Quotes & Sayings About Being That One And Only

What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. ... It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. ... . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." ... And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. — Franz Wright

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most valuable in man is his eternal and almost divine discontent, a discontent which is a kind of love without a beloved, and like an ache which we feel in members of our body that we do not have. Man is the only being that misses he has never had. And the whole of what we miss, without ever having had it, is never what we call happiness. From this one could start a meditation on happiness, an analysis of that strange condition which makes man the only being who is unhappy for the very reason that he needs to be happy. That is, because he needs to be what he is not. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell. — Kim Elizabeth

You told me trees could speak
and the only reason one heard
silence in the forest
was that they had all been born knowing different languages.

That night I went into the forest
to bury dictionaries under roots,
so many books in so many tongues
as to insure speech.

and now this very moment,
the forest seems alive
with whispers and murmurs and rumblings of sound
wind-rushed into my ears.

I do not speak any language
that crosses the silence around me
but how soothing to know
that the yearning and grasping embodied
in trees' convoluted and startling shapes
is finally being fulfilled
in their wind shouts to each other.

Yet we who both speak English
and have since we were born
are moving ever farther apart
even as branch tips touch. — Carol Goodman

Only few know what righteousness is. It is righteous to suffer for your own foolishness. When you sin, it is righteous to bear the consequences of your sin without complaining. Saying what you mean and what is on your heart when you deal with other people, that is righteous. One who hungers and thirsts for righteousness will be filled-and being filled with righteousness is something very great. — Johan Oscar Smith

In one such shop I saw lots of books in the window. I was reminded that humans have to read books. They actually need to sit down and look at each word consecutively. And that takes time. Lots of time. A human can't just swallow every book going, can't chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can't just pop a word-capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine! Being not only mortal but also forced to take some of that precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead. — Matt Haig

Good, law-abiding, value-oriented citizens are the ultimate in hypocrisy; "majority rules" and the law are exactly the same as being the biggest bully on the block with the biggest stick-it is only might that allows one group to force another to live by its code of conduct ... — William J. Murray

Another thing is war. I am naturally warlike. Attacking is one of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy - these require a strong nature, perhaps; in any case every strong nature presupposes them. It needs resistances, so it seeks
resistance: aggressive pathos is just as integrally necessary to strength as the feeling of revenge and reaction is to weakness. Woman, forinstance, is vengeful: that is a condition of her weakness, as is her sensitivity to other people's afflictions. - The strength of anattacker can in a way be gauged by the opposition he requires; allgrowth makes itself manifest by searching out a more powerful opponent - or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike challenges problems to duels, too. The task is not to master all resistances, but only those against which one has to pit one's entire strength, suppleness, and mastery-at-arms - opponents who are equal ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. — Theodore Dalrymple

Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women's march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach. — Aysha Taryam

What you call poetry and passion are nothing but lies - with beautiful facades. Out of your hundred poets, ninety-nine are not really poets but only people in a state of turmoil, emotion, passion, heat, lust, sexuality, sensuality. Only one out of your hundred poets is a real poet. And the real poet may never compose any poetry, because his whole being is poetry. The way he walks, the way he sits, the way he eats, the way he sleeps - it is all poetry. He exists as poetry. He may create poetry, he may not create poetry, that is irrelevant. But what you call poetry is nothing but the expression of your fever, of your heated state of consciousness. It is a state of insanity. Passion is insane, blind, unconscious - because it gives you the feeling as if it is love. Love — Osho

He was looking forward to his visit not only for the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit, but with the sheer happiness of being out of bed and moving once more at free will, even though a little weakly, in the sun and air which men drank and moved in and talked and dealt with one another - a pleasure no small part of which lay in the fact that he had not started yet and was absolutely nothing under heaven to make him start until he wanted to. He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body's slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course. — William Faulkner

Women in Africa, generally a lot needs to be done for women. Women are not being educated, not only in Angola but my trip to Nigeria, one point I would make over and over again was that women need to be educated too. — Mia Farrow

The human soul has sojourned in lower and higher forms, migrating from one to another according to the samskaras or impressions, but it is only in the highest form as a human being that it attains to freedom. — Swami Vivekananda

The present: It is interesting that the "NOW" is called "the present." The present is the ultimate gift; it is the gift of truth and life. You are given the present every second, and you will receive it forever. The present is the only thing that exists, the only thing you are ever conscious of. Your life is a series of presents moving through time. The future does not exist until it becomes the present.

Life is one perpetual present.

Creation is happening now: Your body, mind, and the world around it are being created from microsecond to microsecond. Things may look the same, but they are not; everything is constantly changing and being recreated. Our life and our world is being created from moment to moment.

Life and everything in it is always new. — Michael Smith

It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters - and that's surviving. — Richard Branson

Every day we see allurements of one kind or another that tell us what we have is not enough. Someone or something is forever telling us we need to be more handsome or more wealthy, more applauded or more admired than we see ourselves as being. We are told we haven't collected enough possessions or gone to enough fun places. We are bombarded with the message that on the world's scale of things we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Some days it is if we have been locked in a cubicle of a great and spacious building where the only thing on the TV is a never-ending soap opera entitled Vain Imaginations. But God does not work this way. — Jeffrey R. Holland

Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual, and on the other hand, to a citizen, a moral person.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power. — Karl Marx

My voice of reason is always Lola. "You're a jackass."
"You only say that when I'm being your voice of reason."
"Out of my head, witch. And don't piss me off, I tell her. "I'll buy you underwear one size too small for Christmas and make you hate life. — Christina Lauren

It is a battle that intensely interests humanists (the International Humanist and Ethical Union is one of the most responsible and persistent of the NGOs at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva27) because the concept of rights is so paradigmatically humanistic: when the instruments of the international Human Rights Bill were being forged, there was no claim that their terms and principles were drawn from anything other than human experience, nor that their observance would get anyone into heaven. No, the claim was then, and is now, only that their observance would make this world a vastly better place. — A.C. Grayling

Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume! — Chinua Achebe

LOVE Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. In logotherapy, — Viktor E. Frankl

A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from snares, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise snares, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this. — Niccolo Machiavelli

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

There's only one thing more frightening than being asked to do a book tour, and that's not being asked to do a book tour. — Gerald Petievich

The only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's. — Neil Gaiman

The very desire to preserve animals was a subjective sentiment of fail in the animal's intrinsic worth. It was a feeling possessed by most of the scientists there, who regarded the wildebeeste migration with the same awe that others feel for the Mona Lisa, but they would not admit this sentiment into their arguments because it could not be backed up by facts; the right and worng of aesthetics being imponderables not open to scientific analysis. At the end of the meeting there was a consensus of opinion on only one fact, that there was an urgent need for research before taking any hasty action. — Iain Douglas-Hamilton

This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched. — Maurice Maeterlinck

Now you're just being selfish," Dominic said to Jaime, shaking his head. "You have that body for the rest of your life. I only want it for one night."
Not in the mood to hear his packmate making moves - no matter how playful - on the female he intended to claim, Dante growled. "Dominic, no. Not to Jaime."
"But - "
"No."
Dominic sighed in resignation. "Okay, fine."
Noticing that Trey seemed to find the whole thing extremely amusing, Dante raised a brow at him. "It's funny now that he's not saying this shit to Taryn?"
Trey smiled. "Of course."
"I've always got some stored up for my gorgeous Alpha female," said Dominic with an impish grin.
Instantly Trey's smile fell from his face. "Dom, don't do it."
Dominic held his hands up, pleading innocence. "I was just going to ask her if she went to Boy Scouts ... because she has my heart all tied in knots."
Taryn groaned and chuckled at the same time. — Suzanne Wright

THE MEANING OF LOVE Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come — Viktor E. Frankl

When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close
as close as you can get
to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.'
If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?'
Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. — Nicole Krauss

One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down. — David Harvey

She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on
her, for one. My children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion. She said this was because I didn't know my parents very well, had gone to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is true, though I never knew any of them. — Richard Ford

My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some have called 'opinionated' is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. My only hope is that, one day soon, women who have all earned the right to their opinions
instead of being called 'opinionated' will be called smart and well-informed, just like men. — Teresa Heinz

Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood. — Pete Townshend

But the world can't comprehend a woman being that strong. We're supposed to buckle and break, like the only time we can possibly have any strength is if there's someone with a dick standing by our side.
It's like a penis is a prerequisite for an opinion, so if I don't have one myself, I've got to be utilizing someone else's in order to have any say-so in my own fucking life. — J.M. Darhower

More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain. — Ben Parr

Recognizing that God has called you to function as his agent defines your task as a parent. Our culture has reduced parenting to providing care. Parents often see the task in these narrow terms. The child must have food, clothes, a bed, and some quality time.
In sharp contrast to such a weak view, God has called you to a more profound task than being only a care-provider. You shepherd your child in God's behalf. The task God has given you is not one that can be conveniently scheduled. It is a pervasive task. Training and shepherding are going on whenever you are with your children. Whether waking, walking, talking or resting, you must be involved in helping your child to understand life, himself, and his needs from a biblical perspective (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). — Tedd Tripp

After years of falling into the same pattern of disappointments and heartbreak, I finally began to realize something profound. I had always thought that love of dunya meant being attached to material things. And I was not attached to material things. I was attached to people. I was attached to moments. I was attached to emotions. So I thought that the love of dunya just did not apply to me. What I didn't realize was that people, moments, emotions are all a part of dunya. What I didn't realize is that all the pain I had experienced in life was due to one thing, and one thing only: love of dunya. — Yasmin Mogahed

In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell. — Malcolm Gladwell

There is always a reason. Not being willing to say what your reasons are is not the same as not knowing them. Truth is always present. Truth is always available. You simply need the courage to face yourself, explore your motives and confront your insecurities. Until then, you will only enjoy a false security in the thought that your darkness is a mystery to others. Your darkness is mystery to no one. We all have darkness, but not all of us have light. — LaShawnda Jones

This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. — Sam Harris

The human individual is, at one and the same time, much more and much less than is ordinarily supposed in the West; he is greater by reason of his possibilities of indefinite extension beyond the corporeal modality, in short, of all that refers to what we have been studying; but he is also much less since, far from constituting a complete and sufficient being in himself, he is only an exterior manifestation, a fleeting appearance clothing the true being, which in no way affects the essence of the latter in its immutability — Rene Guenon

Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined: what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; the fact is that her capacities manifest themselves clearly only when they have been realized: but the fact is also that when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the books. — Simone De Beauvoir

On land I have too much time, I'm overwhelmed by a boredom that eventually paralyzes me. But this isn't really the main reason for my suicide. Even if I had another chance to go to sea, I know that for a long time I've been storing up something I can only define as a weariness with being alive, with having to choose between one thing and another, with listening to people around me talk about things that basically don't interest them, that they really know nothing about. The foolishness of our fellow humans knows no bounds, my dear Gaviero. If it didn't sound absurd, I'd say I'm leaving because I can't stand the noise the living make. — Alvaro Mutis

The doctor's wife was not particularly keen on the tendency of proverbs to preach, nevertheless something of this ancient lore must have remained in her memory, the proof being that she filled two of the bags they had brought with beans and chick peas, Keep what is of no use at the moment, and later you will find what you need, one of her grandmothers had told her, the water in which you soak them will also serve to cook them, and whatever remains from the cooking will cease to be water, but will have become broth. It is not only in nature that from time to time not everything is lost and something is gained. — Jose Saramago

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone. — David Foster Wallace

When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. 'It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]' (Gen. 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is 'notoriously difficult to translate.' The various attempts we have in English are "helper" or "companion" or the notorious "help meet." Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat ... disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing "One day I shall be a help meet?" Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it "sustainer beside him"
The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately. — Stasi Eldredge

After Jesus showed up, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up.
Of course, just because Jesus replaces the Old Testament doesn't mean that you should necessarily skip it. That would be like skipping Batman and Robin just because the story starts over in Batman Begins. The important thing to realize is that both the old and new stories are about an all-powerful being trying to rid the world of evildoers, only in the new one The Batman can eat pork. — Stephen Colbert

[This is] the only period in all human history when people were proud of being modern. For though to-day is always to-day and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that to-day is not yesterday. I fear that some in the future will explain it by saying that we had precious little else to brag about. For, whatever the medieval faults, they went with one merit. Medieval people never worried about being medieval; and modern people do worry horribly about being modern. — G.K. Chesterton

The Divine may come to life in individual man, may reveal itself from within individual man; but it attains its earthly fullness only where, having awakened to an awareness of their universal being, individual beings open themselves to one another, disclose themselves to one another, help one another; where immediacy is established between one human being and another; where the sublime stronghold of the individual is unbolted, and man breaks free to meet other man. Where this takes place, where the eternal rises in the Between, the seemingly empty space: that true place of realization is community, and true community is that relationship in which the Divine comes to its realization between man and man. These — Martin Buber

I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them. — Mary Wortley Montagu

He loves me, and I reward his love by forcing on him something he hates. In the evening, after we dance, he rarely returns to the throne; he dances with others or moves from place to place through the room. The court thinks he is trying to be gracious, sharing his attention. Only I see that he moves always to the empty spot and the court always moves after him. He is like a dog trying to escape his own tail. He indulged himself in one brief moment of privacy, and almost died of it. Relius, he hates being king. — Megan Whalen Turner

Why would you family think about it?"
"Oh, my mother's the only one that counts, and she likes you very much from what she's seen of you."
"So you had me inspected?"
"No-dash ti all, I seem to be saying all the wrong things today. I was absolutely stunned that first day in court, and I rushed off to my mater, who's an absolute dear, and the kind of person who really understands things, and I said, 'Look here! here's the absolutely one and only woman, and she's being put through a simply ghastly awful business and for God's sake come and hold my hand!' You simply don't know how foul it was. — Dorothy L. Sayers

You had every right to be. He raised his eyes to look at her and she was suddenly and strangely reminded of being four years old at the beach, crying when the wind came up and blew away the castle she had made. Her mother had told her she could make another one if she liked, but it hadn't stopped her crying because what she had thought was permanent was not permanent after all, but only made out of sand that vanished at the touch of wind and water. — Cassandra Clare

The one opinion that matters and the only correct evaluation of you is what the Lord thinks. He has made clear the standards He holds for us if we long to be pleasing in His sight. If we live sincerely reaching for holiness and humility, if we sing with our end goal being to bring Him pleasure and glory, then we are successful in His eyes. — Anna Blanc

The desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom. Thus when as a child he cowered in a dark corner scared, wretched, sore, and miserable with the black, black misery of the soul, his sister Winnie used to come along, and carry him off to bed with her, as into a heaven of consoling peace. Stevie, though apt to forget mere facts, such as his name and address for instance, had a faithful memory of sensations. To be taken into a bed of compassion was the supreme remedy, with the only one disadvantage of being difficult of application on a large scale. And looking at the cabman, Stevie perceived this clearly, because he was reasonable. — Joseph Conrad

Not many years ago, nearly 100 percent of people who thought they were being constantly watched were certifiable paranoids. But recently it was revealed that, in the name of public safety, Homeland Security and more than a hundred other local, state, and federal agencies are operating aerial surveillance drones of the kind previously used only on foreign battlefields - at low altitudes outside the authority of air-traffic control. Soon, the bigger worry will not be that, as you walk your dog, you are secretly being watched but that the rapidly proliferating drones will begin colliding with one another and with passenger aircraft, and that you'll be killed by the plummeting drone that was monitoring you to be sure that you picked up Fido's poop in a federally approved pet-waste bag. — Dean Koontz

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. — Thomas Mann

Learn that happiness comes through self-control and not being angry or jealous. The only one that you really torment is yourself. It is easier to let go and gain new ways of looking at life. — Frederick Lenz

If love were the only thing, I
would follow you - in rags, if need be - to the world's end; for you hold
my heart in the hollow of your hand! But is love the only thing?
I know people write and talk as if it were. Perhaps, for some, Fate lets
it be. Ah, if I were one of them! But if love had been the only thing, you
would have let the King die in his cell.
Honour binds a woman too, Rudolf. My honour lies in being true to
my country and my House. I don't know why God has let me love you;
but I know that I must stay. — Anthony Hope

Her house being small. They ain't rich folk, that I know. Rich folk don't try so hard. I'm used to working for young couples, but I spec this is the smallest house I ever worked in. It's just the one story. Her and Mister Leefolt's room in the back be a fair size, but Baby Girl's room be tiny. The dining room and the regular living room kind a join up. Only two bathrooms, which is a relief cause I worked in houses where they was five or — Kathryn Stockett

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo's Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana? — Gary Shteyngart

The peculiar idea that bigger is better has been around for at least as long as I have, and it's always bothered me. There is within it the implication that it is more difficult for God to care about a gnat than about a galaxy. Creation is just as visible in a grain of sand as in a skyful of stars.
The church is not immune from the bigger-is-better heresy. One woman told of going to a meeting where only a handful of people turned out, and these faithful few were scolded by the visiting preacher for the sparseness of the congregation. And she said indignantly, 'Our Lord said *feed* my sheep, not count them!' I often feel that I'm being counted, rather than fed, and so I am hungry. — Madeleine L'Engle

The regularity with which we conclude that further advances in a particular field are impossible seems equaled only by the regularity with which events prove that we are of too limited vision. And it always seems to be those who have the fullest opportunity to know who are the most limited in view. What, then, is the trouble? I think that one answer should be: we do not realize sufficiently that the unknown is absolutely infinite, and that new knowledge is always being produced. — Willis R. Whitney

The problem about cutting out the best of your heart and giving it to people, is that 1. It hurts to do that; and 2. You never know if they are going to throw it away or not. But then you should still do it. Because any other way is cowardice. At the end of the day, it's about being brave and we are only haunted by the ghosts that we trap within ourselves; we are not haunted by the ghosts that we let out. We are haunted by the ghosts that we cover and hide. So you let those ghosts out in that best piece of your heart that you give to someone. And if the other person throws it away? Or doesn't want it to begin with? Someone else will come along one day, cut out from his/her heart that exact same jagged shape that you cut out of your own heart, and make their piece of heart fit into the rest of yours. Wait for that person. And you can fill their missing piece with your soul. — C. JoyBell C.

And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage. — Albert Camus

What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? — Virginia Woolf

That's your doing. Now in order to affect that doing I am going to recommend that you learn another doing ... It may hook you to another doing and then you may realize that both doings are lies, unreal, and that to hinge yourself to either one is a waste of time, because the only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. To arrive at that being is the note-doing of the self — Carlos Castaneda

She played a great deal better than either of the Miss Musgroves; but having no voice, no knowledge of the harp, and no fond parents to sit by and fancy themselves delighted, her performance was little thought of, only out of civility, or to refresh the others, as she was well aware. She knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, know the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste. In music she had been always used to feel alone in the world; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove's fond partiality for their own daughters' performance, and total indifference to any other person's, gave her much more pleasure for their sakes, than mortification for her own. — Jane Austen

In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank records, or toll pass records, or public transit records, or phone call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. — Cory Doctorow

I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good. — Albert Camus

I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God "sends" illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. "What did I do to deserve this?" is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is "If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?" As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world. — Harold S. Kushner

All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible. — Malcolm Forbes

Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that science can provide all of the answers. That is scientism and that is wrong. I don't think a billion buckets of science could speak to the problems raised by the Tea Party. Being a philosophical naturalist does not mean that one thinks that the only truths are those of science. I think the claim just made in the last sentence is true but I don't think it is a claim of science. It means that you use science where you can and you respect and try to emulate its standards. — Michael Ruse

There can be no relation more strange, more critical, than that between two beings who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, yes, even hourly, eye each other with a fixed regard, and yet by some whim or freak of convention feel constrained to act like strangers. Uneasiness rules between them, unslaked curiosity, a hysterical desire to give rein to their suppressed impulse to recognize and address each other; even, actually, a sort of strained but mutual regard. For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence. — Thomas Mann

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn't allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren't noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor's steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one's sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence. — Wendy Welch

Most of these super-sovereigns feel that God can comment if he wants to, but God must avoid getting loud. While God is welcome to his opinions, he is only one voice, and he doesn't get extra points just for being God. The unstudied opinionated are prone to say, even to God, "Yes, but here's what I think." In such a world, classic apologetics has lost much of its force. — Calvin Miller

This basic problem of relevance-cum-subservience has been given an added twist in the modern world, where relevance has become not only hollow but fragile and short-lived. A wider range of choices, a deeper uncertainty of events, a more pressing need for new styles - all this makes for an accelerating turnover of issues, concerns and fads. Nothing tires like a trend or ages faster than a fashion. Today's bold headline is tomorrow's yellowing newsprint. Thus the relevance-hungry liberals achieve relevance, but their victory is Pyrrhic. It is precisely as they win that they lose. As they become relevant to one group or movement, they become irrelevant to another and find themselves rudely dismissed. Far from being in the avant-garde, Christian liberals trot smartly behind the times. Far from being genuinely new or radical, they catch up and announce their discoveries breathlessly, only to see the vanguard disappearing down the road on the trail of a different pursuit. — Os Guinness

From up above, in a plane passing over, you'd just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while. — Sarah Dessen

Moses spent so much time face to face with Yahweh, that his own face began to transfigure and shine like the sun. He had to pull a cloak over himself because the Israelites could not stand before the brightness of holiness. The direct presence of Yahweh changes one's very being from human to divine." "Moses was made into a god?" "Like a Son of God. Bene ha Elohim. But it was only a foretaste, because it would fade with time." Mary was putting it together. "So, Sons of God are the holy ones who surround Yahweh Elohim's throne chariot, and they are myriad." "Ten thousands upon ten thousands. They are the divine ones who administered the Law of Yahweh at Sinai. They are direct creations of Yahweh, and because they are in his presence, they shine with holiness. — Brian Godawa

every human who says: 'I AM this or that or whatever' - which, as Meister Eckhart points out, only God can really, really say - is a unique and quite indispensable aspect of His infinite variety. Shankara, the great Hindu sage and philosopher, tells us, 'This being-the-Self-of-all is the highest state of consciousness of the Self, His supreme natural state. But when, before this, one feels oneself to be other than the Self of all, even by a hair's breadth, that state is delusion.' D.E. Harding — Richard Lang

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is
excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. — Ray Bradbury

When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. — Hermann Hesse

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux

You have to see and meet God in this life.
Don't let this life go by and miss discovering the Supreme One.
You will find him inside as your constant being.
Pray: Holy mother, holy father, holy spirit,
don't give me the illusion that even one second belongs to me.
All is you. I, also, am you and yours.
For only like this does your life stand the chance to be miraculous. — Mooji

David tried to give a form to the beast at the heart of the poem but found that he could not. It was more difficult than it appeared, for nothing quite seemed to fit. Instead, he could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness. — John Connolly

One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a character's life into chapters. It's intriguing, because you can't do this with real life. You can't just end a chapter, then skip the things you don't want to live through, only to open it up to a chapter that better suits your mood. Life can't be divided into chapters ... only minutes. The events of your life are all crammed together one minute right after the other without any time lapses or blank pages or chapter breaks because no matter what happens life just keeps going and moving forward and words keep flowing and truths keep spewing whether you like it or not and life never lets you pause and just catch your fucking breath.
I need one of those chapter breaks. I just want to catch my breath, but I have no idea how. — Colleen Hoover

I think the hardest part of being a teenage, or any age really, is the misconception that you're alone. You're not alone. You're not the only one going through what you're going through, and life does get better if you want it to. — Ellie Elisabeth

Even though he had admitted to her that he used to watch me shower through a hole in the bathroom wall back when I was thirteen. She blamed us both for what we had "done" to her. But it sounds like she got over being mad at him pretty quick. She later told me that she had to go back and have sex with him one more time, just to make sure that there was nothing left between the two of them and to get some closure. That almost made me want to vomit. The only interaction between us after that was her showing up at the courthouse when I had to sit in front of a grand jury of twelve strangers and tell them what had happened. She came into the waiting room where I was sitting and started screaming that I was a whore and that I'd fucked her husband. She had to be escorted out of the court by two officers. That's what I got from her. — Ashly Lorenzana

He spoke to her, though, if only through his verse. One night in the banqueting hall, just before a ball, he responded to requests for a verse by raising his glass high. Though he spoke to them all his eyes were on her.

"Tis not that I am weary grown
Of being yours, and yours alone,
But with what face can I incline
To damn you to be only mine?"

She walked out before she heard the rest. — Judith James

The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. — Alan Moore

Such is the passage, x. 14, where, after giving an account that the sun stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, at the command of Joshua, (a tale only fit to amuse children). This tale of the sun standing still upon Motint Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of those fables that detects itself. Such a circumstance could not have happened without being known all over the world. One half would have wondered why the sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and the tradition of it would be universal; whereas there is not a nation in the world that knows anything about it. — Thomas Paine

Genesis supplements "created in God's image" with the affirmation that God thus made humanity "male and female." Women and men together comprise this image. The statement is an extraordinary one in this opening chapter of Genesis, written in a patriarchal culture. One might wonder whether the author of Genesis saw the implications of this declaration. Certainly generation after generation of Christians have not seen it. We have often talked and behaved as if the male was the normal and full form of a human being, with the female a deviant and slightly inferior form. But both male and female belong to the image. You have the image of God represented in humanity only when you have both men and women there. When women are not present and involved in God's work in the world (and in the church), the image of God is not present. — John E. Goldingay

I believe that the one thing that has come out of this
extraordinary
meeting this morning is an awareness that we have, perhaps, been careless about the critical relationship between human and pegasus, careless in our resignation that no better bond than what we are accustomed to can exist. The king agrees with you that his daughter and Lrrianay's son suggest a different way. But the king's view, and indeed hope, for that way is diametrically opposed to your own. Bring what the histories can tell us both, and the councils will decide whose concept of the way forward has more merit.
The king is prepared to consider the possibility that your outburst arose from a dedication to the well-being of our country too profound for restraint; but he is only barely prepared so to consider it. You may leave us. Now. — Robin McKinley

The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species. — Carl Sagan

He liked the girls, liked to hold them around the waist, felt like a man when he did. But as for talking with them, no, no! Then he felt as though he were dealing with another species of human being, in some cases a higher one, in others a lower. He secretly admired the weak, pale, little girl and had picked her to be his wife. That was still the only way he could think of a woman - as a wife. He danced in a very chaste and proper manner, but he heard awful stories about his pals, stories he didn't understand until later. They could dance the waltz backwards around the room in a very indecent way, and they told naughty stories about the girls. — August Strindberg

When I was tiny, the county fair came through town. Our parents took us, and got tickets for the rides, even though I was scared to death of all of them. Edward was the one who convinced me to go on the merry-go-round. He put me up on one of the wooden horses and he told me the horse was magic, and might turn real right underneath me, but only if I didn't look down. So I didn't. I stared out at the pinwheeling crowd and searched for him. Even when I started to get dizzy or thought I might throw up, the circle would come around again and there he was. After a while, I stopped thinking about the horse being magic, or even how terrified I was, and instead, I made a game out of finding Edward.
I think that's what family feels like. A ride that takes you back to the same place over and over. — Jodi Picoult

You realize I had half my guard out searching for you?" Eddard Stark said when they were alone. "Septa Mordane is beside herself with fear. She's in the sept praying for your safe return. Arya, you know you are never to go beyond the castle gates without my leave."
"I didn't go out the gates," she blurted. "Well, I didn't mean to. I was down in the dungeons, only they turned into this tunnel. It was all dark, and I didn't have a torch or a candle to see by, so I had to follow. I couldn't go back the way I came on account of the monsters. Father, they were talking about killing you! Not the monsters, the two men. They didn't see me, I was being still as stone and quiet as a shadow, but I heard them. They said you had a book and a bastard and if one Hand could die, why not a second? Is that the book? Jon's the bastard, I bet. — George R R Martin