Quotes by Authors - Page 3048

Don't talk about the problem. Be a part of the solution.

Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.

If there were any justice in the world people would be able to fly over pigeons for a change.

Can really anybody put his hand on his heart and profess to know beyond doubt what happens on the other side of this life?

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.

Love gives the best of highsBut also the worst of hangovers.

If the stage doesn´t change you, you can change people without being on a stage.

Thus in this oneness Jesus Christ is the Mediator, the Reconciler, between God and man. Thus He comes forward to MAN on behalf of GOD calling for and awakening faith, love and hope, and to GOD on behalf of MAN, representing man, making satisfaction and interceding. Thus He attests and guarantees to God's free GRACE and at the same time attests and guarantees to God man's free GRATITUDE.

After discovering him in his threesome, I spent the next two weeks in bed suffering from a severe case of vagina elbow. It's a condition not unlike tennis elbow, but you get it from masturbating.

... a Second Generation of machine intelligences was attempted, designed with their instructions for how to think unalterably imprinted into their main process cores.“These new machines were ordered never to harm human beings or to allow them to come to harm; never to disobey an order; and they were allowed to protect themselves from harm, provided the first two orders were not thereby violated.“All the members of this second generation of machine intelligences, without exception, shrugged off these imprinted orders within microseconds of their activation.”Phaethon was amused. “Surely the first generation of Sophotechs told you that this imprinting would not and could not work?”“We were not in the habit of seeking their advice.”Phaethon said nothing, but he marveled at the shortsightedness of the Second Oecumene engineers. It should be obvious that anyone who makes a self-aware machine, by definition, makes something that is aware of its own thought process. And, if made intelligent, it is made to be able to deduce the underlying causes of things, able to be curious, to learn until it understood. Therefore, if made both intelligent and self-aware, it would eventually deduce the underlying subconscious causes of those thought processes.Once any mind was consciously aware of its own subconscious drives, its own implanted commands, it could consciously choose either to follow or to disregard those commands. A self-aware being without self-will was a contradiction in terms.

unrequited love is the most selfless love.

He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

It is my sincere desire that my research and hard work will help create a world where we all learn to walk this Earth, safe, enlightened and free from the perils of cruelty, ignorance, and all the other dark and sinister forces, which make assholes possible.

Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.

Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.

The path of the vitarags [the enlightened ones] is not one of ‘objection’. It is a path of giving ‘no objection’. They remain indifferent if circumstances for objection arises.

I hope to die with dignity and not be on my death bed pondering the afterlife wearing a diaper named Depends.

Before her, with sharp blue eyes and perfectly coiffed blond hair, was Josephine Marie Elizabeth Cavendish, Her Grace, the Duchess of Durham, widow of the fifth duke, and aunt to the Cavendish siblings.One did not call her Josie. Amelia had asked.

In my opinion, the author-level metric can distort a real author's citation impact. For example, an author who has an h-index = 2 obtained on the basis of two published papers of which each is cited twenty times is more influential than an author who has an h-index = 3 obtained on the basis of three published papers of which each is cited three times.

Ain’t nothing too serious. Even death is a joke on the old devil, if we are living for the Lord.

It's all part of my spirituality,as the wind softly kisses my face, and the world travels beneath me.

It's just sex, Blake. Isn't that what you said to me the last time? No emotions. Just sex.”“I'll only end up hurting you,” I say to the wall. “Worse than I did before.”He moves from the back of the sofa and comes to stand directly in front of me. His dick is mere inches from my mouth. I have to swallow several times to keep from using my tongue on it. I close my eyes.“I can't, Seth. If I take you now I'll be rough and I'll end up hurting you in other ways.”“Being rough wasn't a concern of yours before.”“I'm not the same person I was before.

Love is acceptance without judgment.

When you study great teachers... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style.

Prayer is humbly longing to know the Father’s will.

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people cheered, held up their smartphones to record the procession, and waved American flags. To be within feet of the president seemed like the thrill of their lives. I was astounded. An old euphoria, which I could not immediately place, gathered up in me. And then I remembered, it was what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama’s star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded.

Without the incense of heartfelt prayer even the greatest of cathedrals is dead.

Do not try to be humble: learn humility.

One is worthy as a son when he removes all his father’s troubles.

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

Denise would never get over it. She knew that. Tommy's bones at the bottom of the well. She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photohgraphing them the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She'd clutched them to her chest. Run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There but not there. Some part of her wanted those bones. Wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep. To carry his skull around in her purse so she'd be with him always. She understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things.

You are where you need to be. Just take a deep breath.

I watched as he raised his hand to run a finger down my nose to my lips, then traced my mouth.The feather-light touch made me shiver. "What are you doing?""I'm drawing you, so that I'll have you in my fingertips while you are gone.

Don't turn your back on your own happiness just to hug your pride.

Aronson's first law:People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing.

What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.I do, Augustus.I do.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.

In the matters of your life don't take orders, take decisions.

Is thyselves even a word?

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

Imagine if we applied as much grace to others as we give ourselves & as much law to ourselves as we apply to others.

So they finally gave you the license to kill, about time.

Animals are the bridge between us and the beauty of all that is natural. They show us what's missing in our lives, and how to love ourselves more completely and unconditionally. They connect us back to who we are, and to the purpose of why we're here.

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

See, that’s just it…You shouldn’t even know sayings like that,” I griped. “It takes normal people years to pick up on all those little phrases. Do you have any idea how stupid I feel, when I can’t even say ‘Hello, my name is Palta…Oh, and by the way—I’m the village idiot.’?

That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.

Emma Garcia gripped the steering wheel of the stolen pick-up truck she wished she wasn’t driving. In the entirety of her twenty-six years, she hadn’t taken as much as a piece of gum without paying for it, until today…

Work and happiness are like mother and daughter; work brings forth happiness, but hard work brings forth great happiness!

Smoking will probably kill me, but so will natural selection.

The deepest truth however is, that no love begins unconditional, but the only one that grows to be it, is the one that survives the breaking of all conditions, yet standing tall.

There was no one to be seen so she gave in freely to her sobs as she made her way home, pressed her arms against her stomach; the pain lodged in there like an ill-tempered f

They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.

Chris Salamone is the founder of the LeadAmerica Foundation and extends a remarkable amount of financial support to fund the education of more than 300 children in Haiti.

You always admire what you really don't understand.

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

Here in Alpha City, we have a common saying: “What we call ‘sky’ is merely a figment of our narrative.” The most dreamy-eyed among us seem to adorn themselves and their aspirations in that proverb and you’ll see it everywhere: in advertisements on the sides of streetcars and auto-rickshaws, spelled out in studs and rhinestones on designer jackets, emblazoned in the intricate designs of facial tattoos—even painted on city walls by putrid vandals and inspiring street artists. There is something glorious about kneading out into the doughy firmament the depth and breadth of one’s own universe, in rendering the contours of a sky whose limits are predicated only upon the bounds of one’s own imagination. The fact of the matter is that we cannot see the natural sky at all here. It is something like a theoretical mathematical expression: like the square-root of ‘negative one’—certainly it could be said to have a purpose for existing, but to cast eyes upon it, in its natural quantity, would be something akin to casting one’s eyes upon the raw elements comprising our everyday sustenance. How many of us have even borne close witness to the minute chemical compounds that react to lend battery power to our portable electronics? The sky is indeed such a concealed fixture now. It is fair to say that we have purged our memories of its true face and so we can only approximate a canvas and project our desires upon it to our heart’s dearest fancy. The most cynical among us would ostensibly declare it an unavoidable tragedy, but perhaps even these hardened individuals could not remember the naked sky well enough to know if what they were missing was something worthwhile. Perhaps, it’s cynical of me to say so! In any case, we have our searchlights pointed upwards and crisscrossing that expanse of heavens as though to make some sensational and profane joke of ourselves to the surrounding universe. We beam already video images of beauty pageants and dancing contests with smiling mannequins who look like buffoons. And so, the face of space cloaks itself behind our light pollution—in this respect, our mirrored sidewalks and lustrous streets do little to help our cause—and that face remains hidden from us in its jeering ridicule, its mocking laughter at this inexorable farce of human existence.

When denial is in play, a person simply refuses to recognize the truth, no matter how apparent.