Circumstances And Ideas Quotes & Sayings

I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations. — Robert Heinecken

If you know who you are, this knowledge will attract people in all types of situation and circumstances to support your intentions and ideas — Sunday Adelaja

The concurrence of two elements is necessary for bringing about a revolution; and by revolution I do not mean the street warfare, nor the bloody conflicts of two parties - both being mere incidents dependent upon many circumstances - but the sudden overthrow of institutions which are the outgrowths of centuries past, the sudden uprising of new ideas and new conceptions, and the attempt to reform all political and economical institutions in a radical way - all at the same time. Two separate currents must converge to come to that result: a widely spread economic revolt, tending to change the economical conditions of the masses, and a political revolt, tending to modify the very essence of the political organisation - an economical change, supported by an equally important change of political institutions. — Pyotr Kropotkin

The Law of Attraction says that you are a "living magnet" and that you invariably attract into your life the people, ideas, opportunities, and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts. When you think positive, optimistic, loving, and successful thoughts, you create a force field of magnetism that attracts, like iron filings to a magnet, the very things you are thinking about. This law explains why it is that you don't have to be concerned where your good is going to come from. If you can keep your mind clearly focused on what you want, and refrain from thinking about what you don't want, you will attract everything you need to achieve your goals, exactly when you are ready. Change your thinking and you change your life. — Brian Tracy

The idea of African brotherhood is often just a cover-up for laziness. We must see what is achievable in our circumstances and evaluate all decisions. In terms of regional economic integration, sentimentality is not enough. We really have to be frank and honest. — Benjamin Mkapa

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity. — Ferdinand Christian Baur

This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can't wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, "Here's what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?" — Edward Lampert

It is very difficult to know exactly what good should come out of a particular situation. To attempt to manipulate circumstances so your idea of good can come about, is to let the ego play God-and that, as you know, can and does backfire. — Neem Karoli Baba

We act, we behave, and we feel the vibration that we're in at the present time according to what we consider our self image to be. And we do not deviate from that pattern. The image you hold of yourself is a premise, a foundation (idea) on which your entire personality is built. This image, not only controls your behavior but your circumstances as well. — Maxwell Maltz

We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: "I leaf through books, I do not study them," he wrote. "What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget. — Joshua Foer

I have studied the enemy all my life. I have read the memoirs of his generals and his leaders. I have even read his philosophers and listened to his music. I have studied in detail the account of every damned one of his battles. I know exactly how he will react under any given set of circumstances. And he hasn't the slightest idea of what I'm going to do. So when the time comes, I'm going to whip the hell out of him. — George S. Patton

When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed. — Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Advancing the agenda of America's wealthiest winners under such circumstances would ordinarily be a hard sell. After all, in 2011, twenty-four million Americans were still out of work. The Great Recession had wiped out some $9 trillion in household wealth. But after forty years, the conservative nonprofit ecosystem had grown quite adept at waging battles of ideas. The think tanks, advocacy groups, and talking heads on the right sprang into action, shaping a political narrative that staved off the kind of course correction that might otherwise have been expected. — Jane Mayer

A good marriage is loving someone in a lot of different circumstances. Respect for them and their views and ideas and the life that they're leading with you. Shared values and interests. A good sense of humour. And a little volatility along the way. — Edward Kennedy

I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas. — Alexander Von Humboldt

More attention to the History of Science is needed, as much by scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists , and this should mean a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual milieu their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track. — Ronald Fisher

He was strict and hard and had perfectly clear and definite ideas about duty, where the others were concerned. For oneself one can always find circumstances that alter cases — Hjalmar Soderberg

Fixed ideas, so frequent and of such importance among hystericals, are generally isolated in their minds. Whether they constitute attacks, or develop in a subconscious manner, they do not disturb the whole thought of the ' SoUier, Guide pratique des maladies mentales, 1893. ' Regis, Manuel de me'd/cine mentale, 1892, p. 490. 30 patients. Yet it is easy to understand how the neighbourhood of these fixed ideas, these parasites, may be very dangerous to normal consciousness, and that in many circumstances general disturbances of the whole thought may be the result of the development of fixed ideas. — Anonymous

If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded and that a modern system of science had been introduced which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical, under such circumstances I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside and have contented my imagination, warmed as it was, by returning with greater ardour to my former studies. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. — Mary Shelley

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shortcomings in the governments' handling of monetary matters and the disastrous consequences of policies aimed at lowering the rate of interest and at encouraging business activities through credit expansion gave birth to the ideas which finally generated the slogan "stabilization." One can explain its emergence and its popular appeal, one can understand it as the fruit of the last hundred and fifty years' history of currency and banking, one can, as it were, plead extenuating circumstances for the error involved. But no such sympathetic appreciation can render its fallacies any more tenable. — Ludwig Von Mises

They ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. — Charles Dickens

To overcome adverse circumstances, you have to learn to overcome your own hang-ups, values, and idiosyncrasies in order to value other people, cultures, and ideas. — Anne F. Beiler

I don't think I'm an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and read and read,
and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the
sixteenth century: "I leaf through books, I do not study them," he wrote. "What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.
It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued;
the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget." He goes on to explain how "to compensate a
little for the treachery and weakness of my memory," he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical
judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of what the tome was about and what he thought of it. — Joshua Foer

Our limited perspective, our hopes and fears become our measure of life, and when circumstances don't fit our ideas, they become our difficulties. — Benjamin Franklin

In the savage horde the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by external circumstances; he is necessarily elevated by his equals; he contracts from them his habits and his wants; his ideas are no longer his own; he enjoys, from the enviable prerogative of his species, a capacity of developing his understanding bu the power of initiation, and the influence of society. — Jean Marc Gaspard Itard

There is, as Emerson says, some central idea or conception of yourself by which all the facts of your life are arranged and classified. Change this central idea and you change the arrangement or classification of all the fact and circumstances of your life. — Wallace D. Wattles

The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future. — Daniel Kahneman

No idea holds greater sway in the minds of educated Americans that the belief that it is possible to democratize governments anytime and anywhere under any circumstances . — Jeane Kirkpatrick

Whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts cannot take a better method than by putting himself into the circumstances and postures of life that the author was in upon every important passage as it flowed from his pen; for this will introduce a parity and strict correspondence of ideas between the reader and the author. Now, to assist the diligent reader in so delicate an affair, as far as brevity will permit, I have recollected that the shrewdest pieces of this treatise were conceived in bed in a garret; at other times (for a reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my invention with hunger; and in general, the whole work was begun, continued, and ended under a long course of physic and great want of money. — Jonathan Swift

questions hold the power to cause us to think, create answers we believe in, and motivate us to act on our ideas. Asking moves us beyond passive acceptance of what others say, or staying stuck in present circumstances, to aggressively applying our creative ability to the problem. — Tony Stoltzfus

Be aware of the words that go into your mind, both conscious and unconscious, because words and ideas can be great tools for your mind to use in coming to appropriate decisions. Remember that a statement spoken in spiritual consciousness can contain great spiritual power. Speaking powerful words of love changes things and outer circumstances as well as consciousness itself. — John Templeton

The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones. — Luc De Clapiers

As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements ... a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it. — Scott Anderson

When you define your goals, you give your brain something new to look for and focus on. It's as if you're giving your mind a new set of eyes from which to see all the people, circumstances, conversations, resources, ideas, and creativity surrounding you. — Darren Hardy

This is the central idea of the Gita- to be calm and steadfast in all circumstances, with one's body, mind, and soul centered at His hallowed feet! — Swami Vivekananda

We do not live in a world of dreams, but in an Universe which while relative, is real so far as our lives and actions are concerned. Our business in the Universe is not to deny its existence, but to LIVE, using the Laws to rise from lower to higher--living on, doing the best that we can under the circumstances arising each day, and living, so far as is possible, to our biggest ideas and ideals. The true Meaning of Life is not known to men on this plane .if, indeed, to any--but the highest authorities, and our own intuitions, teach us that we will make no mistake in living up to the best that is in us, so far as is possible, and realising the Universal tendency in the same direction in spite of apparent evidence to the contrary. We are all on The Path--and the road leads upward ever, with frequent resting places. — Three Initiates

Love makes us wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and a flow of creative ideas. Love floods our nervous system with positive energy, making us far more attractive to prospective employers, clients, and creative partners. Love fills us with powerful charisma, enabling us to produce new ideas and new projects, even within circumstances that seem to be limited. Love leads us to atone for our errors and clean up the mess when we've made mistakes. Love leads us to act with impeccability, integrity, and excellence. Love leads us to serve, to forgive, and to hope. Those things are the opposite of a poverty consciousness; they're the stuff of spiritual wealth creation. — Marianne Williamson

At home and abroad, military men and women are showing purpose and dedication in defending American ideas. They are performing in our country's best traditions under circumstances both difficult and complex. Thanks to their determined spirit of patriotism and professionalism, our country has a powerful and unified defense team, employing its forces in the constant quest for peace and freedom. — Melvin Laird

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances. — Ilya Ehrenburg

The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God Who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances. — Kathleen Norris

Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized. — Annie Dillard

In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced
all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological circumstances, simply copying the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences on to the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches. — Carl Sagan