Importations Procedure Quotes & Sayings

When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it. — Idries Shah

I've dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won't think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he's told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation ... — Paul Auster

It was one of the peculiar malfunctions of technology that shore batteries on the islands were generally of inadequate caliber and range to knock out a ship approaching with hostile intent. One is moved to wonder why, if a 10-pounder gun could be mounted on the rolling deck of a sailing vessel, the same or larger could not be mounted on land? — Barbara W. Tuchman

A book can be as dangerous as a sword in the right hands, said Haldon. — George R R Martin

Jenny: But surely Lord Blakely could not abandon his estates for so long.
Gareth: No. Lord Blakely could not. Not unless he had someone he could trust to run his estates in his absence. And Lord Blakely ... Well, Lord Blakely did not trust anyone.
Jenny: Lord Blakely is talking about himself in the third person, past tense. Its disturbing. — Courtney Milan

The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day. — Robert Adams

A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book. — Molly O'Keefe