The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.

There is simply too much to be done for us all to go round 'enjoying ourselves.' When the world is perfect, then we can all sit down and eat jelly beans, but for now the fact that things are going well for you just means that you are in a position to alleviate someone else's suffering for a while.

I think transwomen, and transpeople in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you're supposed to be to live a more authentic life.

When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.

Everytime I say "sure" when I mean "no," everytime I smile brightly when I'm exploding with rage, every time I imagine my man's achievement is my own, I know the cheerleader never really died. I feel her shaking her ass inside me and I hear her breathless, girlish voice mutter "T-E-A-M, Yea, Team.

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Feelings are indicators, not dictators. They can indicate where your heart is in the moment, but that doesn't mean they have the right to dictate your behavior and boss you around. You are more than the sum total of your feelings and perfectly capable of that little gift . . . called self-control.

No, the Scriptures were not given to us to confuse us but rather to instruct us. Certainly God intends that we should believe His Word with all simplicity. A thousand years means a thousand years; a wolf means a wolf; a lion means a lion. If you read your Bible that way, a child can understand it.

The core of the culture is racism and how black men are viewed. They've always been demonized and seen as threats in our culture. Another holdover from slavery. We've got to deal with that core root of racism and demonization of the upbringing of black men. Black women are not exempt by any means.

People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, 'It could be worse.' It could be worse? Is that what it means to be an American? It could be worse? Of course not. What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that we know it must be better.

Growing our economy means allowing individuals, and particularly those in the middle class, to be able to keep more of their money. It also means that people in the middle class and modest incomes to be able to pay for their retirement, to get a down payment for a home, to send a child to college.

We are so busy telling God where we would like to go. We wait with the idea of some great opportunity, something sensational, and when it comes we are quick to cry, 'Here am I.' Readiness for God means that we are ready to do the tiniest little thing or the great big thing, it makes no difference.

If you work with so many classical instruments... I mean, it still has this power, and it's still connected to the idea of techno. But it has its own quality, its own sound. It's in between, even more than the record before. You need to give every instrument, sound, and element the space it needs.

It's not my goal, definitely. I mean, I don't think it's something I can really achieve. Definitely she's a great champion - she has nine titles. But it's nice to see her in the locker room, and she's smiling and she's happy for me. She's really cheering for me. It's nice to have someone like her.

It means everything, definitely. I mean, it's Wimbledon. Tennis here is tennis history. Centre Court is always great to play on. I really feel like I'm at home. I was really up and down after my title here in 2011, but I still worked hard and believed in myself, and my team believed in me as well.

Finally, ultimately, you write music for yourself. I mean, I need a public, I need people to play, I need everything else. I'm not working in isolation. But finally the man that writes the music is alone. And I have to respond to those criteria which are almost like inner needs or inner responses.

To love God means to surrender, to trust, to be ready to die into Him, because dying in God is the beginning of a new life; it is resurrection. Love has to become such an intense flame that it bums you out, that you are not left behind, that you are consumed in it. If you are not, the Guest comes.

Love says respect the other as an end unto himself or herself; never use the other as a means. Nobody is a means for you, everybody is an end. But then ambition will flop, and our whole educational system depends on ambitiousness, our politics depends on ambition, our religions depend on ambition.

Without the cross the Discipline of Confession would be merely therapeutic. But it is so much more. It involves an objective [a better word would have been "metaphysical"] change in our relationship with God and a subjective change in us. It is a means of healing and transforming the inner spirit.

We're going on a, um, windmill tour later this week." If I'd wanted to shut them all up, I'd definitely succeeded. They all looked stunned. Adrian spoke first. "I'm going to assume that means he's flying you to Amsterdam on his private jet. If so, I'd like to come along. But not for the windmills.

It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.

One of the most solemn responsibilities of the president and it's set out expressly in the Constitution is that the president is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and that means the Constitution. It means statutes. It means treaties. It means all of the laws of the United States.

When you become a driver, they don't tell you that you have to switch languages. The drivers have their own language and they don't tell you that as girls. How am I supposed to know that blinking light means something? There are all these little languages that you have to know, but you don't know.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

Nobody taught me my slider. I mean, if you look at my grip, I don't think anyone has the same grip as I do. It's a separate grip. I hold it kind of weird and everything. When I started throwing it, I just wanted to start throwing something different and came up with that. I turned it a little bit.

President-elect [Donald] Trump has made a provocative choice for secretary of education. Betsy DeVos comes from a wealthy Michigan family. She is an advocate for school choice. That phrase means, in essence, directing public education money to charter schools, private schools or parochial schools.

I'm tempted to tell you that you think too much, but I'm not really one to talk,' Jacob said. 'Henry Miller wrote something about fear making you fearless. It's a very powerful emotion. Use it to get what you want. I mean if it's going to rule our life, it might as well rule you to freedom, right?

The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.

My job is to support businesses, that means promoting British commerce in the big emerging markets that have been neglected in the past. It means keeping Britain open to inward investors, trade and skilled workers. It means cutting red tape which is suffocating growing companies which create jobs.

So, yeah, I mean, there is something universal about that feeling - that 20-something, what the hell am I going to do with my life, I'm lost and my parents are freaking me out, and what's the point? Every generation has a way of making that unique, but there are certain universals of that feeling.

I like work/life separation, not work/life balance. What I mean by that is, if I'm on, I want to be on and maximally productive. If I'm off, I don't want to think about work. When people strive for work/life balance, they end up blending them. That's how you end up checking email all day Saturday.

Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it. Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time. We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures.

We have taught our people to use prayer too much as a means of comfort - not in the original and heroic sense of uplifting, inspiring, strengthening, but in the more modern and baser sense of soothing sorrow, dulling pain, and drying tears - the comfort of the cushion, not the comfort of the Cross.

Instructing in cures, therapists always recommend that "each case be individualized." If this advice is followed, one becomes persuaded that those means recommended in textbooks as the best, means perfectly appropriate for the template case, turn out to be completely unsuitable in individual cases.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water -- that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

Because powerful images are fixed in the mind more readily than words, the photographer needs no interpreter. A photograph means the same thing all over the world and no translator is required. Photography is truly a universal language, transcending all boundaries of race, politics and nationality.

Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.

What this means in practice is that if you are not a born worrier you have nothing to worry about (though of course you wouldn't be worrying anyway), whereas if you are a worrier by nature there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well stop worrying, except of course you can't.

When you realize that no one really knows what they are doing and that everyone is doing the best they can according to their own level of consciousness, life gets a lot easier. Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

I see women going anywhere they want to. And I do mean want to. Because a lot of people measure success merely by position, title and salary. I think women feel comfortable enough in their own skin to put that secondary to what they want. They don't have to define success by the measure of society.

There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice

With the royal family, you don't want to see them as people because it takes the sheen off. They're distant, you can idealize them. But there's room to have compassion for people and see them as human beings. Just because they're royalty, it doesn't mean they don't love, or feel loss, or feel pain.

When you're a kid, nine times out of 10, everthing is pure depending on how you grow up. Everything is new as a kid, so it's all amazing and wonderful. But as we get older, things start to lose their luster or possibly their relevance. Things don't mean as much as they did then. I know the feeling.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.

You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

I mean they [ Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis] are both just really good guys and also they're both extremely funny in very unique ways. We made each other laugh an awful lot, and that goes a long way. And we also went through some hard times. I mean it was hard to make this movie [The Hangover].

Countries can be redeemed. Entire cultures can be brought to "salvation". The land itself can be healed. ... And such miraculous change is brought about by one primary avenue: God working through the market place. ... The primary means to true revival, though, takes place first in the market place.

Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

You never build the perfect building. Only Allah is perfect. Life is such. You make decisions on conclusions, then some guy invents something else and the world changes. That's comforting. There's no one way to use museums, no one way to do art. That also means there is no one way to build museums.

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