Being Refined Quotes & Sayings

Awakening the mystical kundalini prematurely is dangerous, because unless you have refined your being, you'll get all screwed up, entities, weird powers ... strange things. That is why I don't teach anyone how to open up the chakras. — Frederick Lenz

The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight and well-being. — Andrew Weil

In Buddhism, being intelligent and inquisitive is not a crime. It is also not a question of being either exclusively intellectual or exclusively devoted, with-we hope-lots of blissful experiences. There is nobody but ourselves to restrict the range of skillful means that we may beneficially apply as practitioners. Being skillful as well as developing higher insight and wisdom are certainly two major focuses on the Buddhist path, and both obviously require some intelligence and refined mental activity. — Karl Brunnholzl

In order to abandon the uncomfortable world, I began to linger about in abstraction. Because the world suffocated me with inhibition, an unrestrained fantasy life proceeded to remove me from it for release. It was the natural result of my anxiety to seek some tranquil escape, and my dreams became elaborate, wondrous things to explore in moments when trouble would otherwise have eroded my sense of well-being. I became better and better at dreaming, entering the invisible every time I felt uneasy. Over the years, I refined my fantasies, gliding along languidly in my thoughts, until my gestures were either feeble with hypnotism or ethereal with half-sleep. - Beyond the Furthest Edge of Night — Cliff Gogh

yet to be moved by music is essentially human; it reflects sensitivity. The life Gregor led as a human being left no room for this kind of appreciation. But, regressing into an animal, his sensibility has become refined rather than coarsened. — Franz Kafka

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world. — Iris Murdoch

If you want to change from sex towards love, try to understand your sexuality. Watch it, watch the mechanicalness of it. See the futility, see the whole absurdity of it - it is not leading you anywhere. Become a little more refined, become a little more subtle. Look not for the body, but somebody's being. Watch, explore. Sooner or later you will find somebody who fits with you. — Rajneesh

The fires of refinement come with a cost, but also with a promise. His grace has been extended forth to you for restoration, confirmation, strengthening, and being established in Him. — Robin Bertram

But this must not be confused with our usual ideas of the practice of "unselfishness," which is the effort to identify with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no more than a skin-contained ego. Such "unselfishness" is apt to be a highly refined egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of "we're-more-tolerant-than-you." The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the saints without sharing their real motivations, or to ape motivations without sharing the knowledge which sparks them. — Alan W. Watts

Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early
paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked
lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself. — Alexandre Dumas

What does it mean to be cultured? Who is the cultured person? The cultured individual is not defined nor determined by status in society nor by wealth; but the cultured individual is determined and defined by his or her sense for the art of life. And what is the art of life? The art of life is the reflection of the mind and the soul upon the world, upon other people, upon the respect and understanding of other people and upon the things that are in this world and beyond. There is a joy that is always sought in beautiful things. Being cultured is being conscious, reflective, understanding, feeling, aware. Knowing how to feel, to listen, to understand. A desire to find or to create joy in many things - that is the art of life. And these things define a cultured person. — C. JoyBell C.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies. — Vaclav Havel

From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons. — Antonio Gramsci

In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty. — Orhan Pamuk

Although the making of a religion of one's own can be satisfying, it can progress further and faster with the aid of the spiritual traditions. Your own spiritual path risks being too personal and limited. What resources do you have compared to the traditions that have thought of things you will never consider? They have refined ideas and images and teachings and moral guidelines expressed in elegant and inspiring ways. They have produced spiritual beauty of a kind no single person could ever create. Read Emerson's journals and you find that he was reading Hafiz for months, and Thoreau's homespun spiritual insights come wrapped in references from the Western and Eastern traditions. — Thomas Moore

For optimal health, we need body and spirit, exercise (ming) and meditation, awareness of the inner world and the outer. In other words, health requires balance and moderation. The goal of qigong may be summarized as xing ming shuang xiu,spirit and body equally refined and cultivated. Cultivate your whole being, as you would cultivate a garden with attention, care, and even love. — Ken Cohen

The difference between coarse and refined abuse is the difference between being bruised by a club and wounded by a poisoned arrow. — Samuel Johnson

People, most especially those who have known ease in this life, care more about being prospered than refined. It's always about what they can get from God, not what they can do for others, unless they can call attention to it for others to see. — Donna Lynn Hope

Sewers are necessary to guarantee the wholesomeness of palaces, according to the Fathers of the Church. And it has often been remarked that the necessity exists of sacrificing one part of the female sex in order to save the other and prevent worse troubles. One of the arguments in support of slavery, advanced by the American supporters of the institution, was that the Southern whites, being all freed from servile duties, could maintain the most democratic and refined relations among themselves; in the same way, a caste of 'shameless women' allows the 'honest woman' to be treated with the most chivalrous respect. The prostitute is a scapegoat; man vents his turpitude upon her, and he rejects her. Whether she is put legally under police supervision or works illegally in secret, she is in any case treated as a pariah. — Simone De Beauvoir

Taking offense has become America's national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them. — George Will

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there's nothing wrong with being gay. I don't find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason. — Steven Pinker

Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own? — Anna Quindlen

Insensitivity to human pain and sorrow, isolation from the international experiences of exploitation and misery, and indifference to the great questions of economic justice and human rights must mark a human being a savage in the twenty-first century, whatever his or her humanistic conquests in terms of literary skills or refined taste. — Michael Buckley

The man who can be contented to live with a pretty and useful companion who has no mind has lost in voluptuous gratifications a taste for more refined pleasures; he has never felt the calm and refreshing satisfaction ... of being loved by someone who could understand him. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Refined grains (regular old spaghetti being an example), fatty meats (hard salami), sweets (blueberry pie), and fried foods (bacon) are not poisonous. They are foods that just happen to be less wholesome than some other foods. There — Matt Fitzgerald

Flair is a primitive kind of style. It is innate and cannot be taught. It can be polished and refined. When a person has flair, a grounding in the principle of design, and self-discipline, that person has the potential of being an outstanding designer. — Albert Hadley

But this is one of the rewards of reading the Old Testament regularly. You keep on discovering more and more what a tissue of quotations from it the New Testament is; how constantly our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued, refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom He introduced a novelty...The Light which has lightened every man from the beginning may shine more clearly but cannot change. The Origin cannot suddenly start being, in the popular sense of the word, "original". — C.S. Lewis

The game is not set. There are so many layers that it is being perceived on. As your own consciousness becomes more refined, the game changes. — Mooji

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being "politically conscious" - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. — Jonathan Rauch

Good taste has everything to do with being cultured and being refined, and if art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human. — Rich Mullins

The present relationship existing between husband and wife, where one claims a command over the actions of the other, is nothing more than a remnant of the old leaven of slavery. It is necessarily destructive of refined love; for how can a man continue to regard as his type of the ideal a being whom he has, be denying an equality of privilege with himself, degraded to something below himself? — Herbert Spencer