Being Sustained Quotes & Sayings

Resurrection plants are usually tiny, no bigger than your fist. They are ugly and small and useless and special. When it rains, their leaves puff up but do not become green for forty-eight hours because it takes time for photosynthesis to start up. During those strange days of its reawakening the plant lives off of pure concentrated sugar, an intense sustained infusion of sweetness, a year's worth of sucrose coursing through its veins in just one day. This little plant has done the impossible: it has transcended the wilted brown of death. The miracle is not sustainable, of course, and within a day or two things will inevitably go back to normal. Such a crazy life takes its toll, and in the long term, even a resurrection plant withers and dies completely. But for a brief, glorious moment it knows something that no other plant has ever known: how to grow without being green. — Hope Jahren

A tofu birthday cake dosn't wreak a marriage; but if you cut the tofu into lewd shapes, you are probably asking for trouble. Looking back, I think we stopped being kind to each other. And we became competitors ...
Love cannot be sustained under these conditions, any more that yeast will proof in cold water. — Michael Lee West

For the truth of God is sufficiently solid and certain in itself, and can receive no better confirmation from any other quarter than from itself; but our faith being slender and weak, unless it be supported on every side, and sustained by every assistance, immediately shakes, fluctuates, totters, and falls. — John Calvin

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love. — Anne Carson

Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure ... — Jonathan Franzen

The key to maturity is time and community. Discernment and godly wisdom develop in a community that spans generations. The church is called to be this place where the [God's] Spirit uses normal patterns and rhythms of the Christian life in a community, so that we may bear fruit like a well-watered tree. Despite common appearances, the church is the place where God's new creation is coming into existence and being sustained by the Spirit like a great vineyard. — Michael Horton

The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life. The living fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, invisibly present in the soil complex, are known as the soil population. This population of millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes of course, pursue their own lives. They come into being, grow, work, and die: they sometimes fight each other, win victories, or perish; for they are divided into groups and families fitted to exist under all sorts of conditions. The state of a soil will change with the victories won or the losses sustained; and in one or other soil, or at one or other moment, different groups will predominate. — Albert Howard

In her life, she'd been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart in a different way. — David Wroblewski

We often forget that the Author of our faith must be the Preserver of it also. The lamp which was burning in the temple was never allowed to go out, but it had to be daily replenished with fresh oil; in like manner, our faith can only live by being sustained with the oil of grace, — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The moral of Gandhi's life and death is that pacifism as a political program is much more difficult to sustain than pacifism as a personal ethic. Being himself a leader of extraordinary charisma and skill, Gandhi was able to organize a whole people around a program of pacifism. He proved that a pacifist resistance movement can be sustained for thirty years and can be strong enough to defeat an empire. The subsequent history of India proved that political pacifism was not strong enough to survive the death of its leader and to withstand the temptations of power. — Freeman Dyson

There is no sadness and no cruelty in that gaze; it is a gaze without adjectives, it is only, completely, a gaze which neither judges you nor appeals to you; it posits you, implicates you; makes you exist. But this creative gesture is endless; you keep on being born, you are sustained, carried to the end of a movement which is one of infinite origin, source, and which appears in an eternal state of suspension. — Roland Barthes

Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends. No matter that our chosen relationship commitments change. Those of us who have long-term romantic friendships, some that have lasted longer than any of our marriages or partnerships, do not fear that these commitments will falter if we create primary bonds. — Bell Hooks

One was watching the other day a red-tailed hawk, high in the heavens, circling effortlessly, without a beat of the wing, just for the fun of flying, just to be sustained by the air-currents. Then it was joined by another, and they were flying together for quite a while. They were marvellous creatures in that blue sky, and to hurt them in any way is a crime against heaven. Of course there is no heaven; man has invented heaven out of hope, for his life has become a hell, an endless conflict from birth to death, coming and going, making money, working endlessly. This life has become a turmoil, a travail of endless striving. One wonders if man, a human being, will ever live on this earth peacefully. Conflict has been the way of his life - within the skin and outside the skin, in the area of the psyche and in the society which that psyche has created. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Yes, I would loved to have just sustained myself through my art, but less than one in a billion musicians gets that life. So rather than being like, 'I'm an exception!', like a moron, I thought I'd get a real job. — Mary Lambert

"Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: Sustained success comes only when you take what's unique about you and figure out how to make it useful!" — Marcus Buckingham

Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women. — Eugene H. Peterson

Christianity is sustained by the knowledge that the object of man's life on earth is his development as an eternal being. Therefore, none of his expressions of life can be an end in itself, but must serve a higher purpose than the earthly life and happiness of the individual - or even than that of the race. — Ellen Key

One observer commenting on security analysts over forty stated: "They know too many things that are no longer true." As long as I am "on stage", publishing a regular record and assuming responsibility for management of what amounts to virtually 100% of the net worth of many partners, I will never be able to put sustained effort into any non-BPL activity. If I am going to participate publicly. I can't help being competitive. I know I don't want to be totally occupied with out-pacing an investment rabbit all my life. The only way to slow down is to stop. — Warren Buffett

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired. — Erik H. Erikson

The hunter, as Theodore Roosevelt defined him, a man who fights for the integrity of both his prey and the land that sustained it, is being too often overwhelmed by men concerned mostly with playing dress up and shooting guns. — Gary Ferguson

I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to, — Matthew Freud

If we've learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources. — Ronald Reagan

They have done their worst, and continued to deny me even the privileges accorded to the common herd ... but I am sustained by the consciousness of my imputed 'crime' being an honourable one — Michael Davitt

If that means going onto their farms, releasing their animals and burning the place to the ground, that's morally justifiable, in our opinion ... There were always innocent people who got hurt somewhere along the way but it was important that those who oppressed one group of people be stopped, and we don't see the animal liberation struggle being substantially different from these other struggles ... A sustained campaign against a particular industry or a particular organization has the potential to be quite effective. — Jerry Vlasak

The Election Assistance Commission represents a major, unprecedented commitment from the federal government to sustained freedom and vibrant democracy. I am humbled by the prospect of being one its charter members. — DeForest Soaries

The problem with retiring to a desert place was that Daniel would hate it. And keeping Daniel happy was the second rule of his life, as his own sense of well-being, his own capacity to open his eyes each evening with some desire to actually rise from the dead and celebrate the gift of life, was connected to and sustained by making Daniel happy. — Anne Rice

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. — W.B.Yeats

I am sustained by Being Necessary. — Catherynne M Valente

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . . — Gregory Maguire

Recovery itself is a very un-glamorous daily process of being willing to fall down again, to break again, to cry again, to get up and try yet again until 'success' manifests as ever-greater sustained healing. — Shannon Cutts

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework
an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. — Betty Friedan

I understand that through books one is able to journey. One is able to smell and taste and go into different worlds without actually leaving where you are, with your imagination.

Imagination is more powerful than anything. For me, anywhere the imagination is fed, is sustained, is strengthened, then you are preparing that human being to deal with anything they face in life. — Ishmael Beah

Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start. — Judith Butler

Man is a musical being. His origin is in the spoken Word. By sound was he sustained and by music he evolved. One day he will recognize music as a vital factor in the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual evolution of the whole human race. — Corinne Heline

I have also come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love. — Matthieu Ricard

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Unless the human race realizes with a passion and reverence beyond thought or words its inter-being with nature, it will destroy in its greed the very environment it is itself sustained by. — Andrew Harvey

When we're being mindful, we're paying attention to the present moment, deliberately and non-judgementally. When we're meditating, we're being mindful of a specific object, such as the sensation of the breath at the tip of our nostrils, for a sustained period of time. — David Michie

We've made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We've fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We've lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love's potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia - the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape - love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, "lovingkindness," carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself. — Krista Tippett

Our oh-so-brief relationship had been like spending a day in the sunlight when you've lived your whole life underground (my former self being the mole man in this story). Maybe that was all we got when it came to relationships like that - flashes of sunlight. Maybe it was too bright to be sustained for any extended period of time. Maybe I should be thankful. — Cora Carmack

In a world where concepts are so often deployed in an ad hoc fashion, half explored before being displaced by others, it is immensely refreshing to encounter such serious and sustained attention to the building blocks of inquiry - and to the responsibilities thereby incurred. Designs on the Contemporary is a work of profound importance to the philosophy of anthropology. In conjunction with Rabinow's other works, it creates a nonpareil, a configuration of thought with no equal. — Marilyn Strathern

Becoming" a stranger seems easier to maintain than "being" a stranger... The former can be sustained forever and can be resumed time and again... The latter needs just a smile or a handshake or a word of recognition to break... — Gayathri Jayakumar

A mind centered on the truth of God is the key to being sustained and not losing heart. — David Jeremiah

Being able to have a laboratory on Mars, being able to have some sort of sustained human presence on Mars in the future, I think, is critically important for science. — Ellen Stofan

Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them. — Brian Ferneyhough

The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials, and somehow or other to come right at last; 'in which case,' say they who have hunted him down, ' - though we certainly don't expect it - nobody will be better pleased than we.' Whereas, the world would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering them the less endurable. — Charles Dickens

But silence continued in the layers of the earth, and this density that I could feel at my shoulders continued harmonious, sustained, unaltered through eternity. I lay there pondering my situation, lost in the desert, and in danger, naked between sky and sand and stars, withdrawn by too much silence from the poles of my life. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It's a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness - not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves. Such — Krista Tippett

And all this time the earth was being despoiled. The minerals were being ripped out, the fuels wasted, the soils depleted by an improvident and short-sighted agriculture, the animals and plants slaughtered and destroyed, the seas being filled with filth and poison, the atmosphere was corrupted - and always, all the time, the propaganda machines thumped out: more, more, more, drink more, eat more, consume more, discard more -in a frenzy, a mania. These were maddened creatures, and the small voices that rose in protest were not enough to halt the processes that had been set in motion and were sustained by greed. — Doris Lessing

In July, 1853, it pleased the Lord to try my faith in a way in which before it had not been tried. My beloved daughter and only child, and a believer since the commencement of the year 1846, was taken ill on June 20th. "This illness, at first a low fever, turned to typhus. On July 3rd there seemed no hope of her recovery. Now was the trial of faith. But faith triumphed. My beloved wife and I were enabled to give her up into the hands of the Lord. He sustained us both exceedingly. But I will only speak about myself. Though my only and beloved child was brought near the grave, yet was my soul in perfect peace, satisfied with the will of my Heavenly Father, being assured that He would only do that for her and her parents, which in the end would be the best. She continued very ill till about July 20th, when restoration began. "On — George Muller

He had conceded in a panic - for it crushed Nilssen's spirit to be held in low esteem by other men. He could not bear to know that he was disliked, for to him there was no real difference between being disliked, and being dislikeable; every injury he sustained was an injury to his very selfhood. — Eleanor Catton

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see ... — Mahatma Gandhi

It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body were created and are being sustained. — Eckhart Tolle

In all my life - though surrounded by many people - I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others. — Richard Wright

Joy is a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace - a connection to what matters. — Oprah Winfrey

And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage. — Ian McEwan