Quotes by American Authors - Page 2230

To use an analogy, the "leadership is the answer to everything" perspective is the modern equivalent of the, 'God is the answer to everything' perspective that held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages. In the 1500's, people ascribed all events they didn't understand to God. Why did the crops fail? God did it. Why did we have an earthquake? God did it. What holds the planets in place? God. But with the Enlightenment, we began the search for a more scientific understanding - physics, chemistry, biology and so forth. Not that we become atheists, but we gained deeper understanding about how the universe ticks.Similarly, every time we attribute everything to 'Leadership," we're no different from the people in the 1500's. We're simply admitting our ignorance. Not that we should become leadership atheists (leadership does matter), but every time we throw our hands up in frustration - reverting back to "well, the answer must be Leadership!" - we prevent ourselves from gaining deeper, more scientific understanding about what makes great companies tick.
James C. Collins
Success is like a camera. Focus and concentrate on the objective. See your most important goal image for success, and ignore distracting details. Develop your pictures. If they don't turn out, keep at it. Take more shots and be persistent. Focus on making success clearly happen. Visualize optimum success and use perseverance.
Mark LaMoure
When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.
Frank Herbert
It's the contradiction of life, if I were with them,I would only wish to be far away. Now that I am far away, all I do is wish for one more day surrounded by them
Laura Fitzgerald
We may be unlovely yet we are not unloved.
John Ortberg
Here is a universal law: that when it comes to negative and positive, you will always thrive more powerfully in the positive if you have first been immersed in, and have heroically overcome, the polar opposite negative of that thing. To abide in the positive existence of something, without having known and overcome it’s polar opposite— that is to be only a frame of the real structure. Easily toppled down and taken apart. True power is in the hands of the one who thrives in the positive, after having known and conquered the negative. Because when the demons come along, she will say to those demons: “I know you, I have owned you, but now you bow down to me.
C. JoyBell C.
But dogmatism—or the inclination "to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking"—is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past. [Citing Lessing's January 9, 1771 letter to Mendelssohn.]
Leo Strauss
On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey?
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
Tightness takes more energy than the letting go.
Beth Johnson
I know, I know, I'm being a girl.
Gillian Flynn
The future is never set in stone.
Erin Morgenstern
If you want to be somebody else, change your mind.
Sister Hazel
Give thanks to the earth for the hospitality and generosityShow gratitude for life, light and every little beauty.
Debasish Mridha
Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. "Snap out of it and get on with your life," sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet.
David L. Conroy
This is my love line.... It says an incredibly sexy, but totally infuriating redheaded woman with barge into my life and drive me insane.
Denise Grover Swank
People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.
Renata Adler
In order to find the edge you must risk going over the edge.
Dennis Dugan
Before a secret is told, one can feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Robin M. King
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
H.P. Lovecraft
Heaven left a hole in your heart. But it’s up to you to choose if that hole will be filled with pain, anger, and the eternal darkness of loss . . .tOr if you will choose to fill it with light and love and have that hole shine out of you like a spotlight into your life, keeping their memory alive . . .{It’s up to you.}
Tessa Shaffer
We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.
Parker J. Palmer
It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER.
A.E. Samaan
I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world.
Bill Watterson
It's your life and no one else cares as much about it as you should.
Julieanne O'Conner
Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
Peter Singer
Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.
Eben Alexander
Reality is like a fine wine,” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.
Donald Miller
No one is normal. Everyone is just pretending to be normal.
Alessandra Torre
Don't ever underestimate the importance of treating others with respect and kindness.
Alison Levine
I thought maybe a day was coming when I'd stop constantly worrying about how to live. Maybe at some point I'd just start living, no questions asked.
John Corey Whaley
If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.
Robert McKee
I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The (Bible) story is much more powerful as Truth than as metaphor.
John Kasich
Wouldn't it be nice if there weree a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?" he says."Yes, Planet Bach," I respond.He smiles -"Yes", he murmurs- picturing it, hearing it.
Bill Hayes
Everybody has talent, but ability takes hard work.
Michael Jordan
I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.
Brian Selznick
That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.
Mary Ann Shaffer
A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
Knowledge imparts a sense of authority. It will help you stand out and give you an edge over your competition.
Susan C.Young
It's HE-RO," the boy argued."No," the girl insisted,"it's HER-O.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.
Sarah Dunn
Reading exposes is to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.
Rick Gekoski
We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.
Anna Politkovskaya
In addition to an open heart and open mind, I also brought (to the small group Bible study) an open mouth.
John Kasich
Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments … The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.
Carl Sagan
To hear how special and wonderful we are is endlessly enthralling.
Gail Sheehy
Often morality defines our inner philosophy.
Debasish Mridha
They filled our world with weapons aimed at foreheads and smiled as they shot 16 candles right through our future. They killed those strong enough to fight back and locked up the freaks who failed to live up to their utopian expectations.
Tahereh Mafi
Fame you'll be famous, as famous as can be, with everyone watching you win on TV, Except when they don't because sometimes they won't..
Dr. Seuss
there are institutions filled with people who talk to god. we've labeled and drugged them.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Music without passion is merely noise. A life without passion? You may as well be dead.
Rachel Van Dyken
An avowed feminist activist and an outspoken bisexual, DiFranco has been candid about the necessity of women musicians identifying with the F-word. "Either you are a feminist or you are a sexist/misogynist," she once wrote. "There is no box marked 'other'".
Marisa Meltzer
I am the mother of three children whose birth mother died of cancer when they were young. When I met them, they were ages twelve, ten, and eight, all grieving in very different ways. I have seen first hand the pain and confusion that accompanies childhood loss. But I have also seen the healing that can take place when children begin to understand who Jesus is and how much He loves them. By using our family's personal experience as a foundation, I hope this book will be a refuge for grieving children to express their sorrow, to feel understood in all their pain, and to come to know that God is their ultimate source of comfort, healing, hope, and joy here on earth, as well as in heaven.
Kathleen Fucci
One did not turn down an invitation from Saint Cloud. At least, one didn't if one wanted to continue living contentedly in Paris. Vampires took offense so easily - and Parisian vampires were the worst of all.
Cassandra Clare
Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.
Richard Brookhiser
We made love outdoorsWithout a roof, I like most, Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.
Roman Payne
Not only are we not alone, we are a thread in a great tapestry that is rich, because we exist.
Lynne Cockrum-Murphy
Sometimes, when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread
Suzanne Collins
A charging black rhinoceros is nothing to mess with. When it is headed straight toward you, it is the ultimate exercise in sphincter control. In my case, it was a strange bit of weather that caused one to charge me.
Boyd Norton
The humble sinner will sometimes be interpreted as one of the filthiest in the eyes of man yet immersed in the eyes of God, and this is due to the volition of honesty regarding his own corruption.
Criss Jami