Quotes by Lecturers - Page 9

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Obedience alone gives the right to command.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pride ruined the angels.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do things for others and you'll find your self-consciousness evaporating like morning dew.
Dale Carnegie
How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)
Joseph Campbell
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.
Andrew Solomon
There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.
Josh Billings
Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.
Joseph Campbell
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If it wasn't for faith there would be no living in this world we couldn't even eat hash with any safety.
Josh Billings
People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.
Dale Carnegie
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
Robert McKee
HELLO, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, how hard you hope.
Nathan Filer
The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.
Gil Bailie
Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;And Time the ruined bridge has sweptDown the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,We set to-day a votive stone;That memory may their deed redeem,When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dareTo die, and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck wise and strong men in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adopt the pace of nature her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead....
Joseph Campbell
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As a general thing when a woman wears the pants in a family she has a good right to them.
Josh Billings
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
Dale Carnegie
Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man carefully examines his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
Dale Carnegie
When she turned to see me smiling. It was an awkward smile, but you only really know what a smile means when you own the face behind it. Everyone else just sees the smile they expected it to be.
Nathan Filer
Every reform was once a private opinion and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We don't want to eliminate the ego completely. Otherwise we'd be wandering around the house each morning, drinking coffee for hours, saying, 'Who the hell am I?' We need the ego to sustain a sense of identity.
Stuart Wilde
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In retrospect, it seems obvious that my research about parenting was also a means to subdue my anxieties about becoming a parent.... I grew up afraid of illness and disability, inclined to avert my gaze from anyone who was too different – despite all the ways I knew myself to be different. This book helped me kill that bigoted impulse, which I had always known to be ugly. The obvious melancholy in the stories I heard should, perhaps, have made me shy away from paternity, but it had the opposite effect.
Andrew Solomon
Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when...you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out".'There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are only the three positions.
Joseph Campbell
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Andrew Solomon
Though I am weak yet God when prayed Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your smile is a messenger of your good will.
Dale Carnegie
John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you’re a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn’t belong here. So I’m going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can’t do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay.
Andrew Solomon
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
Andrew Solomon
You have first an instinct then an opinion then a knowledge as the plant has root bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end though you can render no reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If only the people who worry about their liabilities would think about the riches they do possess they would stop worrying. Would you sell both your eyes for a million dollars ... or your two legs ... or your hands ... or your hearing? Add up what you do have and you'll find that you won't sell them for all the gold in the world. The best things in life are yours if you can appreciate yourself.
Dale Carnegie
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Ralph Waldo Emerson