing through the Symplegades.
Lies hold civilization together. If people ever seriously begin telling each other what they really think, there'd be no peace. Good-bye to tact. Good-bye to being polite. Good-bye to showing tolerance for other people's buffooneries. The fact that we claim to admire Truth is probably the biggest lie of all. But that's part of the charade, part of what makes us human, and we do not even think about it. In effect, we lie to ourselves. Lies are only despicable when they betray a trust.
The start of the New Year is a perfect time to start a stop doing list and to make this the cornerstone of your New Year resolutions, be it for your company, your family or yourself. It also is a perfect time to clarify your three circles, mirroring at a personal level the three questions... 1) What are you deeply passionate about? 2) What are you are genetically encoded for - what activities do you feel just "made to do"? 3) What makes economic sense - what can you make a living at?
[...] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun [...] rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant pathworks of colour with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.
I say this in the book [Today Matters], we either spend our day repairing or preparing, and if I haven't taken good care of my today's, they accumulate. So all of a sudden today what I'm doing is I'm going back, I'm repairing bad relationships and wrong decisions, and I'm digging a hole. I'm not making any progress because I'm in a repairing mode, versus if I really make today count that prepares me for tomorrow. Tomorrow really will take care of itself if I do the right thing today.
When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. However, we now recognize that if was the other way around. The God of theism came into being as a human creation. As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying.
[Man] is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know—that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence.
All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture. The only real question is: whose interpretation? People with differing interpretations of Scripture cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve their differences. In order for the Scripture to function as an authority, it must be read and interpreted by someone. According to "solo" Scriptura, that someone is each individual, so ultimately, there are as many final authorities as there are human interpreters.
Sure am glad I'm not royalty," I muttered. "I wouldn't want to have to bump uglies with someone I can't stand. On a regular basis. And no one else." "Ow!" I exclaimed, trying to yank my fingers from Trent but finding them caught. Then I colored, realizing what I'd said. "Oh… sorry," I stammered, meaning it. "That was insensitive." Trent's frown turned into a sly smirk. "Bump uglies?" he said, eyes on the table behind me. "You are a font of gutter slang, Rachel. We must do this again.
It's the hardening of these narratives that makes peace so difficult. If each side can see the narrative, the claims that the other has, then there is a much more likely possibility of making a resolution. But what I see is the opposite. There is a total disclaiming of the validity of the other side, and talk that I find really unsettling, the kind of chatter you get from ultra-right Israelis and Hamas is of annihilation. In that kind of dialogue, there's no way to move toward peace.
I saw myself. . . in the time I watched, I saw strength and frailty, pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly much. Of intentions many good ones; but many more left undone. On this alas, I saw myself a man like any other. But this too I saw . . . Alike as men may seem, each is different as flakes of snow, no two the same.You told me you had no need to seek the Mirror, knowing you were Annlaw Clay-Shaper. Now I know who I am: myself and none other. I am Taran.
Jesse, who had not stirred the whole time from the spot he'd been standing, confident I could handle Cheryl myself, was grinning. "It's every girl's dream to guy to go to prom with the guy she loves?" he echoed, not just one, but both inky black eyebrows raised. "Don't start with me," I said. I tried to hide my suddenly flaming cheeks by scraping away what was left of the cannolis, and replacing them with the contents of an upended bag of chocolate chip cookies. "I have things to do.
Criticizing people, winding them up, making idiots of them or fooling them doesn't make people with autism laugh. What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet, or roar with later in an empty room ... When we don't need to think about other people or anything else, that's when we wear our aural expressions.
She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been given her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, 'Will she be the same?
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.
I was just praying quietly in tongues and I found that a really helpful way to pray. There are other times when I use the gift when I really feel I don't know what to pray or how to pray. I know what I feel but I just can't quite put it in to words, and I use that, I find it a helpful gift. I don't think you need to speak in tongues, I don't think all Christians do speak in tongues, nobody has to speak in tongues, nobody's forced to, but if somebody wants to I think it's a good gift.
The road to success, for me, was a long and arduous journey, strewn with obstacles and traps, pitfalls and hurdles-all created by myself. Painful as it is, I speak of those sad and frustrating times whenever I am invited to address sales gatherings, corporate conventions, and success rallies, in the hope that my personal experiences will serve as sufficient evidence for all who hear me that they have it in their own power to make their lives as glorious or as terrible as they choose.
Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives. With different words, they all proclaim the same core message: "Be not afraid." Though the traditions vary widely in the ways they propose to take us beyond fear, all hold out the same hope: we can escape fear's paralysis and enter a state of grace where encounters with otherness will not threaten us but will enrich our work and our lives.
Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.
When you're a kid, you have no power. You're physically small and weak, and adults are constantly telling you what to do. So it's incredibly compelling to imagine yourself not only as someone to whom exciting things happen but as someone who is more than those around you. The problem is that then you begin to grow up and realize you're just a lowly muggle. … Is it possible that all of us, weaned on these stories, end up inevitably disappointed with mundane life as it actually exists?
From the almost total absence of fossil evidence relative to the origin of the phyla, it follows that any explanation of the mechanism in the creative evolution of the fundamental structural plans is heavily burdened with hypothesis. This should appear as an epigraph to every book on evolution. The lack of direct evidence leads to the formulation of pure conjecture as to the genesis of the phyla; we do not even have a basis to determine the extent to which these opinions are correct.
You're the brightest thing I've ever seen, Kaylee. You're this beautiful ball of fire spitting sparks out at the world, burning fiercely, holding back the dark by sheer will. And I always knew that if I reached out -- if i tried to touch you -- I'd get burned. Because you're not mine. I'm not supposed to feel the fire. I'm not supposed to want it. But I do. I want you, Kaylee, like I've never wanted anything. Ever. I want the fire. I want the heat, and the light, and I want the burn.
I traveled around America and then at nineteen, went to Europe and hitchhiked from London to the Himalayas in India. I studied various forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and in India, various forms of Buddhism and Hinduism. Eventually, I came to the path of unconditional love and devotion to the one God, who in our tradition we call Krishna. I met my guru and became a swami. This allowed me to share that gift, which I consider to be a very deep universal expression of compassion.
I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.
Live by what you believe so fully that your life blossoms, or else purge the fear-and-guilt producing beliefs from your life. When people believe one thing and do something else, they are inviting misery. If you give yourself the name, play the game. When you believe something you don't follow with your heart, intellect, and body, it hurts. Don't do that to yourself. Live your belief, or let that belief go. If you are not actively living a belief, it's not really your belief, anyway.
I woke up early one morning a couple of years ago and felt the tenderness of my being alone, the bitter sweetness of it. It has many colors, being alone. I walked out into my living room and I can say honestly that everything was pouring with life - the red sofa, the chairs with their patterns of roses, even the coffee table with its scattering of books. Everything was alive with the presence of being. Seeing the world though those eyes, I realized that I could never really be alone.
The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.
In the financial markets, however, the connection between a marketable security and the underlying business is not as clear-cut. For investors in a marketable security the gain or loss associated with the various outcomes is not totally inherent in the underlying business; it also depends on the price paid, which is established by the marketplace. The view that risk is dependent on both the nature of investments and on their market price is very different from that described by beta.
The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it's a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that's too hard for me. I'm telling a story I'm not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I'm forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I'll have written something that is better than I am.
I have been asked many times, Why do you laugh so much and make so many jokes? I become serious sometimes-when I have a stomachache! The Lord is all blissfulness. He is the reality behind all that exists. He is the goodness, the truth in everything. You are His incarnations. That is what is glorious. The nearer you are to Him, the less you will have occasions to cry or weep. The further we are from Him, the more will long faces come. The more we know of Him, the more misery vanishes.
It's natural for a person to deny he's a failure as a human being. That's why he searches for somebody who is more miserable than himself. That's why so much animosity exists on the Internet. Those who aren't able to find a more miserable person turn to the Internet and call other people losers, even though they've never met just to make themselves superior. Isn't that pathetic? There's a sense of security that comes from speaking badly of someone else. But that isn't true salvation.
The Savior taught His disciples, 'For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it' (Luke 9:24)."I believe the Savior is telling us that unless we lose ourselves in service to others, there is little purpose to our own lives. Those who live only for themselves eventually shrivel up and figuratively lose their lives, while those who lose themselves in service to others grow and flourish—and in effect save their lives.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
If you want a cow to be not just a cow but a milk machine, you can do a very good job at that by creating new hormones like the Bovine Growth Hormone. It might make the cow very ill, it might turn it into a drug addict, and it might even create consumer scares about the health and safety aspects of the milk. But we've gotten so used to manipulating objects and organisms and ecosystems for a single objective that we ignore the costs involved. I call this the "monoculture of the mind."