Quotes by Authors - Page 968

to die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world.

I'm 65 years old. Everyday the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.

His smile was like a Dylan album and a cup of coffee on a sunny afternoon

Lunch can wait. Everything can wait. Time to run.

Wealth won’t make you happy. Power won’t make you remarkable. Fame won’t make you honorable. Education won’t make you wise.

The ability to extend kindness requires an other-awareness. We are apt to miss the needs of those around us if we remain self-focused. Helping children to see the needs of others will bless them with perspective on their own lives, as well as propel them toward good works that display the kindness of God.

If Lord Duryodhana was an evil man, why did great men like Bhishma, Drona, Kripa, Karna, entire army of Krishna fight war on his side??

For Cixi, the whole episode taught her that to survive at court she must hold her tongue about state affairs. This was difficult, as she could see that the dynasty was in trouble. The victorious Taiping rebels not only consolidated their bases in southern China, but were sending military expeditions with a view to attacking Beijing. Cixi felt that she had practicable ideas – in fact it was under her rule that the Taiping rebels were later defeated. But she could not say a word, and could only share non-political interests with her husband, such as music and art.

A man betrayed by life's rats either hates and seeks eternal revenge, or forgives and seeks eternal distance; A man honored by life's faithful builds, and builds, and builds. A man indifferent to betrayal is not a man.

He’d learned years ago it was better not to dwell too much on who was related to whom on the godly side of things. After Tyson the Cyclops adopted him as a brother, Percy decided that that was about as far as he wanted to extend the family.

She really talks to you, doesn't she?" She asked. "it's not just you talking to her. She talks BACK.""hel, half the time she starts it." I said, half-defensively. "I know it's weird.""Well, yes, it's weird. Technically, I think it's insane. But who am I to judge?" Maggie shrugged. "I live in a house most people view as the setting of a horror movie waiting to happen, with an army of security ninjas and a couple dozen epileptic dogs for company. I don't think I'm qualified to pass judgement on 'weird'.

Choice is the mortar that binds together the things that make us who we are.

She asked him, to name the monster that he is most afraid of always and looked into his eyes in silence. 'I see him every time whenever I stare into your eyes.' he replied.

You will not mock me—and you will let me finish. I have owned and lost a kingdom, and I have battled death. I have been through all that, and I will not chase after you like some lovesick poet spouting verse. If you wish to call me yours, then you will have to act as if you are mine. On the front of surrender, there is no middle ground.

God never loses sight of the treasure which He has placed in our earthen vessels.

Using information about animal behavior to justify social or political ideology is wrong . . . People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without having to worry about keeping up with the bonobos.

We need to maintain an awareness of our awareness, of what we are paying attention to, in order to discriminate between higher and lower forms of love.

Sometimes, when you attempt to run away from your true calling, all roads will conspire to lead you back to where you came from.

Once value-laden facts become acceptable, then things like "racist facts" become acceptable, too – and then it becomes acceptable to reject any factual statement not because it is false, but because it is "racist”. Thus, any Obama-esque "national conversation about race" becomes impossible.

Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer's dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaller, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?

All suffering is the consequence of a constant quest.

The Holy Spirit is not in a hurry. Character is the produce of a lifetime.

The illusion of confidence is far more important than actually possessing the feeling.

Understanding of divine truths preserves and protects a man in any situation.

and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Laughter is by definition healthy.

... This is a major theme in mathematics: things are what you want them to be. You have endless choices; there is no reality to get in your way.On the other hand, once you have made your choices then your new creations do what they do, whether you like it or not. This is the amazing thing about making imaginary patterns: they talk back!

A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]

Self-confidence is a great faith.

Don't try to wring out all the answers before you move forward. Faith doesn't work that way. Step into the darkness and the light will appear to guide your next step. It's that first step into the unknown that stops us from progressing.

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

Leaders lead by example. No leader asks more than he is prepared to give himself.

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life.That word is love."(Sophocles)by Adam Harford, Duke of Harford,from the last page of "Sophie's Salvation

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.

I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust

(...) La felicidad es tener un corazón capaz de amar. Es saber que has sido importante para alguien... Que de algún modo, en algún momento, has marcado la diferencia. Y la muerte no es nada en comparación con esos momentos.

I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.

Do I need permission to breathe, Sir?

„You know, life is just programmed chaos. Everybody starts out on one side—that’s the programmed part. But then chaos happens, and our album flips. We get fat or thin, or dye our hair and pierce our nose. But those are just our outsides. Our insides are still beautiful, even if we think we’re ugly children.

She had no idea what the future would hold for any of them, beyond possibilities as infinite as the stars. And really, that was enough.

He reaches over and touches my necklace. "You still have it. That gives me faith." "Faith in what?""God, I suppose. No, I don't know. Survival.

Does your heart walk forward in the light?

Night falls over Machu Picchu to the sound of Abba's 'Dancing Queen'.

Abdullah to Kim Burton: "War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold that stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war - countries (America) like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. Tt's why you fight wars more than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.

Henry's face went red in anger as he blustered at her audacity. It wasn't often anyone got the better of him, and Sin knew no woman had ever flummoxed him before. Not even Eleanor."You are willing to declare war for him ?" Henry asked indignantly.She didn't hesitate with her response. "I am. Are you?"Sin closed his eyes as he heard the most precious words of his life. She who believed in nothing but peace was willing to fight for him. He could die happily knowing that.Still, he couldn't let her do this. Henry would not rest until he buried her and her clan. A king's reputation was all he had, and if Henry lost face…"Callie," Sin said, waiting until her gaze met his. "Thank you, but you can't do this. You can't start a war over me. I'm not worth the cost.""You are worth everything to me.

The cult of friendship disturbs me. It's like our quality is supposed to be measured by the number of friends we have. For me, it's quite the inverse. When somebody says "I'm friends with everyone" I just assume they have the spine of your average jellyfish and the integrity of your average soap dish. "I have tons of close friends!" Ok, then you obviously have no standards. "I've slept with lots of people!" Good, I will shake your hand from inside this Hazmat suit. It's like you have to have friends or you're nothing, and you gotta have lots of friends, and the more friends you have the more value you have. This Is a way of lowering our standards to fit in. I'm a big fan of quality over quantity. Everyone wants to look at their life like it's a beer commercial they can just climb into. The larger the circle of friends the more alcohol is involved to blind yourself to the fact that you cant stand most of these assholes.

Try taking five minutes for meditation. Close your eyes and in your mind picture Jesus. Watch Him turn, look at you and hear Him...

When Rhiannon was small and had just learned to read, her mother brought her into the hall one day when her father was on campaign, and led her to the large table upon which a great map of their lands lay. She instructed Rhiannon to read the words of the landmarks: castle, road, mountain, forest, village. The young girl touched words inscribed over a place where trees met craggy peaks. “What does that say, my love?” her mother prompted. “Here be dragons,” Rhiannon answered, glancing up at her mother. Her mother nodded, smiling. She knelt down in front of Rhiannon so they were at the same height. The lady’s hazel eyes sparkled as she whispered, “I have a secret to share. But I can only share it with a little girl with red and gold hair,” she pulled playfully on Rhiannon’s braid,” who knows how to read.” Rhiannon giggled. “Are you a little girl such as this?” Rhiannon nodded eagerly, and her mother laughed. She stood up and gestured at a tapestry on the wall. “Come, child, the dragon guards our treasure.” Hand in hand they walked to the tapestry of the sleeping dragon. “Your great-great grandmother wove this tapestry when she was an old woman. It took her a long time to complete, with her hands gnarled so, like the twisted oak by the drawbridge.” The dragon was curled up in front of a turret, with stone dolmens in a semi-circle behind it, interspersed with trees and a mountain peak in the background and bright blue sky above. The dragon’s scales were crimson and woven through with glittering gold thread, and its curved horns and talons were gold. As they paused in front of the large tapestry, Rhiannon looked closely at the eyes of the dragon; she thought perhaps she could see a slit of gold, as if the dragon were only pretending to be asleep. Rhiannon’s mother stood on tiptoe and moved part of the tapestry to the side, revealing a slit in the stone wall. With her free hand she reached in and drew out a large leather-bound tome. She motioned her daughter to come sit with her on one of the benches that lined the walls. “Look and listen well, my daughter,” she said, and ran her fingers along the smooth cover, “this book is our special treasure, and it contains many secrets within its pages. I am going to teach you how to read them.” She opened the book as Rhiannon snuggled closer to her, her mother’s loose red-gold hair falling over the girl’s shoulder and brushing the crinkly parchment pages of the book which she turned until she came to the picture of a girl.

Even if you can’t see the whole road ahead, you can ask for the one step that will lead you forward.

O how quickly passes away the glory of the earth.

None of us are getting out of here alive".

A Kula or spiritual community is like a nudist camp for the soul. Not only are we given the permission to remove our robes of guilt, our suits of shame, and our masks of false identity—we are encouraged to do so. To become naked and hold nothing back is to become truly beautiful.

You should never start something when you haven't finished the last thing. People feel used that way.

Suspicion," he said. "Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He's a genius." "Starring Cary Grant." When Lucas gave me a look, I added, "You have your priorities, I have mine.

Be courageous. Always be a voice for those who are oppressed.

When we are kind and forgiving, we will be forgiven.

Too much hurry will bury your goals. Too much haste will make you waste. Too quick race will cripple your pace. Be patient.