Quotes by Lecturers - Page 5

The only reward of virtue is virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.
Robert McKee
For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,
Joseph Campbell
To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history.
Kenan Malik
In general, it should be noted, biblical law is evolutionary, not revolutionary...
Joseph Telushkin
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.
Joseph Campbell
A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors for the expression of all his history and his wants.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Describing current human mindsets reflecting our ignorance and cowardice and non action-oriented mentality:"I'm going to do nothing but escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my way out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth.
Mark Passio
It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics for then we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent's good will.
Dale Carnegie
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
Joseph Campbell
Spiritual force is stronger than material force thoughts rule the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.
Tamim Ansary
As many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.... Will these, too, seperate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
Joseph Campbell
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By talking to yourself every hour of the day, you can direct yourself to think thoughts of courage and happiness, thoughts of power and peace. By talking to yourself about the things you have to be grateful for, you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and sing.
Dale Carnegie
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The child's world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself. This infantile notion of a world governed by moral rather than physical laws, kept under control by a superordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men's thoughts all over the world.The sense then, of this world as an undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (Participation), which is all alive (Animism), and which was created by a superior being (Artificialism), may be said to constitute the frame of reference of all childhood experience no matter where in the world. No small wonder then, that the above Three Principles are precisely those most represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.
Joseph Campbell
Self-trust is the first secret of success.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The boy answers, "Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt."Indra says, "I ask. Teach." (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)
Joseph Campbell
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
Joseph Campbell
The flowering of geometry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
Joseph Campbell
Faith is the soul riding at anchor.
Josh Billings
All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are ... punished by fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For what avail the plough or sail Or land or life if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them.
Andrew Solomon
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone else's path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way,you are not going to realizeyour potential.
Joseph Campbell
As much as we seek approval, we dread condemnation
Dale Carnegie
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
Joseph Campbell
Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.
Susan Blackmore
Difficulties exist to be surmounted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The student is to read history actively not passively.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When ill luck besets us to ease the tension we have only to remember that happiness is relative. The next time you are tempted to grumble about what has happened to you why not pause and be glad that it is no worse than it is?
Dale Carnegie
Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.
Joseph Campbell
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)
Joseph Campbell
Beauty without expression tires.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don't blame you one iota for feeling as you do. If I were you I would undoubtedly feel just as you do."(...) You can say that and be 100 percent sincere, because if you were the other person you, of course, would feel just as he does (...) Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind (...) Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was - and where he was. For it is those things -and only those things - that made him what he was. (...) You deserve very little credit for being what you are - and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.
Dale Carnegie