Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
I am between the Tories and the Lib Dems. I am fiscally conservative. I'm for strong foreign policy, but socially very liberal. I am not religious. That makes me feel uncomfortable with American Republicans. I don't feel at home anywhere, really. Labour under Tony Blair was not something I would associate myself with, but I didn't have a big problem with it. I have to make a choice between fiscal and the role of the state and social freedom.
No intellect is needed to see those figures who wait beyond the void of death - every child is aware of them, blazing with glories dark or bright, wrapped in authority older than the universe. They are the stuff of our earliest dreams, as of our dying visions. Rightly we feel our lives guided by them, and rightly too we feel how little we matter to them, the builders of the unimaginable, the fighters of wars beyond the totality of existence.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
Of course life frightens me sometimes. I don't happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. I'm going to give it hundred percent and go as far as I can. I'll take what I want and leave what I don't want. That's how I intend to live my life, and it things go bad, I'll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.
Everyone defends his treasure, and will do so automatically.The real questions are, what do you treasure, and how much do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these questions and to bring them into all your actions, you will have little difficulty in clarifying the means. The means are available whenever you ask. You can, however, save time if you do not protract this step unduly. The correct focus will shorten it immeasurably.
Economic freedom is in our eyes a good. It is among the highest of temporal goods because it is necessary to the highest life of society through the dignity of man and through the multiplicity of his action, in which multiplicity is life. Through well-divided property alone can the units of society react upon the State. Through it alone can a public opinion flourish. Only where the bulk of the cells are healthy can the whole organism thrive.
"We will make such a chase as shall be accounted a marvel among the Three Kindreds: Elves, Dwarves and Men. Forth the Three Hunters!" Like a deer he sprang away. Through the trees he sped. On and on he led them, tireless and swift, now that his mind was at last made up. The woods about the lake they left behind. Long slopes they climbed, dark, hard-edged against the sky already red with sunset. They passed away, grey shadows in a stony land.
I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag full of mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.
Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free. But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief; because your belief projects what you think God ought to be, what you think ought to be true. If you believe God is love, God is good, God is this or that, your very belief prevents you from understanding what is God, what is true.
When I announced on my Facebook page that I'm coming to Israel, people started telling me that I shouldn't go there, but I figured that if I'm not going to come here, then I guess I can't go back to the United States anymore and I can never go to Russia again and I should probably never go back to Germany and I should probably never go back to France and I should probably never go back to England....All I see here is a really beautiful city.
Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day's lazy work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind. You are not in a hurry there; you learned long since not to be.
Unlike someone like Tom Hanks, or U2, the comics industry is not a thriving industry and we all need to keep and expand our audience. The best way to do that is to keep the fans we have happy and to keep them excited about our next projects so they'll keep following our work. The best way to do that is to continually engage them in conversation. I don't mean to sound flippant by any means. We're not being nice to our fans because we have to.
The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.
The real important function of the church is to present the symbol, to perform the rite, to let you behold this divine message in such a way that you are capable of experiencing it. What the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to each other might be, in technical terms, is not half important as you, the celebrant, feeling the Virgin Birth within you, the birth of the mystic, mythic being that is your own spiritual life.
Satan has control now. No matter where you look, he is in control, even in our own land. He is guiding the governments as far as the Lord will permit him. That is why there is so much strife, turmoil, and confusion all over the earth. One master mind is governing the nations. It is not the president of the United States; it is not Hitler; it is not Mussolini; it is not the king or government of England or any other land; it is Satan himself.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going.
Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current, rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as drift-wood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered; and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, of old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.
I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort.
At one store, Gansey had started to pay for Blue's potato chips and she'd snatched them away. "I don't want you to buy me food!" Blue said. "If you pay for it, then it's like I'm... be---be---" "Beholden to me?" Gansey suggested pleasantly. "Don't put words into my mouth." "It was your word." "You assumed it was my word. You can't just go around assuming." "But that is what you meant, isn't it?" She scowled. "I'm done with this conversation.
I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our Doctors very particularly about it, if I knew anyone of 'em that I thought had Virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of Revenue for the good of Mankind, but that Distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their Resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it.
Tolerance has been a very important feature of Christianity from its very roots, despite all the other things that have gone on since. And that, I think, must be the global perspective. Tolerance implies more than saying, "Well, let the Muslims go on with what they are doing." It also means trying to learn something from them and adding that to your own tradition. That is the attitude I think needs to inform the global citizen of the future.
Every year, in the deep midwinter, there descends upon this world a terrible fortnight. ... every shop is a choked mass of humanity ... nerves are jangled and frayed, purses emptied to no purposes, all amusements and all occupations suspended in favor of frightful businesses with brown paper, string, letters, cards, stamps, and crammed post offices. This period is doubtless a foretaste of whatever purgatory lies in store for human creatures.
He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.
As not every instance of similitude can be considered as a proof of imitation, so not every imitation ought to be stigmatised as plagiarism. The adoption of a noble sentiment, or the insertion of a borrowed ornament, may sometimes display so much judgment as will almost compensate for invention; and an inferior genius may, without any imputation of servility, pursue the paths of the ancients, provided he declines to tread in their footsteps.
None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances.
I eased back on my elbows, tilting my head back to look up at the sky, which was pinkish, streaked with red. This was the time we knew best, that stretch of day going from dusk to dark. It seemed like we were always waiting for nighttime here. I could feel the trampoline easing up and down, moved by our own breathing, bringing us in small increments up and back from the sky as the colors faded, slowly, and the stars began to show themselves.
How many demons and people are enslaved here? (Jericho) Define slavery. (Asmodeus) Kept against their will. (Jericho) Good definition. Counting me? (Asmodeus) Why not? (Jericho) Probably a couple of million…you know it’s really hard to count to a million, plus they’re always dying and new ones are coming in. I tried to count once, but it got really depressing so I stopped. The constant adding and subtracting. Not my forte, really. (Asmodeus)
How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.
If you hold a candle close to you, its flame rises. And if you hold it away from you, its flame shrinks. The same way you hold a candle close to you, keep all your plans, aspirations, projects, and dreams close to you too. Do not share your plans or goals until you complete them, because as you hold your candle away from you, your goals will shrink in the eyes of others. Envy, jealousy, and resentment will put out your flame before it grows.
People nowadays talk about issues as if they're reading lines off a teleprompter. They recite what they read and echo it without thinking. It has become easier to divide people than to unify them, and to blind them than to give them vision. We are no longer unified like a bowl of Cheerios. Instead, we have become as segregated as a box of Lucky Charms. Every day we see the same leprechauns on TV acting like they're the experts of everything.
You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.
The editor, Stephen Segal, actually called me with the idea of creating an accordion book [ "The Thorn & The Blossom"], and asked if I could write a story for it. I was so intrigued! I immediately knew that it had to be a love story told from the points of view of the two main characters. Right away, I started working on a proposal. And once I had my main characters, Brendan and Evelyn, it was as though they started telling me their stories.
The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist, her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.
At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.
[It is hard to know what is good luck and what isn't and therefore whether we should be happy or sad about it. Only time will tell. For example...] The Talmud relates a story about two people who wanted to travel by boat. One broke his foot and was unable to make the trip, while his friend got on the boat. The one who missed the boat cursed his misfortune. A few days later, however, he heard that the boat sank and all the passengers drowned.
What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.
I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I’m corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody’s got to do it.
...Generally people don't recomend this type of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other books recomended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, teachers, then told that these books are the type you have to read. Those books are invariably described as "important"- which in my experience, pretty much means that they're boring. (words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.)
Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days...What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure?...Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds...But failure...ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough...then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing...There's always another secret.
one trouble with all the churches is that they have too many incurable saints in them, men and women who pray too much and do too little, who cannot forget their own selfish salvation enough to look after other people's without feeling their own spiritual pulse all the time they are doing it. Of late I've sometimes suspected that it is nearly as debilitating to stay in the church all the time as it would be to stay in a hospital all the time.
Education is the key to perpetuation of the [god] virus for the Taliban, Baptist or Catholic. If the virus cannot control public education, it will seek to divert resources from public coffers to fundamentalist school funding. From the madrassa schools of Pakistan to the Christian push for school vouchers in the United States and the religious home school movement, religions seek to control education or to control the resources for education.
Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: "Here," he said, "are the walls of the city," meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants.
Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?
What is pronounced these days is staying on the Internet for hours. It's really about distraction. We are living in such an over stimulated culture. There's a nervous energy of always having to be focused out there. People have a hard time just being happy, settled, and content. We're not taught how to just be by ourselves, be present. We always want to change the channel in our minds because we don't like what's going on. It's uncomfortable.
One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it's going to, we can just relax and do it. Unfortunately, in my experience, that's not the way it works. The story doesn't want to be told what to do. You have to enter into this process with a high level of trust that the many hours of choosing that you're doing every day will gradually clarify the narrative for you. And that's what happens.
A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it?
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but of the dawn.