Daniel Smith Quotes & Sayings

But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can't blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mod your child's temperament as surely as water wear at rock. — Daniel Smith

Charismatic leader will speak with compassion, intelligence, and presence. These — Daniel Smith

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. — Daniel Smith

First, contrary to popular belief, Buddhists can actually be very anxious people. That's often why they become Buddhists in the first place. Buddhism was made for the anxious like Christianity was made for the downtrodden or AA for the addicted. Its entire purpose is to foster equanimity, to tame excesses of thought and emotion. The Buddhists have a great term for these excesses. They refer to them as the condition of "monkey mind." A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the walls and swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines. Buddhist practices are designed explicitly to collar these monkeys of the mind and bring them down to earth - to pacify them. Is it any wonder that Buddhism has had such tremendous success in the bastions of American nervousness, on the West Coast and in the New York metro area? — Daniel Smith

By the tie I arrived at the clinic I was typically so demoralized I could barely stand. I was twenty-three years old and I looked like Nixon resigning the presidency. — Daniel Smith

If you're afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you're afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid? — Daniel Smith

Freud was of the opinion that in fear a person is responding to a specific and immediate threat to physical safety while in anxiety a person is responding to a threat that is objectless, directionless, and located somewhere far off in the future - ruination, for example, or humiliation, or decay. — Daniel Smith

There are many selfish people who are extremely original, then they take those pure ideas and use them to raise themselves up, that is an insincere move. — Daniel Smith

Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward. — Daniel Smith

by knowing someone's needs and doing them a favor, you own them. You will be able to get them to do a lot more for you, further down the line, when you need them to. — Daniel Smith

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety - as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose. — Daniel Smith

Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we've violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret - regret is useless. — Daniel Smith

There is no such thing as a good decision and a bad decision. There are only decisions. Make them, fuck up, enjoy, repeat. — Daniel Smith

I believe people who are looking for a fresh idea and spirit have received Danielson. The conservative Christian press have been quite mean to us, but the mainstream 'secular' press has been very, very nice. — Daniel Smith

Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad. — Daniel Smith

Up till now I wrote the songs on my acoustic guitar alone with the Lord. Then I would take the song and share it with my family and then we all would figure out instrumentation together. — Daniel Smith

The problem of anxiety isn't that the organism responds to threats by near-instantly powering up. That's clearly a good thing, species-survival-wise. It's that sometimes the organism starts seeing threats too readily. — Daniel Smith

It's like I've had a stroke. Do you think I've had a stroke?"
"I don't think you've had a stroke."
"But how do you know? How can you be sure I haven't had a stroke?"
"What are the symptoms of a stroke?"
"I don't know. Look them up. Look them up on line."
"OK. Hold on ... OK. Here it is. Do you have trouble speaking?"
"I have trouble speaking intelligently. — Daniel Smith

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious. — Daniel Smith

I believe that an artist working for and representing the Kingdom of God should do the best of their ability to show and prove the depth, life, newness, creativity, truth and excitement of their Heavenly Father through the work that is set before them. — Daniel Smith

The bargain was this: Admit the anxiety as an essential part of yourself and in exchange that anxiety will be converted into energy, unstable but manageable. Stop with the self-flagellating and become yourself, with scars and tics. — Daniel Smith

Bob Dylan started out as a folk rip- off but he quickly ran with complex influences and it ended up to be his own sound. — Daniel Smith

This is why therapists go to such lengths to urge their anxious patients away from intellectualization: The first step toward peace is disarmament. — Daniel Smith

And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt. — Daniel Smith

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard! — Daniel Smith

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It's just you and your mind, which has fists and is using them. It may be dualistic and logically untenable to posit the situation as You v. Head; it may not make sense philosophically. But in the throes of anxiety? In the cognitive shit? There's really no other way to think about what's going on. — Daniel Smith

This is the trouble with origin hunting. There are so many origins. — Daniel Smith

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes with more a active skin. — Daniel Smith

My mother took the measure of what could be built with the material she'd been given, and she built it. — Daniel Smith

Even the imperative to make choice after choice without clear guidance - allegedly the most nerve-wracking part of the profession - isn't exclusive to writing. — Daniel Smith

Equally as therapeutic was the fact that disaster did not come. — Daniel Smith

Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, "Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly." Freedom says, "Even not to choose is to choose." Freedom says, "So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings." Freedom says, "You're on your own. Deal with it. — Daniel Smith

He isn't trying to transform himself into something different; he's trying to transform someone different back into himself. — Daniel Smith

Remind yourself that every second spent scrolling through social media is one you will never get back. — Daniel Smith

I get excited about what the Holy Spirit is doing now through all the people he is refining and raising up all over this planet. I love connections and relationship and networking but it must be led by the Spirit. — Daniel Smith