Live Commodity Quotes & Sayings

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition. — Michael Richardson

I have that precious commodity - freedom. I can live my life a day at a time, and I am open to whatever the next day brings. I know I sound as if I have been off with some guru in India, but I haven't. I've come to realise the value of being able to decide for oneself. — Cherie Lunghi

There's a difference between just gaining access to a commodity as opposed to a spirit that allows us to live a life of love and justice, that when crisis and catastrophe hits you, that the biggest mansion in the world is not going to help you. If you don't have anybody who loves you, if you don't have any God who cares for you, that you're not going to have what it takes to move to the next stage in your life. — Cornel West

Time is your most precious commodity and yet most of us live our lives as if we have all the time in the world. — Robin Sharma

That which man dreams of and to Which he aspires, unless fulfilled in his own lifetime, can produce no actual satisfaction to him. It will be self deceiving and a waste of time to advocate dialogue with those who are not ready to listen, because it is obvious that the freedom of millions is not a commodity subject to bargaining. It is better to die free than to live as slaves. — Haile Selassie

Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells. That was my mantra. "Fear sells. — Max Brooks

Peace is the absence of war, but beyond that peace is a commodity unlike any other. Peace is security. Peace is a mindset. Peace is a way of living. Peace is the capacity to transcend past hurts - to break cycles of violence and forge new pathways that say, I would like to make sure we live as a community where there is justice, security, and development for all members. At the end of the day, peace is an investment; it is something you create by investing in a way of life and monitoring where your resources go. — Noeleen Heyzer

As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life's moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity. — Mitch Albom

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe ... Turn on the TV ... What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products. — Max Brooks

And the desire to own property, to take for ourselves things which in no way belong to us, does not stop short at the sun. The air is already bought and sold as a commodity, by health resorts. And what of water? Or waterpower? Why should the earth be parceled out into private hands? Is it any different from the sun? No; the earth belongs to the people who live on it. God intended it for them, but it has been taken over by private individuals. Privare means to steal. Thus private property is stolen property - property stolen from God and from humankind! — Eberhard Arnold

When you live your life knowing the mission and calling and voice of God in your soul and you know where that compass is driving you forward, you will become a rare commodity in a world searching for direction. — Erwin McManus

Because this, after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that love was no finite commodity. That it was not subject to the cruel reckoning of addition and subtraction, that to give to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart, in its infinite capacity-even the confused and cheating heart of the man in front of her, even the paltry thing now clenched and faltering inside her own chest-could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like the heart of God itself, vast and accommodating and holy, a mansion of rooms without number, full of multitudes without end. — Brady Udall

The unvarnished truth is that a trained dog is a perishable commodity. Few things are so subject to deterioration. It is almost as hard-and it takes almost as good a hunter-to keep a dog good as to make one as good. Eternal vigilance is the price of a good bird dog, regardless of who you are, or where and how virtuously you live. — Havilah Babcock

At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day. — Michael Leunig

Waste is unjustified, and especially the waste of time limited as that commodity is in our days of probation. One must live, not only exist; he must do, not merely be; he must grow, not just vegetate. — Spencer W. Kimball

The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells. — Max Brooks

If they survive, today's children will inherit a world that our fathers and grandfathers have ravaged, where the seas are acidic cesspools that the whales have fled, where rain forests are Indian memories never to return, and where human greed has plundered Mother Earth's innards and turned human genes into factories for profit. They will inherit a diminished planet where fresh water is increasingly rare, and where fresh air is a commodity ... We live in a world that fears and hates its young. How else can one explain the bequest of such a foul, polluted, and hollow inheritance? — Mumia Abu-Jamal

Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer. — Archie Shepp

And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this
letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable
but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Rampant inflation is just as hard to live with as the devaluation of commodities. — David Harvey

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives ... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs. — Laura Miller

Intelligence is the only indispensable commodity in life or in warfare. If you think otherwise, go live in a hut with a poet. The rest of us will do our best to defend you. — Dorothy Dunnett

There's no commodity we can take with us. There is only our lives, whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance. And this is everything. — Sharon Salzberg

People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They're thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work. — Tom Kundig