Lolling Def Quotes & Sayings

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work. — Karl Jaspers

The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why, when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up. — Julian Baggini

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others. — June Singer

Spirit is the source of life. Humans are the manifestation of spirit. — Debasish Mridha

I wish more fantasy, especially the dominant fantasy that draws heavily on British and Christian lore, would wrestle with its own ethnospecific nature and what that means when the story is set somewhere where more than one belief system is in operation. If all you do is pay lip service to it, you can get the kind of thing where the writer has thrown one Hindu god into a Christianist fantasy (rendering said god by default a demon or otherwise inferior to the dominant religious system of the story, which is such an insult), and the hero is able to vanquish it by chanting a spell in church Latin. — Nalo Hopkinson

We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes; to know that we know nothing, that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems, that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, "It is good and wise,
God is great! Though He slay me, yet I trust in Him." Islam means, in its way, denial of self. This is yet the highest wisdom that heaven has revealed to our earth. — Thomas Carlyle

I encourage makers to recognize that when you pull your ego out of the game, your work can become a series of joyful collaborations (between artist and mystery, between artist and peers, between artist and audience). The important thing is to take responsibility for continuing to show up for your side of the bargain. — Elizabeth Gilbert

With strength you need two stones to kill two birds; with faith you only need one. — Matshona Dhliwayo

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope. — Markus Zusak

still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, 'I don't want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don't want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake. — Svetlana Alexievich

If you want me in the Hall of Fame put me in because of some contributions that I have made to country music. — Buck Owens

I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level. — Malcolm Gladwell

Climbing has taught me many lessons, one of the most important being, just how ever-present death is. Having faced death a few times now while climbing, has made me realize that I have no fear of it. — Mekael Shane

This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one's head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by sprigs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity. In no other way have I seen of my own unaided sight that the earth is round. As I watch, it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles - though bristles is a word of too much commotion for it. Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth must see itself. — Nan Shepherd