Quotes by Authors - Page 3936

There are reasons to doubt that what we call the laws of physics necessarily apply everywhere in the universe—or that they were applicable to every time in its history.

We need to start preparing ourselves for the changes we are anticipating in our society

In this neighbourhood people don't venture out after dark. It's not safe for them. Only the terminally stupid and the criminally motivated come out at this hour.

One day, the child will understand what he feared most and he will laugh at his ignorance!

The illusion of free will, of freedom, is a useful tool you know. Let people think they are free and present them with a danger to their so-called freedom, a fear. It’s amazing how much you can get them to deal with just as long as you tell them they’re still free.

No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.

You know that feeling of invincibility you sometimes get, especially when young and testing yourself - well that could be because actually know deep down that we are indeed eternal. We come into this world to live a life, to experience it, from somewhere else, some other plane, but we are programmed by all around us to deny or forget this - until one day we may remember again. That feeling of blissful reconnection with our source can be invoked through nature, beautiful writing or art or music, any detailed craft or work of discovery or personal dedication, meditation or other mentally balancing practice, or even through religious experience if there is a pure communion (not a pretence of it). But we should not yearn to return too soon, we should accept that we have come here for the duration of each life, and revel in the chance to learn and grow on this splendid planet. We can draw a deep sense of being-ness. peace, and love from this connection, which will sustain us through any trial. Once nurtured, this becomes stronger than any other connection, so of course our relationships here are most joyful when they allow us the personal freedom to spend time developing and celebrating that connection. Our deepest friendships form with those we can share such time and experiences with - discussing, meditating, immersing ourselves in nature, or creating our music, art, written or other works. Our journeys here are voyages of discovery, opening out the wonders within and all around. What better companions could we have than those who are able to fully share in such delights with us?

In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.

At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.

Master books but do not let them master you. Read to live not live to read.

There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.

PULL and PUSH" are basic principles of life. You must PULL to work hard and then PUSH to give hard"... The reason why we gain is to give!

There is something about losing your mother that is permanent and inexpressable - a wound that will never quite heal.

The greatest leaders can inspire you and lead the way without ever having to give you their back.

Rather, that rigidity had simply been given sporadic spots of wrath, coupled with the sprinkling of secrets, and placed in a cold corner to slowly stew and starve––leaving it no choice but to eventually break through with blooms of fury. And on the night of Cornelius’s arrival, it at long last broke through.

[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love.

I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.

Happiness depends on your mindset and attitude.

I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")

Even with all their threats of eternal damnation and soul roasting, Christian missionaries have run across some who were not so quick to swallow their drivel. Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. So, when missionaries ventured to Alaska and warned the Eskimos of the horrors of Hell and the blazing lake of fire awaiting transgressors, they eagerly asked: "How do we get there?"!

A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming in quantity rather than quality, and comes away with his soul and imagination unchanged, untouched by the wonder of a life lived differently.

When he left us, he stole all the words.

Drop down someone else's shoe and run to take your own quickly. Don't hire your own to anybody, else it profits you nothing! Brighten the corner where you are. Yes, you can!

We act individually to collectively clean our communities.

We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.

There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.

Perhaps friendship doesn't divert sound judgment.

Love has many positionings. Cordelia makes good progress. She is sitting on my lap, her arm twines, soft and warm, round my neck; she leans upon my breast, light, without gravity; the soft contours scarcely touch me; like a flower her lovely figure twines about me, freely as a ribbon. Her eyes are hidden beneath her lashes, her bosom is dazzling white like snow, so smooth that my eye cannot rest, it would glance off if her bosom were not moving. What does this movement mean? Is it love? Perhaps. It is a presentiment of it, its dream. It still lacks energy. Her embrace is comprehensive, as the cloud enfolding the transfigured one, detached as a breeze, soft as the fondling of a flower; she kisses me unspecifically, as the sky kisses the sea, gently and quietly, as the dew kisses a flower, solemnly as the sea kisses the image of the moon.I would call her passion at this moment a naive passion. When the change has been made and I begin to draw back in earnest, she will call on everything she has to captivate me. She has no other means for this purpose than the erotic itself, except that this will now appear on a quite different scale. It then becomes a weapon in her hand which she wields against me. I then have the reflected passion. She fights for her own sake because she knows I possess the erotic; she fights for her own sake so as to overcome me. She herself is in need of a higher form of the erotic. What I taught her to suspect by arousing her, my coldness now teaches her to understand but in such a way that she thinks it is she herself who discovers it. So she wants to take me by surprise; she wants to believe that she has outstripped me in audacity, and that makes me her prisoner. Her passion then becomes specific, energetic, conclusive, dialectical; her kiss total, her embrace without hesitation.—In me she seeks her freedom and finds it the better the more firmly I encompass her. The engagement bursts. When that has happened she needs a little rest, so that nothing unseemly will emerge from this wild tumult. Her passion then composes itself once more and she is mine.”—from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_, (as written by his pseudonym Johannes the Seducer)

Maybe – let’s not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red devotion deeper than comfort, a desire profounder than schoolboy satisfaction, a yearning cold and immaculate and unstoppable as snow.

At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she ever had been before. And why worry about defining everything?

Learn to live in the heart’s conscious, not the mind’s.

Our answer, our opportunity, our chance to change the world has to come from the poetry that is already written on the walls of the soul.

When we learn to relax and simply be present for the animal without judgment, we will find it much easier to connect with animals, and in turn, we will begin to see better responses from them.

I’m not sorry it stopped. [on Lady Gaga’s ”Poker Face”]

When you feel you are badly falling into the emptiness, stick to the reason , stick to the logic; they will reverse the situation!

The author relates George Bernard Shaw's sentiments that polite conversation excludes the only two subjects that matter, religion and politics.

Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

We can find peace among ourselves, when we find peace with nature.

Those times are over and gone, and good-riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.

Idleness is a form of passivity in an active universe.

Every journey will take us to somewhere even if at the beginning it looks like taking us to nowhere!

At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?

But if two people do almost nothing except search for one another, it's hardly surprising if they run across each other by chance.

Many a times a huge problem gets solved with a trivial move.

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.But sometimes it doesn't.Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.

But maybe she’d always been this fucking adorable and I’d just been the jackass who never bothered to notice.

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.

He tried to shape in his mind what he had to say to McDonald. It was a feeling; it was an urge that he had to speak. But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.

If you see yourself as other people see you, it means you are lost, you don't know yourself and you have closed down a world class university of diligence!

Everyone loses their class when they travel through hell, but only a few will regain it if they remain humble and accept the part they played in their own misery.

Life is fun.

So you know what mean when I say that I don't think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You're just pulled to that person like true north, whether it's good for you or bound to break your heart.

As I explored my soul, now I know I have survived schizophrenia; hearing voices, reduced social engagement, emotional expression and lack of motivation.

Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the doorknob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, enter inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.

If you think someone is AWESOME, tell them! The world NEEDS more of THAT!

Charity erodes the cultural prerequisites for a vigorous democracy.

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.

As my mind dwells on the depths I have already sunk into since my arrival less than an hour ago, I approach Shaw’s feet and legs. Unsure of how to proceed, but sure that looking up at him is not an acceptable response, I wait on all fours in front of him, like an untrained animal. I squirm at the prospect that he may be making the same comparison.The hushed and excitable voices of the other men perforate the air around us as Shaw reaches down towards me. I see his left hand in my line of vision and one finger gently moves my face upwards to look at him. I gaze up at him and in this moment I want him more than I have ever wanted any man. I want him to seduce me. I want him to conquer me. I want to be devoured.

Stretch out your hand! Let no human soul wait for a benediction.

Carroll was eleven years old when he saw The Haunting in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted - not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no - he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.("Best New Horror")