Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We can only learn to deal with failure by actually experiencing failure, by living through it. The earlier we face difficulties and drawbacks, the better prepared we are to deal with the inevitable obstacles along our path.
Curiosity killed the cat,” Fesgao remarked, his dark eyes unreadable. Aly rolled her eyes. Why did everyone say that to her? “People always forget the rest of the saying,” she complained. “‘And satisfaction brought it back.
In my book Radical Reform I made it clear that we cannot talk about the environment or ecology if we don't also deal with the economy. There is a direct link between how we deal with the economy and how we deal with nature.
Man is certainly free, but he is responsible for this freedom before God as before men. This responsibility is inevitably moral. In order of this morality, to be free is to protect the freedom of others and their dignities.
I understand that a lot of girls feel encouraged by what I have been able to do, but I've never felt like I'm a role model. I'm not concerned with building a great legacy or anything because I'll be dead so it won't matter.
I feel angry that I can't be hypnotized. I'm not putting it down, and I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I have talked to a great many people who are very good at it, but so far nobody has ever been able to hypnotize me.
What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others.
Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them.
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
An agricultural landscape produces food but it also provides water, requires biodiversity to underpin soil function, pollination and other useful services, and also has value to society in terms of aesthetics and recreation
Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.
The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.
... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
I'm not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I'm looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don't see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don't see how to get there.
My family was entirely political, all the time, on the left. The opposite of that is not to be political on the right. It's trying not to be - politics is not everything. There's life other than politics. Politics intrudes.
Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
Without life there can be no action — no objects of pursuit — no restless desires — no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to it — that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.
You are to think of yourself as only existing in this world to do God's will. To think that you are your own is as absurd as to think you are self-created. It is an obvious first principle that you belong completely to God.
Man needs to be Saved from his own Wisdom as much as from his own Righteousness, for they produce one and the same corruption. Nothing saves a man from his own righteousness, but that which delivers him from his own wisdom.
Without enthusiasm, the adventurer could never kindle that fire in his followers which is so necessary to consolidate their mutual interests; for no one can heartily deceive numbers who is not first of all deceived himself.
The Egba kingdom was one of the very last to be ceded to the British protectorate. It remained almost an independent entity within what is now known as Nigeria, simply because of its own traditional structure of governance.
People who know there is a god and people who know there isn't live in exactly the same world. Same number of hours in the day, same weather, same football results. They both love their children and die of the same diseases.
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship character.
Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.
Of course, Marxism is an example of what Carl Popper would have called a 'World Three' structure, in that it's got immense power as an idea, but you couldn't actually hold up anything in the world and say: 'this is Marxism'.
My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
True love would look a second time. True love would not be thwarted. True love would not accept no for an answer. He would search the world and certainly look again and again in every cottage in Euphrasia until he finds you.
It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.
I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.
I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?
Let us remember the devil labors hard to disturb us at the time of recollection in order to make us abandon it. Let him then who omits mental prayer on account of distractions be persuaded that he gives delight to the devil.
The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.
If I'm fighting for the possibility of having a kind of desire and possibility, that right now is not too likely, it gives me a different kind of engagement with the future, than if I say, "sex doesn't matter; it's private."
I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man...is above all the plaything of his memory.
To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.
A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.
James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.
Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
You will seek for God in vain till you understand that God can't be seen as a "thing"; he needs a special way of looking - similar to that of little children whose sight is undistorted by prefabricated doctrines and beliefs.
He did once say the time to worry is when they stop writing about you but again I think that was pretty token of the coverage was very respectful, he rather resented the intrusions on his private life, but that was about it.
The Beauty of the Mountain is hidden for all those who try to discover it from the top, supposing that, one way or an other, one can reach this place directly. The Beauty of the Mountain reveals only to those who climbed it.