Quotes by Authors - Page 221

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

Content people give fashion a life. All the rest seek a life from fashion.

You possess a great soul, awaken the spirit.

Jefferson was the rare student who came to college already knowing that there could be joy in studying.

He could tell by the way animals walked that they were keeping time to some kind of music. Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to.

Sufism is transmitted by means of the human exemplar, the teacher.

May I share with you a formula that in my judgment will help you and help me to journey well through mortality... First, fill your mind with truth; second, fill your life with service; and third, fill your heart with love.

Hardship bred a bitter, quickfire humour and resilience to all but the most terminal of life's tragedies.

War cannot eliminate differing ideas and viewpoints, and partisans of the defeated side do not disappear. Though subjugated, they become a sizable political constituency in the postwar period. A dictator may be able to repress them, and in democracies a numerical majority may outvote them, but neither can change their thoughts. Since civil wars are, by nature, deep and fundamental conflicts, the competition between the views that led to war is likely to resurface. The defeated side may be chastened or subdued, but its values and ways of seeing the world reappear, in some form, in politics [107].

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.

Calmly, deliberately, he moved his hands down to her breasts and molded his fingers over them. Jay inhaled sharply, and he said, "Easy, easy," as he stroked the soft mounds.t"Steve, no." But her eyes were closing as warm pleasure built in her, her blood beating slowly and powerfully through her veins. His thumbs rubbed over her nipples and she quivered, her breasts beginning to tighten.t"You're so soft." His voice roughened even more. "God, how I've wanted to touch you. Come here, sweetheart.

Humans would never tell the simple truth when a lie was available....

If everyone knows so much about it, why do they need to make a documentary?

Books have been vastly important in my life - as both a reader and a writer. I've learned that the great gift of literature is that someone else's tale becomes a chapter of your story. And I still feel books are the best art form for making contact with another consciousness, which is why reading a good book by yourself never feels lonely.

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.

Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)

At the end of the week, you told me that you were going on a long trip, but someday you would come back and marry me.”Arianna giggled. “Did I really say that?” she asked, mortified at her bold younger self.“Yes, but I suppose it doesn’t count if you don’t remember. Oh yeah, not to mention the fact you told two of the butlers, three maids, and your favorite cook you wanted to marry them also

Use your mind’s talents diligently, your heart’s powers incredibly, and your soul’s genius profitably.

For many people, money is an index of how successful one is. And so they fear competition and attach themselves to their shadows. Such path drives one towards materialism rather than spiritualism. So what’s the difference between such individuals and those that work in the hope of quitting their job? Well, the main difference is that materialist people separate the two realities in the hope they can earn money from the work they love and then quit the work they don’t like. And by creating such division they remain there, in the middle, trapped. They think that by following what they love to do, step by step, they’ll be guided towards the right direction. But if their thoughts were clear, they would know they’re diving themselves and perpetuating their fate, rather than solving it. They neglect the mental barriers stopping them from achieving their goal. And anyone is responsible for determining the result that one holds in his thoughts. In other words, if you had not made such division in the first place, and instead accepted the lack of duality, you would achieve your result much faster. That is why almost all entrepreneurs rather work hard and be poor when starting a business than waiting for the right time to quit their job. There’s not such thing as the right time, or a shift from one reality unto another, because you create both things, your fortune and your unfortunate, and you own your luck and results, all the time. Whatever you believe in present time, perpetuates that same present time.

People get absorbed in chitchats with whomever they meet. They simply have to meet someone. Infinite energies are wasted in such chitchatting.

if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.

Patience guarantees project that will last for generations.

The investment you make in others is transferred to everyone they influence long after you’re gone. Significance

It was Don Paolo's birthday and all the people of the village were gathered in the piazza to celebrate him. The band played, the wine flowed, the children danced, and, as he stood for a moment alone under the pergola, a little girl approached the the beloved priest. "But Don Paolo, are you not happy?" she asked him. "Of course I am happy," he assured the little girl. "Why, then, aren't you crying?

What the fuck is wrong with you? I screamed in my head – or maybe to my head.

We all romanticize the people we adore.

Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.

I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188

A miracle is no less glorious for having previously happened

Pain is a horribly wonderful gift.

Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?

I take showers to think.

The reason why you don´t have success is, because you don´t understand the difference between wasting and spending time.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

When you're in love, life is a kiss.When you are in doubt life is amiss.

Is that cancer curable or just treatable.

...I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea...But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is — read them again — at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir. Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion.

Beware of anyone who calls you bad names merely for asking honest questions.

A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.

To be successful you must be willing to work hard, work smart, work consistently, and most importantly do all three simultaneously over a long period of time.

Willa came around to Finn's side of the bar. She was tiny, barely came up to his shoulder, but she was like a mother cat when riled. He knew better than to go toe to toe with her, especially when she was giving him The Look. But he wasn't in the mood. "No," he said."You don't even know what I'm going to say.""You're going to say I'm being a stupid guy," Finn said. "But newsflash, I am a guy and sometimes we're stupid. Deal with it.""I wasn't going to say that." She paused when he slid her a look and she sighed."Okay, fine, I was. But you are being stupid.

Above all I needed to be made to think about what it meant that I was a woman, instead of acting unreflectingly as though I were a man, bound to live out the script of a man’s life.

Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.

Never give up. It might not seem easy at first but in the end, it will all be worth it

Happiness is there when you have great imagination and vision, when you take relentless action and love your creation.

When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires.We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

I'm drowning and you're stealing every breath.

I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead. Remember that I'm often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (it's tempting to call this the stadium of writing). It has a "something from nothing" quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture (107).

Today’s caterpillars are tomorrow’s butterflies.

We do not just belong to this universe, we are it.

She said that one day they would be very old, that the world would be a different place, but it would always be their world, and that the time apart now would be a nightmare from which they would recover - desperation buried under years of happiness.

Strategic wisdom is an integral and multidimensional intelligence.

Even if we're among the lucky few who benefit from civilization, we find ourselves curiously unsatisfied, plagued by stress, worry, and conflict... Like the addict who believes against all evidence that what he can't give up won't lead to suffering and death, our culture adheres to its ideas in spite of ample, clear evidence they will lead to suffering and death.

To confront death every day, to see it for yourself, you have to love the living

The essence of life: be good to all souls like you seek them to be good to your soul.

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

The key, Gansey found, was that you had to believe that they existed; you had to realized they were part of something bigger. Some secrets only gave themselves up to those who'd proven themselves worthy.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Perhaps nothing is as simple as it looks. Perhaps everything has another layer, a hidden room that only reveals itself when you accidentally stumble across the secret door. Or perhaps I'm talking bollocks and it's time to go to bed.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact.But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.