Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
She [my mother] said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.
See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
Human beings have a variety of intelligences, such as cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, and so on. Most people excel in one or two of those, but do poorly in the others. This is not necessarily or even usually a bad thing; part of Integral wisdom is finding where one excels and thus where one can best offer the world one's deepest gifts.
My purpose is to show people that you can take what God put inside of you, inside your heart, and you can live by it! Like, literally. Somebody might like to make shoes or make hats. You can literally live by that gift and no go get a nine to five job. I just to keep my purpose in front of everything that I do, and that is just reminding people that it's possible. That's what it's all about for me.
Kids are probably frustrated and egos are too much involved and kids don't know how to get together and be kids and start a group and it's kind of sad because I feel like if you come out with three or four people in the beginning, you can be protected and everybody can shield each other. Before you get out there by yourself and get all these people coming at you. I just think it's not really there.
Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.
In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody -- from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung -- can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions.
When it comes to the street-art world, there are a lot of people who realize if they go out and put up a few pieces of street art and photograph them really well, even if their locations weren't actually that high-profile or dangerous, with the level of exposure they get from the Internet, with a large audience, they can maintain that rebel cache by having it be theoretically documented street art.
I wanted other women to know there's no shame in talking about it. People don't say they're pregnant until the second trimester. I intellectually understand that you don't want the whole world to know your business, but at the same time what does that mean? You don't tell your employers you're pregnant, but then when you miscarry no one knows you miscarried. Miscarrying is a horrible painful event.
When Scott and I started, every time we performed we wrote a whole new bit. We didn't know this wasn't the way things were done because we were just starting. But we needed the new material anyway. And it's nice, every time that Matt Besser does the show he does a whole new bit. And it's nice to offer up a place where people can be that experimental while offering some solid, proven comedy as well.
I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.
That we do not discover reality but rather invent it is quite shocking for many people. And the shocking part about it - according to the concept of radical constructivism - is that the only thing we can ever know about the real reality (if it even exists) is what it is not. It is only with the collapse of our constructions of reality that we first discover that the world is not the way we imagine.
I'm a recording artist who's traveled around the world so I have different opportunities than other people and people may decide how I should use my opportunities because my opportunities are public whereas I can't decide how people should use their opportunities because their opportunities are private. That's what we're dealing with - people feeling like they should be able to control celebrities.
The US, for historical reasons, mistrusts the concept of a welfare state, and this mistrust shows itself nakedly under present US government, which commits uncounted billions of the national wealth to what it calls defence, and is close-fisted in giving money to plans which would ameliorate the grinding poverty of a great part of its people. Quite simply, in Canada you could not get away with that.
I don't care what the press is about a person that I'm working with. I care about how they come to work every day. I don't care who broke up with who or who is sleeping with who or who went out where. I don't care what you do with your personal life. It's when people take their personal lives into a space where it affects their performance at work, that's when I would stop taking someone seriously.
I get bored with things easily. I always have to change something to keep myself excited. When I feel like I did a really good classical and acoustic album, the next thing I want to do is the opposite. And then I want to do the opposite of that. When I work alone after that, I feel like I should work with a lot of people. When I work with a lot of people after that, I feel that I should work alone.
You know what I miss? The energy of live audiences, because there's no substitute for that exchange that you get in real time when you're sharing a moment, a same with people who are in that same time and space with you. I really just love that. I enjoy it when I get to travel and make speeches now. I like that a lot too. But that's probably the thing that I miss the most about hosting my own show.
I always love trying to put my arms around more people. As a designer, it's a great compliment when people wear your clothes or buy your products, so to do things that are more affordable and have more of a distribution is always very exciting - especially when I can still bring my personality in complete, heavy doses. It's not a diluted version of me; it's a very clear extension of my personality.
More often than not when we do not like our work, it's not necessarily because of the work itself. But more often because of the people we work with and more importantly because of the lack of leadership. It is amazing how inspired and motivated we can be when we like the people and when we feel like we show up to work because our leaders care about our wellbeing. It is kind of incredible actually.
I didn't wake up one day and say, I have to tell O.J.'s Simpson story. But what drew me to it wasn't what people have focused on over the last 20 years - meaning, the question of innocence or guilt, nor the spectacle of the trial. I was more interested in the history that led up to that point in time in 1994, which would help explain what exactly went into making the trial as fascinating as it was.
Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection.
I try to return my calls but I get inundated with emails and I can't answer them all. So often, I have to refer to them my webpage and the frequently asked questions or refer them to the books. But if they take the time to call me, I try to call back. You know, I am really busy, but just happened to have an hour in the hotel room and had some time before I have to meet some people about 20 minutes.
A question I would like to present to the world is: Where is the love? And what are we doing? Who's making the decisions that are putting us in the predicaments that we are in, with all of these people losing their lives around the world in so many different ways? I feel like a serious revolution needs to take place in order for human beings to evolve in a way where we can truly exist as a society.
You have to make those mistakes. You have to do the work. You have to fail. I also realized that I should practice what I preach, which is that if you only do get one kick at the can . . . When you go to places like Africa or Asia or the Indian sub-continent, you realize that a lot of the people there don't ever get a kick at the can. There are no "kicks" at the can - you just don't have that shot.
I know this, that there were thousands and thousands of hours given to Hillary Clinton's e-mail server and Benghazi. It seems to me we need bipartisanship now to look at exactly what happened in this election and exactly the things that people like James Comey did and put it in context to make sure we have all the facts, because I don't think anyone is comfortable with how this election played out.
When I see an entire community disenfranchised, it disturbs me. Not that I'm a message guy, per se. I write about people. I like to write about human beings, not crap political rhetoric. I've tried to avoid that all my life. When I wrote about soldiers in Vietnam, I wasn't trying to make a political statement. I was trying to write about how screwed things were for soldiers, and how they still are.
If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.
I started in comedy when I first started as an actor on stage and doing improvisational theater and stuff like that. So a lot of people who know me know that sort of side of me. But I got the roles that I got as an young actor kind of steered me in a different direction, which were, at times, darker characters. And so comedy was not something that came easy for people to think of my in those terms.
I still believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love;I still believe that connections between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touch. I still believe that the cost of these connections is horribly, outrageously high... and I still believe that the value received far outweighs the price which must be paid. (From introductory notes.)
I really think people are greatly stimulated and enriched by experiencing in film just as we can from novels and other art, experiencing things that resonate with what our lives are about. I think people really want to know... want to share, want to have the stimulus to think and care about the way they live their lives, the way they relate to other people, their aspirations, their hopes, et cetera.
Cuba harbor fugitives of American justice. There are people living on the island of Cuba who have violated American law, including those who have stolen millions of dollars from Medicare fraud in South Florida and have fled to Cuba. Those are three reasons right there to care about what is happening on the island of Cuba, which happens to be 90 miles from our shores, basically a neighboring country.
We are all going to die. When it happens in such a drastic, inhuman way, which we've been seeing in Africa, this is crime on its highest level. It is affecting not only the security of the national parks, it is affecting the people in communities that live around the national parks. In terms of security for wildlife and our society, it's an incredibly alarming situation, and we need to address that.
What I've found is that there is an enormous shift taking place in our society. Suddenly there are all young women who are better educated and earning more money than men their age. When young couples today decide to marry, they have very different expectations of one another than their parents did. And there's even been change at the very top of the career ladder. People tend to underestimate that.
"Each moment you fight is a gift to those in this cavern. Each second we fight is a second longer that thousands of people can draw breath. Each stroke of the sword, each koloss felled, each breath earned is another victory! It is a person protected for a moment longer, a life extended, an enemy frustrated!" There was a brief pause. "In the end they shall kill us"... "But first, they shall fear us!"
I want brave people. Fearless ones. A good actor just goes out and leaps off the edge and develops wings on his way down, hopefully. That's the kind of people I really enjoy working with. Playing safe isn't much fun. I like danger. It's controlled danger, always, and that's why I hope I don't lure too many good actors down into the pits with me, because I hope they maintain their own unique talents.
Belief in one god, praying, charity, the five pillars, ethical moral objectives and messages in the Koran, the history of Islam. There are basic tenants in Islam that we universally believe in but I think it's very naive to think that Sharia, that legal rulings are derived in a vacuum, that people do not bring their own histories and politics and social pledges to bear when they interpret the Koran.
A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.
My first experience of that was with my first movie which I did in India. And it was so different from other people. I find that "Oh my God." Every time the music is slow I feel that people are going to get up and go out. You get this nervousness. But, to my surprise, people starting singing the song even before it came in. They started singing along a week later, after release, which was very cool.
All my favorite artists are downtempo - Portishead, Burial, a lot of 1990s trip-hop. Some people are saying that I'm trying to help with the trip-hop revival that's possibly going on, but I'm not aware of other artists that are necessarily doing that. But if they are, that's fantastic. It's a great medium of electronic music. There's a lot of emotion - it's good for soundtracking a late-night drive.
Yes, there's something dangerous about turning people into token social activists. I was thinking about this recently with our pop-culture feminism, when feminism is such a buzzword in the media now. We're covering it in a way that we haven't before, but also in a way that's way more surface level. And while I think that there's some danger in that, I also think it's a great gateway for some people.
In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
Fasting, as some people speculate, is not a bodily torture, martyrdom, or a cross, but it is a way to elevate the body to reach the level of cooperation with the soul. When we fast, our intention is not to torture the body but to shun its behaviour. Thus, one who fasts becomes a spiritual and not a physical person. Fasting is an ascetic soul which takes the body with it as its partner in asceticism.
You cannot overestimate the role of intuition in fiction writing. Or the role of accident or randomness. These things are very central. This is never really admitted. You have to cover the pages. You have to have those people do things. And the things they do have to be relevant to the entire concern. The specific things they do don't much matter, you just have to have them do something that counts.
Is this Prior?" "In the flesh." "Why's he bleeding?" "Because he's an idiot." Zeke offers me a black jacket with a factionless symbol stitched into the collar. "I didn't know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose." I wrap the jacket around Caleb's shoulders and fasten one of the buttons over his chest. He avoids my eyes. "I think it's a new phenomenon.", I say.
And there's wordplay and there's rhythms and you have to be able to get the poetry out of it. You have to be able to sell my jokes. And if you're talking about somebody like Sam Jackson, they do that. Sam Jackson can do that. Sam Jackson can turn it into the spoken word that it was always meant to be and he can sell my jokes. And Christopher Walken can do it and a lot of people can do it, all right.
I knew that was coming. That's another stupidity. The people who use the term don't even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they're talking about snapshots they're talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs.
People expect it to be easy because there you are, out there, doing the thing that you want and making lots of money out of it. But, you know, I'm not that smooth. I can get clumsy around certain people. Like if I were to sit down and think, 'OK, I'm really famous, how am I going to conduct myself in public?' I wouldn't know who that person would be! It would be a lot easier if I could, but I can't.
The internal sexism within womanhood is very predominant in Hollywood, because we all want to be successful. There's a plug to it: You all have to be skinny! You all have to be pretty! You all have to be likable, because that's the formula that works. On an executive level. On a power level. And it's not always the same working with black people, because of the internalized racism. The colorism.
If you want to run for Prime Minister, you can. If you don't, that's wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don't shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. These things are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people wouldn't get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop.
People see everything through a filter of them, of their own selves. And it's like, you can't be depressed because somehow that has something to do with me. And it's like - no, it doesn't. This is my brain. This is my body. These are my emotions. It's got nothing to do with you. You don't want me to get help for whatever reason you don't want me to get help. But I'm out here, and I need to get help.