Look For The Good In Everything Quotes & Sayings

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

How good it would be to know where to look for help in this life and what to expect after it, there, beyond the grave! How happy and calm I'd be, if I could say now: Lord, have mercy on me! ... But to whom shall I say it? Either it is an indefinable, unfathomable power, which I not only cannot address, but which I cannot express in words - the great all or nothing ... or it is that God of whom Princess Marya has sewn in here, in this amulet? Nothing, nothing is certain, except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something incomprehensible but most important! — Leo Tolstoy

It's your world, but I make my way in it. At fifteen, no, I couldn't stand up to you. The age of illusions, when we know nothing, we hope for everything; we're wandering in a mist ... And the half of the world that's never had any use for us, suddenly is besieging us. You need us, you adore us, you're suffering for us. You want everything--except to know what we think. You look deep in our eyes--and put your hand up our dress. You call us, "Pretty thing." That confuses us. The most beautiful woman, the highest ranked, lives half dazzled by constant attention, half stifled by obvious contempt. We think all we're good for is pleasing you--till one day, long acquaintance with you dispels the last mist. In a clear light, we suddenly see you as you are--and generally we start preferring ourselves. At thirty, I could finally say no--or really say yes. That's when you begin backing away from us. Now I'm full-grown. I pursue my happiness the same as any man. — Pierre-Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais

Art should be beautiful, not ugly. It should be uplifting and redemptive. Art reassures us that life is good and that, however bad things may look at the moment, everything works out for the best in the end. — Michael Swanwick

The people on the QVC shopping channel convince me that life is worth living. They see the good in everything. People who go to counselling should actually go to a room with a QVC seller for half an hour and let them find the qualities within them. For example, they'd look at me and say, 'To anybody else this looks like a stomach but, actually, his feet never get wet in the rain. — Johnny Vegas

My joy is that there is no such world at all, but that the substance of life is in everyone! There is no reason to be troubled because we are absurd, is there? For we really are: we are absurd, frivolous, we have bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look around ourselves, we don't know how to understand, we are all like this, all of us, you, and I, and everyone! And you aren't offended by my telling you straight to your faces that you are absurd? There is the basic stuff of life in your, isn't there? You know, I believe it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous. Yes, much better. People forgive each other more readily and become more humble, we can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection! To reach perfection there must first be much we do not understand. And if we understand too quickly we will probably not understand very well. I tell this to you who have been able to understand so much and - do not understand.'
p. 577 — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sometimes I thought it was a good thing that he had gone blind, because that way he would never see me, never see my face, never see the look on my face when I was with him, which wasn't the look of a prostitute or a thief or a spy, but an expectant look, the look of someone hoping for anything and everything, from a kind word to a life-changing declaration.
There weren't many kind words, because Maciste didn't talk much, but there were kind gestures. And there were no life-changing declarations, or at least none I recognized at the time, though since then I've come to remember each of Maciste's words as a key or a dark bridge that surely could have led me elsewhere, as if he were a fortune-telling machine designed exclusively for me, which I know isn't true, though sometimes I like to think so, not often, because I don't lie to myself the way I used to, but every once in a while. — Roberto Bolano

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource. — Bill Bryson

You cannot become good enough for your own approval just like you can't become good enough to have hair. You cannot earn your own self-acceptance just like you can't earn your own ears. You can't become what you are. Stop looking out there. Look in the mirror. You're already everything you've ever wanted to be. — Vironika Tugaleva

Everything that isn't gospel is law. Let us say it again: Everything that isn't gospel is law. Every way we try to make our kids good that isn't rooted in the good news of the life, death, ressurection, and assension of Jesus Christ is damnable, crushing, despair-breeding, Pharisee-producing law. We won't get the results we want from the law. We'll get either shallow self-righteousness or blazing rebellion or both (frequently from the same kid on the same day!). We'll get moralistic kids who are cold and hypocritical and who look down on others (and could easily become Mormons), or you'll get teens who are rebellious and self-indulgent and who can't wait to get out of the house. We have to remember that in the life of our unregenerate children, the law is given for one reason only: to crush their self-confidence and drive them to Christ. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Dad often told me, 'My job is to help my boss do his job and make him look good.' That was my dad's objective. Everything about the way he conducted himself was to communicate support for his superiors and respect for his coworkers. The way he dressed was his starting point in that communication. — Lyle Lovett

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. — Charlie Kaufman

Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when the total population was the population of Tennessee. We've stretched it to try to make it work for different kind of problems and in stretching and adapting it, we've lost its meaning. We still have the form but not the meaning. There's a lot of things that we have to look at critically that might have been useful at one time that are no longer useful I think there's some good in everything. There's some bad in everything. But there's so little good in some things that you know for practical purposes they're useless. They're beyond salvation. There's so much good in some things, even though there's bad, that we build on that. — Myles Horton

oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid - ? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified - and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what's in store for me - I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I'm too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There isn't going to be any turning point ... There isn't going to be any next-month-it'll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don't have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say, "So this is it. This is really all there is to it. This little thing." Everybody needing such little things and they can't get them. Everybody needing just a little ... confidence from somebody else and they can't get it. Everybody, everybody fighting to protect their little feelings. Everybody, you know, like reaching out tentatively but drawing back. It's so shallow and seems so ... fucking ... it seems like such a shame. It's so close to being like really right and good and open and amorphous and giving and everything. But it's not. And it ain't gonna be.
September 1969
quoted in "The New Yorker" 9 August 1999 — Janis Joplin

It is a metaphor for life, perhaps, in that everything is a metaphor for life. The berry season is short. So how full, exactly, do I intend to fill the box? Or, if we slice away the metaphor, we could just ask this: what does the good life look like for me? — Laura Vanderkam

It's important to have a vision of the long run and make wise decisions for our highest good in the present moment; however, we don't want to become attached to how everything must look. When we show up in good faith, life provides. And when we trust, we are always in the flow of manifestation. — Alaric Hutchinson

We pick up our shots and for the first time there's a total absence of sound in the room. From the ceiling, shy silver things blink and wait. Dennis doesn't sit, but hovers at the edge of the table, leaning in with a darkroom perfected slump. His hair hangs like its edges were dipped in lead. Thin spears pointing to the table. I'm looking at his face; we're both serious in a self-aware way, pretending not to notice.

"It doesn't even feel like I left. God, you look fucking terrible. But it's a terrible face that drinks tequila well. Down. And cheers."

We force a dull clash of cups and pour everything down at once. The hard tequila shudders that never happen in the movies. First your head feels light, then it starts receiving the distress signals from throat, lungs, belly. Your shoulders jerk to shake off the snake that wrapped around you and squeezed. It burns. The good burn. — Laurie Perez

The Nightside CSI is only one man, pleasant enough, calm and easy going, and very professional. It probably helps that he has multiple personality disorder with a sub-personality for every speciality and discipline in his profession. One to handle fingerprints, another to examine blood splatter or look for magical residues ... He's really quite good at his job though he does tend to argue with himself.
Between himself he knows everything he needs to know. Each sub-personality has a different voice. Some of them are women. I've never asked. — Simon R. Green

In Heaven, to look into God's eyes will be to see what we've always longed to see: the person who made us for His own good pleasure. Seeing God will be like seeing everything else for the first time. — Randy Alcorn

There's a part of me wishes that Daddy would sleep his life away. A part of me that hopes that after all these years his drinking will finally catch up to him. That one day he'll just go to bed and never wake up. But who am I kidding with that dream? It's the people like Daddy, the wicked ones who go on living forever. It's like God puts people like Daddy on earth on purpose. Making them a test for the good people in the world. If you can withstand what the good Lord throws at you, by staying true to your goodhearted self, and persevering through all of the obstacles thrust before you, then you've earned a spot by his side in Heaven. I look forward to that day. I look forward to the day where I'll be smiling down from Heaven, wondering what made my daddy become so sick, twisted, and rotten. I look forward to the day when I can forgive him for everything he's done and watch him from a cloud up in Heaven, praying for his damned soul, while he's doused in flames, and burning in hell. — Lauren Hammond

Youths should study,' grumbled the Old Woman, 'and not take the laws apart. And you, dear Youth, before you become acquainted with the Beautiful Woman, take a good look into her Garden through the window tomorrow morning, when everything is clearly and genuinely visible in the light of the sun. You will see that in the Garden there are no flowers which are familiar to anyone here, and only such flowers as none of us in the City know. Just think about this carefully, after all, there is something strange about it. The devil is cunning; is this not his creation for the damnation of people?'
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

There's a writer for you," he said. "Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing."
[narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers. — F Scott Fitzgerald

First of all, you must never speak of anything by its name
in that country. So, if you see a tree on a mountain, it will be better to say 'Look at the green on the high'; for that's how they talk
in that country. And whatever you do, you must find a false reason for doing it
in that country. If you rob a man, you must say it is to help and protect him: that's the ethics
of that country. And everything of value has no value at all
in that country. You must be perfectly commonplace if you want to be a genius
in that country. And everything you like you must pretend not to like; and anything that is there you must pretend is not there
in that country. And you must always say that you are sacrificing yourself in the cause of religion, and morality, and humanity, and liberty, and progress, when you want to cheat your neighbour
in that country."
Good heavens!" cried Iliel, 'are we going to England? — Aleister Crowley

You change everything: your friends, schedule, dress, etc. Whatever they need to feel more comfortable, and more secure, you adjust because their peace is your peace. You start to watch for the "look" that tells you when they are getting agitated. You start to listen for what is being said in the silence. You cease to have a good time when you are out because you never know what is being held in the reserve for later. — Renair Amin

I want to live for today, hope for tomorrow, and try to look for the good in everything in between. — Megan Squires

I'm not a poet. But my wife is. She taught me to look for the extraordinary in the simplicity. She taught me about emotion, and truth, and second chances. You see, I never realized a person can keep giving everything with no thought to take. Alexa, you changed my life, but I was too afraid to reach for it. I believed I wasn't good enough. Now I realize the truth. — Jennifer Probst

I know when I look good, I feel good. I know when I come home and my house is in order, everything else seems to fall into place for me. Shouldn't we strive for that all of the time? — Nannie Helen Burroughs

And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane: ... Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable ... Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment ... Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not - and not some other way. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Didn't matter how much love you gave them. How good you treated them. How you gave them everything you wish to the gods you'd had, including respect. It didn't matter how much you hated the life you'd been forced against your will to live or how hard you'd try to put the past behind you. They cursed you for surviving and judged you on a past you despised even more than they did. He and Nykyrian were the ones who'd lived in hell, and these assholes who had no understanding of the world dared to look down on them for it. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Peeking into the living room through the bathroom's connecting door, she called out, "You gonna be okay out there, Owen?"
He was lying on his back, long flannel-pajama-clad legs crossed at the ankle and arm up over hi head. Cover off to the side. No shirt. Jeez, his chest was broad and defined, stomach cut with ridges of muscles. He turned a lazy gaze from the fire to where she stood in the doorway.
"I'm god. Thank you, for everything."
Good, indeed. She'd never look at that couch the same way again. She hugged herself. "Okay, well, give a shout if yuo need anything, or just help yourself. G'night. — Laura Kaye

The ways of sin are curious," Samuel observed. "I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up."

"Maybe that's a good thing to keep us humble. The fear of God in us."

"I guess so," said Samuel. "And I guess humility must be a good thing, since it's a rare man who has not a piece of it, but when you look at humbleness it's hard to see where its value rests unless you grant that it is a pleasurable pain and very precious.
Suffering - I wonder has it been properly looked at. — John Steinbeck

If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty. — Paramahansa Yogananda

The Obama administration has turned a blind eye to radical Islam since before they came to office. If you look at everything that's transpired since the famous Cairo speech in 2009, it's all been an embrace of those who are the most radical elements in that part of the world. That is not a good sign for America's foreign policy. — Oliver North

But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three- That's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which there qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll end up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

Look at the two of us, barely out of childhood and already we're too old-fashioned for this changing world. Is it possible to be born old? Because I certainly feel it sometimes. How can we hope to stand against unstoppable progress; how can we possibly win a war against the forces of science?"
Oskan snorted.
"Which question do you want me to answer first? Born old? Yes, right now I feel ninety. And as for the rest, we're not fighting progress or science, they're both ideas that belong to people. Ideas that should help us to understand the beauty of our world and improve the lives of everything that lives in it. But the Empire has kidnapped them, and progress of its sort means sweeping aside everything that isn't new, whether good or bad. And to the Empire science is just a means of creating more efficient ways of killing people. — Stuart Hill

It is the work of the Canadian artist to paint or play or write in such a way that life will be enlarged for himself and his fellow man. The painter will look around him ... and finding everything good, will strive to communicate that feeling through a portrayal of the essentials of sunlight, or snow, or tree or tragic cloud, or human face, according to his power and individuality. — J. E. H. MacDonald

I look out again at the sun-my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal-the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow ... — Henry Miller

Erah Graesin had a silky, low voice. It was reputed to be sexy, but then, everything about Terah Graesin was supposed to be sexy. Kylar didn't see it. Oh, she was pretty. She had a wide mouth, full lips, and the kind of figure that was unattainable for the majority of noblewomen who spent their days doing nothing more strenuous than issuing orders to the servants. Maybe it was that she was a little too self-consciously good-looking. She wore lots of makeup - expertly applied and subtle, but lots - and had tweezed her eyebrows down to tiny lines. The truth was, she held herself like he ought to admire her, and it pissed him off. What pissed him off more was that to look her in the eye with his disguise, he had to stare straight at her admittedly perky breasts. Dammit, why were breasts so intriguing? — Brent Weeks

There are so many lies out there about what the good life is whether that's making as much money as you can or just being the best you can be. I just want to challenge those lies and look at what God says the good life is in His Word. He says that the good life is about believing in God and embracing everything that He has for us. — Trip Lee

I don't like it when people on the street say "smile" or "cheer up." It's a real cheap line. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling real grateful for everything. It's a solid time in my life. When people say I look sad, they're wrong. — Nicolas Cage

I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types - in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!" Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said: "Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature. — Anton Chekhov

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there. — Paul Bloom

No, I don't party; no, I don't dress in black leather and chains; that's not my style. That's how I was raised. I worry about getting good grades and I go to church and I watch sci-fi movies and I generally follow the rules. Most people would call me a geek or a nerd. You've called me that many times. But that isn't everything that defines me. I mean, look at me, sitting here in a rainstorm under a tree that's probably going to kill us when the lightning hits it, holding the hand of a pretty cool girl who really is the opposite of me, a girl that I happen to be in love with. A girl I couldn't have imagined would want to be with me. But here she is, letting me hold her hand, trying to tell me why she isn't good enough for me. That's crazy. — Cindy C. Bennett

Sometimes we fall into the negative so deeply that we do not realize our first instinctive reaction to everything is to think negatively or to "look" for the bad in every situation. The phrase "too good to be true" directly comes from this aspect of ourselves. To be cautious can be good in certain situations, but to dismiss every interaction or idea to the possibility of "bad things happening" puts us in a place where the beautiful or the divine never gets a chance to fully blossom. Mind your thoughts carefully, as you are the only one who can allow happiness to thrive in your life — Gary Hopkins

Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs. The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he'd never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted, even if it made him sick. Harry piled his plate with a bit of everything except the peppermints and began to eat. It was all delicious. "That does look good," said the ghost in the ruff sadly, watching Harry cut up his steak. — J.K. Rowling

SETH: But don't you understand, Amy? You're wrong. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing. — Hanya Yanagihara

Simon did everything inexpertly. He was really good at it. He was one of those tall lads apparently made out of knees, thumbs and elbows. Watching him walk was a strain, you kept waiting for the strings to snap, and when he talked the spasm of agony on his face if he spotted an S or W looming ahead in the sentence made people instinctively say them for him. It was worth it for the grateful look which spread across his acned face like sunrise on the moon. — Anonymous

It was with some surprise that I saw that the person waiting for me at the airport's exit was Adrian. A grin spread over my face, and I picked up the pace. I threw my arms around him, astonishing both of us.
"I have never been happier to see you in my life," I said.
He squeezed me tightly and then let me go, regarding me admiringly. "The dreams never do justice to real life, little dhampir. You look amazing."
"And you look ... " I studied him. He was dressed as nicely as always. His dark brown hair had that crafted messiness he liked, but his face - ah, well. As I'd noted before, Simon had gotten a few good punches on him. One of Adrian's eyes was swollen and ringed with bruises.
Nonetheless, thinking about him and everything he'd done ... Well, none of the flaws mattered.
" ... Gorgeous."
"Liar," he said.
"Couldn't Lissa have healed that black eye away?"
"It's a badge of honor. Makes me seem manly. — Richelle Mead

She turns in the doorway. "Oh, and Galen?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Have your mother call me so I can get her number programmed into my phone."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You kids have a good time. I won't be home until late, Emma. But you'll be home by nine, sweetie. Won't she, Galen?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Neither Emma nor Galen say anything until they hear the car pull out of the driveway. Even then, they wait a few more seconds. Emma leans against the fridge. Galen is growing fond of hiding his hands in his pockets.
"So, what did you two chitchat about?" she asks as if uninterested.
"You first."
She shakes her head. "Uh-uh. I don't want to talk about it."
He nods. "Good. Me neither."
For a few seconds, they look at everything in the room but each other. Finally, Galen says, "So, did you want to go change-"
"That idea is fan-flipping-tastic. Be right down." She almost breaks into a run to get to the stairs. — Anna Banks

If only you would understand the silent speech and the real pain within the innermost man of they that suffer in silence, you would never keep silent to their suffering. So many people can't speak everything about how they are suffering for the sake of dignity and confidentiality. Though they smile, they smile out of a deep pain within. When you look at someone suffering, just see how he is suffering and in so far as you can, be the joy to the innermost man of the person to the best of your ability. Don't wait for his words, just look and see! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Henri Nouwen wrote of the spiritual work of gratitude: To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives - the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections - that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.2 — Brennan Manning

Because it has lived its life intensely
the parched grass still attracts the gaze of passers-by.
The flowers merely flower,
and they do this as well as they can.
The white lily, blooming unseen in the valley,
Does not need to explain itself to anyone;
It lives merely for beauty.
Man, however, cannot accept that 'merely'.

If tomatoes wanted to be melons,
they would look completely ridiculous.
I am always amazed
that so many people are concerned
with wanting to be what they are not;
what's the point of making yourself look ridicuolous?

You don't always have to pretend to be strong,
there's no need to prove all the time that everything is going well,
you shouldn't be concerned about what other people are thinking,
cry if you need to,
it's good to cry out all your tears
(because only then will you be able to smile again). — Mitsuo Aida

Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock. — Edward Abbey

I've asked myself that a thousand times over and I'm no closer to an answer now than I was when it began. I think that's why I always loved movies so much. In a movie, everything has to make sense. The characters always have to have motivation. Good, solid motivation for everything they do. They can't be a dickhead without reason. If someone turns on a character, they have to have a hardcore, believable reason for it. Unfortunately, in real life you don't. People turn on each other for anything from catching a constipated look on your face when you had gas and thinking it was directed at them, to not liking the brand of shoes you're wearing. People are sick. (Aiden) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Women have always tried to make themselves attractive to men, and you're not going to change a thing like that in a hurry. Look around you. All the women nicely groomed and attractive and good-looking, and the men no better than fat slugs, for the most part, or skinny runts. Unshaved and smelly as often as not. They get away with everything, men. They can do every disgusting thing they like and no one ever says a thing. — Fay Weldon

There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory ... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. — Elizabeth Warren

If I ever have kids, this is what I'm going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil - preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp - destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you've been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the woman are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever. — Sloane Crosley

That's exactly the way parents develop positive, successful kids. Don't look for the flaws, warts, and blemishes. Look for the gold, not for the dirt; the good, not the bad. Look for the positive aspects of life. Like everything else, the more good qualities we look for in our children, the more good qualities we are going to find. — Zig Ziglar

You see, there was this man, and he was a good man; he worked hard and did everything to the best of his ability. All he desired was for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom to be his wife. Now this wasn't all bad because she actually loved him too
very much so
but this vizier, he wanted her as well and not for so noble a cause as love."
"What did he want her for?"
Yashar paused for a moment. "So that people could look at him and say, 'He must be a great man to have such a beautiful wife.'"
"Oh. I thought he wanted her for sex," said Colby, disappointed. — C. Robert Cargill

There's a note on the door: "Dear kind person, Please don't look for valuables here. We never had any. Use whatever you want, but don't trash the place. We'll be back." I saw signs on other houses in different colors - "Dear house, forgive us!" People said goodbye to their homes like they were people. Or they'd written: "we're leaving in the morning," or, "we're leaving at night," and they'd put the date and even the time. There were notes written on school notebook paper: "Don't beat the cat. Otherwise the rats will eat everything." And then in a child's handwriting: "Don't kill our Zhulka. She's a good cat." [Closes his eyes.] — Svetlana Alexievich

God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. "I do not delight in the death of anyone, says the Lord God" (Ezek. 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic, with all its (good and evil) parts he does delight in (Ps. 115:3). — John Piper