Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dear God, I prayed, all unafraid (as we're inclined to do), I do not need a handsome man but let him be like You; I do not need one big and strong nor yet so very tall, nor need he be some genius, or wealthy, Lord, at all; but let his head be high, dear God, and let his eye be clear, his shoulders straight, whate'er his state, whate'er his earthly sphere; and let his face have character, a ruggedness if soul, and let his whole life show, dear God, a singleness of goal; then when he comes (as he will come) with quiet eyes aglow, I'll understand that he's the man I prayed for long ago.
I am pleased as punch no longer to believe in a god who declares reason a sin, who will not choose many noble and great and wise things but has chosen the base things of the world, the foolish things, the weak things and the things which are not. A god who can choose his companions in eternity and prefers Jerry Falwell and Tammy Bakker over Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. I am no longer a fool for Christ's sake. And I have no more desire to be a sheep than to be a fool. It is possible to pull out justification for imposing your will on others, simply by calling your will God's will.
All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty-and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally.
For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong.
Indeed, being a beginner is very difficult right now. Book publishers are in a crisis, sales are dwindling, and publishing houses are losing money, doing their best to survive. It's a sign of the times, the emergence of new kinds of entertainment -- there's nothing we can do about it. I don't think books will perish for good. They could become less widespread, though, falling even further behind movies and computer games. But we shouldn't be afraid of this, because books will always remain the entertainment of choice for intelligent people, of whom there are still many in this world.
When we meditate, what we actually do is enter into a vacant, calm, still, silent mind. We go deep within and approach our true existence, which is our soul. When we live in the soul, we feel that we are actually meditating spontaneously. On the surface of the sea are multitudes of waves, but the sea is not affected below. In the deepest depths, at the bottom of the sea is all tranquility. So when you start meditating, try to feel your own inner existence first. That is to say, the bottom of the sea: calm and quiet. Feel that your whole being is surcharged with peace and tranquility.
Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.
I am thoroughly convinced that no individual or nation can live by holding itself apart from the community of others. Give and take is the law; and if India wants to raise herself once more, it is absolutely necessary that she brings out her treasures and throws them broadcast among the nations of the earth, and in return be ready to receive what others have to give her. Expansion is life, contraction is death. Love is life, and hatred is death. We commenced to die the day we began to hate other races; and nothing can prevent our death unless we come back to expansion, which is life.
It is so important to remember that, as we travel through life, there will be so many events which we can`t control. These are things that seemingly alter our lives forever or become barriers for living a life of fulfillment. It`s important to remember that the ultimate experience of life is not to be controlled by events. We all have difficult events in our lives - the loss of family members, economics, stress, litigation, government interference in our businesses, health challenges. Remember that it is not the events that shape our lives, but, rather, the meaning we attach to them.
On the Upper East Side, women are prisoners to the ideology of intensive motherhood, which is that you should be enriching your child's well-being on every measure you possibly can at every moment. So when your kid is sitting down playing with Legos, intensive motherhood dictates that you should be engaging with him or her somehow, praising, questioning, making it into a learning opportunity. It's not enough to just tell your child, "Do your homework." It's not enough to help with the homework. You go to the school and learn how they do math, so that you can tutor your child in math.
But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.
Her [Mary's] motherhood extends beyond view. In the will of the Son, she becomes at once mother and maid: sheltering him, but sheltered in him, forming him, but formed by him ... When she pronounces the words: 'Be it done to me according to thy word', the Mother conceives the mystery from the Trinity, in order to give it to the Son. The Son gives the word back to the Trinity by giving everything he has back to the Father in the Spirit. Then, after the Father has received it again, it is distributed to mankind by means of that extravagant expansioning-the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit.
I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts.
Each restorational advancement of the Army of the Lord has established denominational forts that are given responsibility to maintain the purity and power of that truth... New recruits are now being drafted and trained and older soldiers and generals are being put through intensified training for the next advancement of the Church Army. They are being purified by the Baptism of Fire... Are you ready? Where do you start? What will you do? A new government must be established, a new way of life for those millions of people. You are now ready to rule and reign on your overcomer's throne!
My relationship with God developed at an early age. I was raised on a remote little ranch, where I had for company and for the fullness of my life three other humans and an enormous amount of animals and land and sky and wind. As a child, my experience of God included everything-a love of the whole beauty around me. And the country was so beautiful: mountains that ended in aspen groves and streams, thick with wild animals and game of all kinds. One time I said to my mother, "You know, I think heaven is just like this, only the animals would speak to us; they wouldn't be afraid of us."
Far away, where the swallows take refuge in winter, lived a king who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elise. The eleven brothers--they were all princes--used to go to school with stars on their breasts and swords at their sides. They wrote upon golden slates with diamond pencils, and could read just as well without a book as with one, so there was no mistake about their being princes. Their sister Elise sat upon a little footstool of looking-glass, and she has a picture-book which had cost the half of a kingdom. Oh, these children were very happy; but it was not to last thus forever.
There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
The reality of the Life Review is becoming part of our every day understanding. We know that after death, we have to look at our lives again; and we’re going to agonize over every missed opportunity, over every case in which we failed to act. This knowledge is contributing to our determination to pursue every intuitive image that comes to mind, and keep it firmly in awareness. We’re living life in a more deliberate way. We don’t want to miss a single important event. We don’t want the pain of looking back later and realizing that we blew it, that we failed to make the right decisions.
My studies have shown that the process of falling into mature love happens in four steps. When you meet a woman, you subconsciously look for cues that she's the kind os person you should be with. That's assumption. If she passes the assumption test, you begin to get to know her to find out if she's appropriate for you. If she is, you're attracted. If, as you get to know her, the attraction is reinforced with joy or pain or both, you'll fall into infatuation. And if you manage to make a connection and attach to each other during infatuation, you'll move into mature, unconditional love.
prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Yeah, I must have been really bad in a past life or something." He smiled, his eyes still in pain. Reaching up, he touched a strand of mt hair. " Don't leave, OK?" "Shhh. I'm not going anywhere." I kept stroking his forehead, trailing my fingers across it. His muscular shoulders gradually relaxed, his eyes closing again. His breathing slowed, became more regular. I could hear the TV on in the other room, the sound of voices. None of it mattered to me. I stayed there until long after Alex had fallen asleep-- gently caressing the vbrow of the boy I loved, trying to keep his pain at bay.
And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict. So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing. -Drizzt Do'urden
Lure him out. Send in a 'customer' with a message from me needing to meet him. I'm not the kind of person he can ignore-well, that he used to not-never mind. Once he's out, we can get him to a place we choose." I nodded. "I can do that." "No," said Dimitri. "You can't." "Why not?" I asked, wondering if he thought it was too dangerous for me. "Because they'll know you're a dhampir the instant they see you. They'll probably smell it first. No Strigoi would have a dhampir working for him-only humans." There was an uncomfortable silence in the car. "No!" said Sydney. "I am not doing that!
I perceive we postpone all our joys of Christ, till He and we be in our own house above, thinking that there is nothing of it here to be sought or found, but only hope and fair promises; and that Christ will give us nothing here but tears, sadness, crosses; and that we shall never feel the smell of the flowers of that high garden of paradise above, till we come there. Nay, but I find it possible to find young glory, and a young green paradise of joy even here. We dream of hunger in Christ's house, while we are here, although He alloweth feasts to all the bairns within God's household.
There's two kinds of evil that horror fiction always deals with. One kind is the sort of evil that comes from inside people, like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The other kind of evil is predestined evil. It falls on you like a stroke of lightning. That's the scary stuff, but, in a way, it's the stuff you don't have to worry about. I gotta worry whether or not I'm getting cavities. I gotta worry about whether cigarettes are giving me cancer. Those are things I can change. Don't give me lightning out of a clear sky. If that hits me I just say, "That's probably the way God meant it to be."
Instead, over the past thirty years, in the world of action and adventure sports, in situations where asses really were on the line, the bounds of the possible have been pushed further and faster than ever before in history. We've seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation's worth of iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the bar but often obliterating it altogether. And this brings up one final question: Where-if anywhere-do our actual limits lie?
What if someone hurts you with a weapon? Wait. Think it over. You probably feel angry. That's normal. But wasn't it the stick striking your body that hurt you? Can you be angry at the stick? Of course not. Should you be angry at the wielder of the stick? Wouldn't it make more sense to be angry at the hatred in the mind of the stick wielder? If you think about it, isn't the end of hatred in the world what you want most of all? Why, then, would you add to it by giving energy to your anger? After all, it will pass on its own if left alone, especially if you respond to it with compassion.
There is more interest in what is occurring in technology companies that impact news. Such companies don't have the same sense of transparency about what they do. They have a tradition of secrecy about products, mores and decision-making that goes along with Silicon Valley and intellectual property and technology. You cannot step onto the grounds of Google without signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement. That industrial secrecy mentality exists along with a theoretical sensibility about transparency on the Web, which is different than transparency inside companies that profit from the Web.
...yet, unbeknownst to him, it had been kept alive - and it was only now, in listening to Deet's songs, that he recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music: he had always had a great love of dadras, chaitis, barahmasas, horis, kajris - songs such as Deeti was singing. Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing and separation - of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home.
You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.
Peeping through my keyhold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brian: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
You sound worked up. Really worked up. No, that's not it. You sound agitated...flustered...aroused." I could feel her eyes widen. "He kissed you, didn't he?" No answer. "He did! I knew it! I've seen the way he looks at you. I knew this was coming. I saw it from a mile away." I didn't want to think about it. "What was it like?" Vee pressed. "A peach kiss? A plum kiss? Or an al-fal-fa kiss?" "What?" "Was it a peck, did mouths part, or was there tongue? Never mind. You don't have to answer that. Patch isn't the kind of guy to deal with preliminaries. There was tongue involved. Guaranteed.
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.
Dear Heavenly Father, I have a friend who stands as close as a brother, a brave soul. I have seen in him the heart of a warrior... He is gallant, loyal, and true, sacrificing his esteem, forfeiting his comfort, even spilling his blood. But, what color is his soul? My friend has a desperate need, and I have seen it. How can I be his accuser, condemning the one who has gladly poured out his blood in my stead? But shall I deny my witness? There is a darkness, a gnawing void behind those eyes of steel... Will you make him a knight, dressed in holy raiment, fit to take a seat at your table?
All right. Are you going to come back? Do you want any soup?" "No," said Jace. "Do you think Hodge will want any soup?" "No one wants any soup." "I want some soup," Simon said. "No, you don't," said Jace. "You just want to sleep with Isabelle." Simon was appalled. "That is not true." "How flattering," Isabelle murmured into the soup, but she was smirking. "Oh, yes it is," said Jace. "Go ahead and ask her—then she can turn you down and the rest of us can get on with our lives while you fester in miserable humiliation." He snapped his fingers. "Hurry up, mundie boy, we've got work to do.
Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite...know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how....and when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded as the rest of us
Let's not forget that for thousands of years the institution of marriage has been between a man and a woman. Until quite recently, in a limited number of countries, there has been no such thing as a marriage between persons of the same gender. Suddenly we are faced with the claim that thousands of years of human experience should be set aside because we should not discriminate in relation to the institution of marriage. When that claim is made, the burden of proving that this step will not undo the wisdom and stability of millennia of experience lies on those who would make the change.
Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.
Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.
A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he i A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is still racing. He is still alive
No-knock police raids destroy Americans' right to privacy and safety. People's lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people's lives in order to control what others ingest.
A case can certainly be made that Christians bear a major responsibility for our ecological crisis. But the fault is not their biblical but their unbiblical view of nature. Christians have long failed to understand what the Bible really teaches concerning nature and our responsibility for it. For this there is no excuse. Repentance must be our first response. Our second response must then be to right the wrongs of our faulty understanding and act accordingly. We are all responsible to know what can be known of God's will for nature, and we are then responsible to act on that knowledge.
There's a song that wants to sing itself through us. We just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through us is the most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet or maybe it's a song of joyous rebirth as we create a new culture that doesn't destroy its world. But in any case, there's absolutely no excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its degree of health, whether we think it's going to go on forever. Those are just thoughts anyway. But this moment you're alive, so you can just dial up the magic of that at any time.
I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.
There is also a great deal of behind-the-scenes pressure from political funders too. And by funders I don't just mean the fossil fuel industry. Many of those exerting pressure on our society to ignore climate change, oppose climate change legislation, and shut down efforts to develop a clean energy economy are doing so out of ideology, not just economics. In the simplest terms, many large industries don't want the government telling them what to do with their businesses and they don't want any restrictions on what they can and cannot do, which includes polluting our shared environment.
The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money that the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents.
Prayer is a means of sharing the burden, which relieves pressure, as you tell your worries and concerns to someone who will listen and won't judge, no matter what you say. Praying is like handing the problem over to someone else as you talk it out. Then you can tune in for guidance and a different perspective that will exude heartfelt energy. When you pray, you are exposing your real self and extending sincere, loving energy to yourself. It doesn't matter if your words are fancy or plain, and there is no way to do it right or wrong. Prayer is about opening your heart and being sincere.