Quotes & Sayings About Being In Your Own World

I dedicate my work today to the furtherance of all things good. Whether I am paid or not, whether I am working out in the world or planting my own garden, I dedicate whatever I am doing today to the uplifting of all things. May the activity of my mind and work of my hands be of service to the healing of the world. Today I remember that there is only one work: to be who I am capable of being, to do what I am capable of doing to make the world a better place. May my life be of use to something greater than myself, that I might feel the joy of being used. Dear God, Today I dedicate all I am and all that I have, That love might use me as a conduit of its power. Illumine my mind and increase my understanding, Hone my personality and deepen my skills, That all I do might glorify Your presence in the world. And so it is. Amen. — Marianne Williamson

Even he knew that if demons could exist, it meant there was real evil in the world, and if you believed in the devil, somewhere in the deepest fibers of your being you had to believe in God. He knew, firsthand, that the devil was real; he'd seen it with his own two eyes. But he'd never seen God. He'd never felt God. He'd never been helped by God. For all he knew, wickedness was strong enough to exist in a world without good. — Ania Ahlborn

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.
Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never
enjoy the world. — Thomas Traherne

It is immensely gratifying to hear from fans from around the world where being a gay or lesbian teen, having feelings for someone of your own gender is simply not acceptable. We noticed that our show fills a huge void for large audiences in many different countries. That's why our choice of format for the show, the web series, is such a fortunate one as it allows viewers in those countries to feel acknowledged. While the series is not exclusively dealing with gay and lesbian issues, the fact that we don't sanitize it gives us truly global appeal, especially with the gay and lesbian community. In fact, demand is such that we are subtitling the show in French and perhaps other languages to even better reach those audiences. — Otessa Marie Ghadar

I haven't been to a temple in years, never been forced. My folks always said, marry a nice human being, religion doesn't matter. They said your god is inside you! Don't you forget that. Krishna, Jesus, Allah, are all one. Follow vegetarianism as far as you can, but you can choose your own diet, doesn't matter. Believe in god, but for you and not because the world asks you to. Forgive and forget to be at peace. Do not believe in revenge, believe in karma!! — Manasa Rao

In that case, hell, I'll even spring for the coffee. Unless you're some kind of damned tea-drinking Englishman, in which case you can buy your own dirty leafy water."
"Drink tea in America?" Jeremy's eyebrow twitched upwards in disbelief. "I'm not that sort of masochist. Coffee, at least, has the benefit of being horrible the world over, so it doesn't matter where you get it."
Simon eyed him narrowly. "And to think I was almost not hating you."
Jeremy blinked, feigning confusion. "Goodness. Did I say something wrong? — M. Chandler

The moment you know your real being, you are afraid of nothing. Death gives freedom and power. To be free in the world, you must die to the world. Then the universe is your own, it becomes your body, an expression and a tool. The happiness of being absolutely free is beyond description. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. — Zadie Smith

It was safe, with all the lights off and no one around to point and stare. In the night it's easy to indulge. It was just the two of us - we didn't have to think about who we were or what this meant or where it was going. It was like an escape. It's easy to forget at this moment billions of people exist and far-off galaxies are being born and stars collide. Kissing is its own kind of collision, it produces its own planetarium of lights inside your head. For me, it was like seeing colors for the first time after living in a black-and-white world. A single person can be just as wide and vast and spellbinding as any sky full of stars. They can make you think the world stops and night can last forever., — Katie Kacvinsky

It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not - at first - be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we're quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to dilemmas that've been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba 'across de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual so profoundly and routinely reinforces our cuntpower. — Inga Muscio

Nothing should be worth more to you than its value in helping you live your life. If you are willing to slough off the past, even at a loss, you are keeping yourself free, and your world continues to grow. If you insist on holding to some abstract valuation, you are being held hostage by that possession, and you are trapped in a prison of your own devising. — Kent Nerburn

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings as vast as your own, who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making, and knows inside herself that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone.
Slavery is the same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and describes this world in essential texts. A world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave. Hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself behind my leaks.

"I know," I said.

"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.

"I know," I said.

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world. — Susan Orlean

My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever. — Mary Gordon

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me. — Jason Reitman

Here's the best thing about being a writer: it's like having a magic wand to make whatever you want happen to imaginary people in a made-up world.

Here's the worst thing about being a writer: it makes you wish even more that you had a magic wand to make whatever you want happen to actual people in your own real life" -Autumn — Claudia Mills

To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world. — Rudolf Steiner

It must be an awful feeling to have love all around you and not feel loved, to be in need and unable to accept whats being offered, to see a world of possibilities but trapped inside your own mind. — Tracy L. Darity

And I'm afraid it really is a jungle too," pursued the Consul, "in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger." "What's that?" Mr Quincey said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And God never drinks before breakfast either.
"On a tiger," the Consul repeated.
The other gazed at him a moment with the cold sardonic eye of the material world. "I expect so," he said sourly. "Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too ... Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you'd mind being sick on your own side of the fence? — Malcolm Lowry

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world. — Jeanette Winterson

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. — Charlie Kaufman

You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.
When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center. — Alice Walker

Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you, was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered - you must have music, dancing, and society - or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? — Charlotte Bronte

Take childcare for example, an issue that never gets much support beyond lip service in the feminist world, despite it being something that would benefit the majority of women. Once you reach a certain income level, it's easier and more convenient for you to take care of your own childcare needs than to pay the taxes or contribute to a system that would help all women. If your child is in a failing school, it's much more convenient to place your child in a private or charter school than to organize ways to improve the situation for the entire community. This also applies to expanding social welfare programs, supporting community clinics, and so on. As a woman's ability to take care of herself expands thanks to feminist efforts, the feminist goals she's willing to really fight for, or contribute time and money and effort to, shrink. — Jessa Crispin

Love is the degree to which you are willing to sacrifice your own interests for those of another. It doesn't matter what sex you are. It doesn't matter who you are, or were. It only matters that you care more for someone else than you do for yourself. It's when you eat minlatta with tarragon oil even when you hate pasta because someone with you enjoys it. It's when you value being alone more than anything but agree to move in with someone because they need you. And believe this, Ellis Rogers, for I am quite certain that love is most certainly when you push away the one person in all the world you want to be with because you think your thoughts would cause them pain. — Michael J. Sullivan

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying. — Allen Ginsberg

Were you somebody different a thousand years ago? Will you be somebody different a thousand years from now? What is this One Self that is forever your own deepest being? Must you believe the lies of time? Must you swallow the insanity that One Spirit does not exist? Can you show me your Original Face, of which there is One and Only One in all the entire World? — Ken Wilber

Stop being offended. Start engaging the world! More and more, it seems that Christians are isolating themselves from the rest of the world. They seem content living in their own bubbles, speculating and condemning the world from their safe zones. They seem surprised when the non-Christian world makes "wrong" decisions. They have an opinion on almost any subject, often without even hearing both sides of an issue. They post fiery comments on Facebook and throw their judgment all over the Internet. And they do all of this from within their little, safe, comfortable bubbles. Seriously?! Is this the kind of influence Jesus asked us to have in the world? You need to quit being offended! Instead, you must engage the world. The world doesn't need your judgment. It needs your love! It needs to see a real Christian living a real life. The good. The bad. The ugly! — Bob Beeman

Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on. — Richard Hell

His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it. — Dara Horn

what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me - it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing then but your voice - your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. — Ayn Rand

One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country - there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view. — Kim Edwards

In accusing me of being a damnable sinner, you are cutting your own throat, Satan. You are reminding me of God's fatherly goodness toward me, that He so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. In calling me a sinner, Satan, you really comfort me above measure. — Martin Luther

If enslaved to the desire for wealth, let this go. If enslaved by grievance, turn the cheek. If your significance is in being mother or father or wife or husband or child or in having any of these - indeed, if you cling even to your own life - these too let go. Have instead a new mind set upon the kingdom. Do not be anxious, but rather repent - see beyond your old mind, you see? Only have eyes to see what is true beyond what you think. Trust the Father. Then you will master this world with pleasure rather than be mastered by it. Then you will find the power to command any storm. — Ted Dekker

O'Brien: How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston: By making him suffer.
O'Brien: Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. — George Orwell

Love, real love, is being seen. Being known. Knowing the ugliest part of someone, and loving them anyway. And ... I guess I think two people in love become something else, something more than the sum of their parts, you know? That it must be like you're creating a new world that exists just for the two of you. You're gods of your own pocket universe. — Cassandra Clare

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Some ADD adults adapt to the work world by allowing themselves to be pitifully underemployed. Rather than find a great match for their skills and interests, they will work at a job far below their natural abilities. In this way, their inevitable screwups and difficulties with following directions will be balanced by being more capable than those they work with. This strategy has its own set of painful problems. For one thing, knowing you could do and be more can lead to an enduring agony. For another, you may find yourself falling prey to negative feedback from people who aren't as smart as you are. Another strategy ADD adults sometimes adopt is to overcompensate, working inhuman hours to try to avoid possible criticism. It can be shattering when even this strategy doesn't prevent criticism from heading your way, whether from colleagues, bosses, or clients. Another problem with this strategy is that it can take a tremendous toll on your personal relationships. — Lara Honos-Webb

Leading isn't about being perfect, but learning from mistake one made by you or others. It's showing by example and, if you do make a mistake, you own it and rise above it. You don't hang your head down, but lift it up and say, "Fuck. I guess I won't do that again!". The one thing you can't do is let it destroy your self-confidence . If you do, the mistake wins. If you rise above it and tuck the lesson in your bag of tricks, you win. -- Jack Walker (A New World: Conspiracy) — John O'Brien

A society where you're not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that's being ushered in. — David Mitchell

I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny - arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate - I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom - maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions. — David Grossman

The liberal entertainment industry is a fickle world. So it's about living in the moment, and it's about being clear with it and understanding that this is another opportunity to step up the staircase a little bit and create some newer opportunities and get involved in some other projects, as well as possibly creating your own. — John Pyper-Ferguson

If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon, or secretion, of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of being, if it can merge with the natural world and with other beings, then, indeed, it may be possible to drop, for a time, the constraints of one's personal worldview and see reality through the eyes of others. — F. David Peat

If you want to be a part of this community that you love, I realized - this family that keeps you sane in a shitty, boring world, this million-dollar enterprise that you fund with your consumer clout, just as much as male listeners do - you have to participate, with a smile, in your own disintegration. You have to swallow, every day, that you are a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered by men. — Lindy West

You are now 18
standing on the precipice,
trembling before your own greatness.

This is your call to leap.

There will always being those
who say you are too young and delicate
to make anything happen for yourself.
They don't see the part of you that smolders.
Don't let their doubting drown out
the sound of your own heartbeat.

You are the first drop of a hurricane.

Your bravery builds beyond you
You are needed by all the little girls
still living in secret, writing oceans
made of monsters and
throwing like lightening.

You don't need to grow up to find greatness.

You are stronger than the world
has ever believed you to be.
The world is waiting for you to set it on fire
Trust in yourself
and burn. — Clementine Von Radics

To fully contribute to this transformation in your own unique fashion, you selected an identity based on the numerous talents and abilities you have accumulated from experiences in many directions of time. You inserted yourself with great care into your chosen life. Deciding to be here is an achievement in itself; however, understanding what is unfolding around you is an even greater accomplishment. Billions of people have come here to play a part in this great drama - to recognize and remember that they are energetic beings whose thoughts, feelings, and emotions create the world they meet. Consciously learning to recognize frequencies and then producing those you want is an underlying key to the game; being able to read and communicate with the life energies of your environment is a worthy goal for all humanity. To — Barbara Marciniak

We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction," he said. "We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came. — G.K. Chesterton

My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. The more you develop it in your own being, the more it overwhelms your surroundings and by and by might oversweep the world. — M K Gandhi

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. — Laurie Perez

You have to experience it to understand. One thing I can say, though, is that once you see that true sight with your own eyes, the world you've lived in up till now will look flat and insipid. There's no logic or illogic in that scene. No good or evil. Everything is merged into one. And you are part of that merging. You leave the boundary of your physical body behind to become a metaphysical being. You become intuition. — Haruki Murakami

As you become more rooted inside
as you drink from this silent stream of life that runs beneath the surface of everything
as you live from that depth of your own being more and more, then you'll be able to rise taller and stronger in this world; more than you may have ever thought possible. — Derek Rydall

He believed in a true world. A world behind this one, that shines through it, like a candle through a lampshade' ... She thought of the true world the times they had seen it - it was like light glinting on the surface of the river, that shimmering quality when you saw it. It wasn't the thing itself. It was your own ability to see it ... the feeling when time stopped, and you could stay there forever. 'You see the beauty in everything. It doesn't last long
it's either gone in a minute, you just caught it, or else maybe it's something so big that you normally can't get your head around it. Like the fog in your head clears out. The world stops being a puppet show and you see the real thing. It's probably like that all the time, but you just can't see it, except for those little glimpses (pg 82). — Janet Fitch

God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn't about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace - like saying, "Oh, it's OK, I'll be the good guy and forgive you." It's God saying, "I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. — Cormac McCarthy

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake. — Margaret Atwood

Linney moves in the world with such firm, certain steps, being with her can make you forget your own confusion, at least for a little while. — Marisa De Los Santos

I feel the president is ignoring the opinion of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world. My comments were made in frustration, and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view. — Natalie Maines

I became an actor to escape my own personality. Acting is the most therapeutic thing in the world. You see, through acting you come full circle in your personality and, oh, what a grand time you can have along the way being wonderful people through your characters ... I think all the courage that I may lack personally I have as an actor. — George C. Scott

I think it is because I have a habit, when I am bored or disgusted with people of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door. People resent this
I suppose it is only natural to resent a door being shut in your face. They call it slyness when it is only self-defense. — L.M. Montgomery

All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own. Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears." But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it. — Rajneesh

Love?" Michael smiled down at his hands. "Love, real love, is being seen. Being known. Knowing the ugliest part of someone, and loving them anyway. And . . . I guess I think two people in love become something else, something more than the sum of their parts, you know? That it must be like you're creating a new world that exists just for the two of you. You're gods of your own pocket universe." He laughed a little then, as if he felt foolish. "That must sound ridiculous."
"No," Robert said, the truth dawning over him. Michael didn't talk like someone who was guessing - he talked like someone who knew. — Cassandra Clare

Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed. — John O'Donohue

Remember what your grandfather said about the earth's being round at school and flat at home. He was a wise man and taught you what you need to know in Burma. It is the same in politics. Learn the arguments for socialism in the textbooks parrot them pass your exams. Never never argue. But keep within your own head and heart what you and everyone really knows that in the real world it is a system of incompetence and corruption and a project for ruining the country. — Pascal Khoo Thwe

Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Being a hangman requires you to take someone else's life based on someone else's judgment, and carry it out on someone else's schedule. The job does not provide the same satisfaction that an ordinary murderer gets from smashing a skull. It robs them of the fulfillment of plunging a knife into someone's throat. In the world of capital punishment, the prisoner's crimes have been sanitized by years of sitting on death row. By then, the execution is a cold and impersonal affair. There is prayer, a noose, and a few last words. The prisoner then experiences a sudden rush of blood to the head. At the end of it all, you have a broken neck and a dead body swinging from the end of a rope. That is it. You don't get to manhandle them with your own hands. That's why the brutes you mention will never be hired. So you see, Vaida, this is not a job for a murderer. It is a job for a humanitarian. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

I thought that you would bring everything into my life. I thought you are my Jesus. You are my priest, my light. So I always believed you are my only home here. I feel so insecure because I am so scared of losing you. That's why I want to control you. I want you are in my view always and I want cut off your extension to the world and your extension to the others.
I think of those days when I travelled in Europe on my own. I met many people and finally I wasn't so afraid of being alone. Maybe I should let my life open, like a flower; maybe I should fly, like a lonely bird. I shouldn't be blocked by a tree, and I shouldn't be scared about losing one tree, instead of seeing a whole forest. — Xiaolu Guo

As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once
that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people. — Elizabeth Gilbert

It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in the world. — Leif Enger

The main question is "Do you own your pain?" As long as you do not own your pain - that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world - the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give. As a result, you will feel frustrated, and those you wanted to help will feel confused, disappointed, or even further burdened. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

No," he said after a pause, "the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. They do not even withhold their own existence from his sports. Jove may favor Lucianos of Samosata. As long as your mockery is in true godly taste you may mock at the gods and still remain a sound devotee. But in pitying, or condoling with your god, you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms. — Karen Blixen

As a child growing up, you never thought about being in a videogame, then to have a game of your own and be lucky enough to set the bar with it in the gaming world, it's a dream come true. — Tiger Woods

Kids today are sold so much, by corporations and media and commercials and advertising and music videos, that I do. A lot of times, they retain that stuff and wear it, and that's the concept of a hipster. It's about owning it and redefining it, on your own level. It's a way of retaining control and meaning, in a world where you're being told to think in a certain way. — Joseph M. Kahn

You know what is the worst thing in the world?
You are amidst this crowd, a swarm of people,
Who think they connect with you,
Every one of them, in their own way.
But in reality, you are being ripped apart,
Connecting with each one of them.
It is a constant struggle to connect with someone,
To be heard,to be understood,to be loved, to be accepted.
And it is done with a glimpse of hope,
That someone from these known and unknown faces,
Will hear you out, someone with a warm & genuine smile,
Will touch your heart.
And that's precisely when,perhaps,you would say,
Yes, THIS IS ME. — Sachin Garg

I think that, generally, people of the world typify a "free and wild" person as someone who's uprooted, detached and uninhibited. But I don't believe in that kind of freedom. I think that's an infantile concept. Freedom means something when it has escaped something! Those people who escaped things - their inner cages, cages set by others around them - when those people are able to roam free and say, "This is who I am because this is who I choose to be", THAT is freedom. Freedom isn't being stupid; freedom is being so smart that you develop a strength strong enough to break free and become your own person. A better person than what your circumstances would like to define you as. — C. JoyBell C.

Apart from being interested in a good role, I think it's necessary to make up your mind as to whether it will make a movie that will entertain an audience all over the world and not just in your own backyard. — Rod Taylor

Self-esteem comes from being able to define the world in your own terms and refusing to abide by the judgments of others. — Oprah Winfrey

The ego keeps you almost in a drunken state. You don't know who you are because you believe what others say about you. And you don't know who others are because you believe what others say about others. This is the make-believe, illusory world in which we live. Wake up, become more conscious. By becoming conscious you will become a master of your own being. Mastery knows nothing of self, and the self knows nothing of mastery. Let that be absolutely clear to you. My — Osho

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world. That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust. — Ernest Hemingway,

If someone is being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird, you don't have to take it in. You don't have to turn it into a big psychodrama about your worth. That behavior so often is not even about you. It's about the person who's being unkind or petty or jealous or distant or weird. If this were summed up on a bumper sticker, it would say: Don't own other people's crap. The world would be a better place if we all did that. — Cheryl Strayed

Wow," the empty air finally said. "Wow. That puts a pretty different perspective on things, I have to say. I'm going to remember this the next time I feel an impulse to blame myself for something. Neville, the term in the literature for this is 'egocentric bias', it means that you experience everything about your own life but you don't get to experience everything else that happens in the world. There was way, way more going on than you running in front of me. You're going to spend weeks remembering that thing you did there for six seconds, I can tell, but nobody else is going to bother thinking about it. Other people spend a lot less time thinking about your past mistakes than you do, just because you're not the center of their worlds. I guarantee to you that nobody except you has even considered blaming Neville Longbottom for what happened to Hermione. Not for a fraction of a second. You are being, if you will pardon the phrase, a silly-dilly. Now shut up and say goodbye. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world - with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies - becomes the actuality. That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version. — Saul Bellow

Do you want to be crazy, radical, insanely different than everybody else and do something few people have the courage to do? Then try being yourself and walk a mile or two in your own shoes. Stop trying to be something you are not. Stop trying to emulate someone else. Trust me ... they are probably just copying another person they think is cool. No one else will ever be able to duplicate how perfectly you personify yourself. Here is your chance to amaze the world with how different you can be. — H.L. Stephens

It started off for me as just wanting to be an actor and sort of resenting in a weird way being expected to write as well as be a comedian and an improviser. And then you think about it for a minute, and I smartened up and realized that the only way to sustain a career is to generate your own material. Or to be in control of your career as best you can. And in allowing yourself to do that it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And then you're like "Oh, producing is a thing." — Rob Corddry

Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. — Alyssa Reyans

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing - as every parent fears - that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader. — Michael Chabon

As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space," Milosz writes, "I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!" And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude. — Gaston Bachelard

Let her go?' asked Son, and he smiled a crooked smile. Let go the woman you had been looking for everywhere just because she was difficult? Because she had a temper, energy, ideas of her own and fought back? Let go a woman whose eyebrows were a study, whose face was enough to engage your attention all your life? Let go a woman who was not only a woman but a sound, all the music he had ever wanted to play, a world and a way of being in it? Let that go? 'I can't,' he said. 'I can't. — Toni Morrison

There isn't any such thing as being your own boss in this world unless you're a tramp, and then there's the constable. — George Horace Lorimer

If you are forced to confront your fears on a daily basis, they disintegrate, like illusions when viewed up close. Maybe being always protected made me more fearful, and I would later dip cautiously into the outside world, never allowing myself to be submerged completely, and always jerking back into the familiarity of my own life when my senses were overwhelmed. For years I would stand with a foot in each sphere, drawn to the exotic universe that lay on the other side of the portal, wrenched back by the warnings that sounded like alarm bells in my mind. — Deborah Feldman

You told me i was your world.
It wasn't me. I was an animal."
My heart pounded. My cheeks burned.
You never wanted it to end.
"Why are you being such a jackass, slamming me in the face with my own humiliation?"
Humilation? That's what you call this? He forced a more detailed reminder on me.
I swallowed. Yes, I certainly remembered that. "I was out of my mind. I'd never have done it otherwise."

Really, his dark eyes mocked, and in them I was demanding more, telling him I wanted it to always be this way.
I remembered what he'd replied: that one day I would wonder if it was possible to hate him more. — Karen Marie Moning

Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worth-while love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance which inspires no sacrifice. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What man has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads men, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronizes the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord say, "Tolerate your enemies!" But He did say, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you" (Matt. 5:44). Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature's animosities. — Fulton J. Sheen

I think they call that parallas: being able to know the distance of something because you're seeing it from two separate points - and the farther apart those two points are, the more accurate you can be. Put one eye here and one eye fourteen feet away, and you know a whole lot more about the world you're seeing.
The thing is, if you go through life with just your own point of view, you're like that kid with glass eye. If there's something that's right up in your face, it looks really big - overwhelming even. But if you've got that parallax - if you've got that other point of view - you realize that there are bigger, much more important things that are far off toward the horizon. Once you focus on those things rather than the way up close, that close-up stuff becomes nothing more than a nuisance blocking the view. — Neal Shusterman

You are the most incredible being I have ever met. And its not just because of the things my grandfather did to you. You're strong all on your own. You care about all of them, even if you don't really know what love even means.
Eden is a wonderful place but it wouldn't be anywhere near the same without you. I know I don't fit in there, that people still don't fully trust me. But you're there so its all okay. When I'm with you, I feel something I didn't think it was still possible to feel in this world. I feel alive like there is still hope in this world. Like maybe things will still be okay someday. — Keary Taylor

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

When you conform to the monoculture's version of who you are and what the world is like, you lose your freedom along with your ability to be truly innovative in terms of your own life. Being able to draw on many different stories, not just the economic one, allows you to creatively and authentically meet the challenges that face you in your life. The monoculture, determinedly single-minded, insists that economic values and assumptions can be used to solve your problems, whether those problems are spiritual, political, intellectual, or relational. — F.S. Michaels

Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind - this is what I call being whole in power. — Zhuangzi

I have faith that if we caught hold of God's living candle on that truth and went out into the world-I don't care [what vocation] -just out in the world being true to the vision, we would not need to defend the cause of Jesus Christ. People would come and ask; "Where have you found the radiance that I sense in your eyes and in your face? How come you don't get carried away with the world?" And we would answer that the work of salvation is the glorious work of Jesus Christ. But it is also the glorious work of the uncovering and recovering of your own latent divinity. — Truman G. Madsen

Love is scary. It terrifies each and every human being. And you know why? Because opening your heart to another person makes you vulnerable. There's this whole new world of promise when you answer the heart's call. One minute you can be soaring high in the clouds. The next, you might find yourself broken and sitting in a puddle of your own tears. — Kassandra Lea