Accustoming To Quotes & Sayings

Christian mothers, if only you knew the future of distress and peril, of shame ill-restrained, that you prepare for your sons and daughters in imprudently accustoming them to live hardly clothed and in making them lose the sense of modesty, you should be ashamed of yourselves and of the harm done the little ones whom heaven entrusted to your care, to be reared in Christian dignity and culture. — Pope Pius XII

Once, at a seminar, I heard a Westernized lama say that a meditator's state of mind should be like that of a hotel doorman. A doorman lets the guests in, but he doesn't follow them up to their rooms. He lets them out, but he doesn't walk into the street with them to their next appointment. He greets them all, then lets them go on about their business. Meditation is, in its initial stages, simply accustoming oneself to letting thoughts come and go without grasping at their sleeves or putting up a velvet rope to keep them out. — Marc Ian Barasch

All mechanical habits are bad and slavish, and this one is ferocious as well. Of course, if you look upon the work of the revolutionist as the mere wresting of certain definite concessions from the government, then the secret sect and the knife must seem to you the best weapons, for there is nothing else which all governments so dread. But if you think, as I do, that to force the government's hand is not an end in itself, but only a means to an end, and that what we really need to reform is the relation between man and man, then you must go differently to work. Accustoming ignorant people to the sight of blood is not the way to raise the value they put on human life. — Ethel Lilian Voynich

Despite the damaging effects of mounting criticism, we saw some lovely examples of the triumph of the human spirit. Al's greatest trouble was accustoming his people to the concept that each had been given at least one gift of the Holy Spirit to be used for ministry in the community. It seemed to be foreign to them. For those who actually experimented with expressing what was locked inside there was delight and fulfillment. — David R. Mains

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform. — Christopher Henry Dawson

What is called Western Civilization is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us, if, indeed, it has not already begun. With the Media, especially television, governing all our lives, as they indubitably do, it is easily imaginable that this might happen without our noticing ... by accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values. — Malcolm Muggeridge

Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing. — Julian Baggini

In order to prevent self-interest and ill-conceived projects, and all such dangerous innovations as finally ruined the Athenians, each man should not be at liberty to propose new laws at pleasure; this right should belong exclusively to the magistrates.... It is above all the great antiquity of the laws which makes them sacred and venerable; men soon learn to despise laws which they see daily altered; and states, by accustoming themselves to neglect their ancient customs under the pretext of improvement, often introduce greater evils than those they endeavor to remove.109 — Will Durant

The healing process can only truly begin when we are willing to remember. — Phoebe Stone

I put forward at once - lest I break with my style, which is affirmative
and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily - the
three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to
think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture.
Learning to see - accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things
come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual
case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react
at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Then viselike fingers clenched my throat, the stake was wrenched from my hand, and a sharp stabbing pain shot up my right thigh as I landed on the ground with a thump that knocked the breath out of me.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, once I landed, something hard and heavy - his knee, I thought - hit me right in the sternum. You know, just in case there was one last breath left in my lungs. The point of the stake scraped the sensitive skin just under my chin. I looked up, wheezing, into Archer's face. — Rachel Hawkins

(Lincoln reflecting on) George Washington's words: "It is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prospertiy. Washington advised vigilance against "the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Habit hath so vast a prevalence over the human mind that there is scarce anything too strange or too strong to be asserted of it. The story of the miser who, from long accustoming to cheat others, came at last to cheat himself, and with great delight and triumph picked his own pocket of a guinea to convey to his hoard, is not impossible or improbable. — Henry Fielding

He had been brought up to it from a boy, his father, as I have heard, accustoming his children to dispute with one another for his diversion, while sitting at the table after dinner, but I think the practice was not wise; for, in the course of my observation, these disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them. — Benjamin Franklin

Love yourself before you love someone else. — Leslie Becker-Phelps

The habit of seen the public rule, is gradually accustoming the American mind to an interference with private rights that is slowly undermining the individuality of the national character. There is getting to be so much public right, that private right is overshadowed and lost. A danger exists that the ends of liberty will be forgotten altogether in the means. — James F. Cooper

For the good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. Its real influence will be in giving the mind that enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of common life for us - whether it be by giving the most spiritual interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the most sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things. For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all, and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all. — Oscar Wilde

In the killing of animals there is cruelty, rage, and the accustoming of oneself to the bad habit of shedding innocent blood. — Joseph Albo

The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that ... we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever. — Phillips Brooks

Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides. — Friedrich Nietzsche

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. — Ronald Reagan