Not Less Than Quotes & Sayings

If what you achieve today is equal to what you achieved yesterday, then you are at a loss. And if what you have achieved today is less than what you achieved yesterday, then you are deprived from the Almighty's blessings. Anyone who is not progressing, is in fact regressing, and if you are regressing, then you might as well be dead. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

But God has not called us to be like those around us. He has called us to be like Himself. Holiness is nothing less than conformity to the character of God. — Jerry Bridges

No, take more! What may be sworn by, both divine and human, Seal what I end withal! This double worship, Where [one] part does disdain with cause, the other Insult without all reason; where gentry, title, wisdom, Cannot conclude but by the yea and no Of general ignorance - it must omit Real necessities, and give way the while To unstable slightness. Purpose so barr'd, it follows Nothing is done to purpose. Therefore beseech you - You that will be less fearful than discreet; That love the fundamental part of state More than you doubt the change on't; that prefer A noble life before a long, and wish To jump a body with a dangerous physic That's sure of death without it - at once pluck out The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick The sweet which is their poison. Your dishonor Mangles true judgment, and bereaves the state Of that integrity which should become't; Not having the power to do the good it would, For th' ill which doth control't. — William Shakespeare

were spilt on his bib, Jane and Michael could tell that the substance in the spoon this time was milk. Then Barbara had her share, and she gurgled and licked the spoon twice. Mary Poppins then poured out another dose and solemnly took it herself. "Rum punch," she said, smacking her lips and corking the bottle. Jane's eyes and Michael's popped with astonishment, but they were not given much time to wonder, for Mary Poppins, having put the miraculous bottle on the mantelpiece, turned to them. "Now," she said, "spit-spot into bed." And she began to undress them. They noticed that whereas buttons and hooks had needed all sorts of coaxing from Katie Nanna, for Mary Poppins they flew apart almost at a look. In less than a minute they found themselves in bed and watching, by the dim light from the night-light, the rest of Mary Poppins's unpacking being performed. From the carpet bag she took out seven flannel nightgowns, four cotton ones, a pair of boots, a — P.L. Travers

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: 'You were running,
That's fine. It was the thing to do.'
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That's better than examining one's private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It's here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell. — Czeslaw Milosz

His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess Of glory obscur'd. — John Milton

If you walked into your local convenience store and bought a package of cigars, you would notice that it carries a label warning of the potential dangers of cigar smoke. Yet research suggests that cigar smoking poses a hazard only to moderate to heavy cigar smokers, who comprise less than 1 percent of the adult population. More than 97 percent of American adults, however, eat animal foods, and despite much research demonstrating the connection between the consumption of animal products and disease, we are not warned of these dangers. — Melanie Joy

Missionary work is but home teaching to those who are not now members of the Church, and home teaching is nothing more or less than missionary work to Church members — Harold B. Lee

The assumption that everything past is preserved holds good even in mental life only on condition that the organ of the mind has remained intact and that its tissues have not been damaged by trauma or inflammation. But destructive influences which can be compared to causes of illness like these are never lacking in the history of a city, even if it has had a less chequered past than Rome, and even if, like London, it has hardly ever suffered from the visitations of an enemy. — Sigmund Freud

Hobbes is not an absolutist precisely because he is an authoritarian. His scepticism about the power of reasoning, which applied no less to the 'artificial reason' of the Sovereign than to the reasoning of the natural man, together with the rest of his individualism, separate him from the rationalist dictators of his or any age. Indeed, Hobbes, without being himself a liberal, had in him more of the philosophy of liberalism than most of its professed defenders — Efraim Podoksik

mighty smug with their present, howsoever unenviable or contemptible their lives and the attitudes might appear others to be. While nearsightedness is not exactly an affliction (but just the thing a good doctor or spiritual healer might prescribe for leading an uncomplicated and happy life), farsightedness is nothing less than a full-blown syndrome. Forever whining, carping, criticizing, castigating, berating and bemoaning every aspect of national-societal life, the lot of the farsighted is pathetic indeed. And, this, when they have far less reasons to cavil, enjoy as they do generally a far better station in life than their nearsighted — D.P. Singh

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. — George Orwell

To a new generation of butterflies, hopefully less stupid than last.
Maybe they were burgeoning even now in fat little cocoons. Or maybe not. — Laini Taylor

The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many ... , myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter's presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy. — James Q. Wilson

But suppose it past, - suppose one of these men, as I have seen them meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame ; suppose this man surrounded by those children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, about to be torn for ever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is not his fault than he can no longer so support; suppose this man - and there are ten thousand such from whom you may select your victims, - dragged into court to be tried for this new offence, by this new law, - still there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him, and these are, in my opinion, twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jefferies for a judge! — George Gordon Byron

So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war's true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war - which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell - seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively. — Geoff Dyer

Perhaps if you were not a foot taller, or quite so broad across the shoulders.'
'It's considerably less than a foot,' said Damen.
'Is it?' said Laurent. 'It feels like more when you argue with me on points of honour. — C.S. Pacat

Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the Christian, only in the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas by venturing to let go of everything the Christian takes a stand beyond finitude and comes into the limitlessness of God, Christ, in order to make this act possible and to be its source, has dared to emerge from the infinitude of the 'form of God' and 'did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped,' has dared to set out into the limitation and emptiness of time. This involved a transcendence and a boundary crossing no less fundamental than that of the Christian, and Christ undertook it so as to entrust himself henceforth within time, with no guarantee or mitigation from eternity, to the Father's will, which is always given to him in the present moment. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

It's not willing to settle for anything less than success. — The Miz

You don't need anger to control children. You do need action, occasionally. Furthermore, you can apply the action anywhere on the time line that is convenient, and children will live contentedly within that boundary. In fact, the closer the action moves to the front of the conflict the less punishment is required. A pinch of the trapezius muscle would not be a sufficient deterrent at the end of a two-hour struggle, whereas it is more than adequate when the conflict is minimal. — James C. Dobson

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life. — Baruch Spinoza

If you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values. — Dennis Prager

I'm not a great pothead or anything like that ... but weed is much, much less dangerous than alcohol. — Johnny Depp

Gandhi once said, you are the change you want to see in the world. But I have to ask, how do you bring about the change in you? Because it stands to reason, first you have to change before you can change the world. Your beliefs have to change, because your beliefs influence your behavior and your daily interactions with others. Changing oneself is not easy. First, you have to admit that there are parts of you which need changing. Many of us do not want to admit that we are less than perfect, that we might have facets of our personality which needs change. Change is hard, so most of us give up before we start. But if things aren't right in our lives, we need to look at what part of us we can change to make it right. — Cindy Vine

He rewarded me with one of those brilliant smiles. If I had been less professional, it might have melted me into my socks. There was a tinge of evil to it, a lot of sex, but under that was a little boy peeking out, an uncertain little boy. That was it. That was the attraction. Nothing is more appealing than a handsome man who is also uncertain of himself. It appeals not only to the woman in us all, but the mother. A dangerous combination. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identiy, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of the ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before. — Herman Wouk

Association is the delight of the heart, not less than of poetry. Alison observes that an autumn sunset, with its crimson clouds, glimmering trunks of trees, and wavering tints upon the grass, seems scarcely capable of embellishment. But if in this calm and beautiful glow the chime of a distant bell steal over the fields, the bosom heaves with the sensation that Dante so tenderly describes. — Robert Aris Willmott

The strategic aspect of General Joffre's policy was not less stultified than the administrative. The easterly and north-easterly attacks into which his four Armies of the Right and Centre were impetuously launched, were immediately stopped and hurled back with a slaughter so frightful that it has never yet been comprehended by the world. His — Winston S. Churchill

If Elvis ..is the definition of rock, then rock is remembered as showbiz ... It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music ... if Dylan ... becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition ... The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally "good" singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style ... — Chuck Klosterman

His obvious nervousness at seeing me made
me feel less nervous about seeing him, and I was glad for it.
"Sorry for just droppin' in unannounced,""I said, and gnawed on my lower lip.
Ryder shook his head. "No, no, it's more than fine. It's great actually. Really, really great."
"Ry," Alec said, and when I looked at him I saw him trying not to laugh. "You need to calm down."
"Calm? I am calm."
He so wasn't — L.A. Casey

He takes a seat, coming eye to eye with me. His elbows meet his knees and he leans forward, smiling calmly. "My name is Owen Gentry. I'm an artist and this is my studio. I have a showing in less than an hour, I need someone to handle all the transactions, and my girlfriend broke up with me last week."
Artist.
Showing.
Less than an hour?
And girlfriend? Not touching that one. — Colleen Hoover

And what happens if we don't remember? What happens if we never knew? Too many of us are here in the dark because in the rush and clamor of blood the third reptilian brain takes over, the one that says I do not recognize anything of myself in you, and so you are less than nothing. — Quan Barry

When a tragedy occurs, do not say that your thoughts are with the victims. People do not need thoughts, they need blankets, they need food, they need water, they need shelter. They need a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold. All the cumulative thoughts from every sentient being that has ever existed is worth less than a single glass of water given to a thirsty person. - Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Eighteenth Binding, Fourteenth Stanza — Aaron Lee Yeager

If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them. Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do. Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you. — David Keirsey

More African American adults are under correctional control today - in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.7 The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.8 The absence of black fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites. — Michelle Alexander

In the consumer culture of marriage, commitments last as long as the other person is meeting our needs. We still believe in commitment, because we know that committed relationships are good for us, but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage. Most baby boomers and their offspring carry in our heads the internalized voice of the consumer culture-to encourage us to stop working so hard or to get out of a marriage that is not meeting our current emotional needs. — William J Doherty

You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies - though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God's] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is. — Jean-Pierre De Caussade

The ownership of computers in the home is far less than the statistics show, because usually when the computer breaks down once, that is the end of it for a long, long time. They do not have the money or incentive to get the computer repaired. — Major Owens

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. — Chris Van Allsburg

I contend that proposing too early in the sales process (aka Premature Proposal Syndrome) produces a less-than-ideal proposal and puts the seller at a disadvantage. Some of the possible dangers of prematurely delivering a proposal include not having identified the buyer's criteria for making a decision, all the key players involved in the decision, and the true underlying issues driving the request for a proposal. — Mike Weinberg

God's love never ceases. Never. Though we spurn him. Ignore him. Reject him. Despise him. Disobey him. He will not change. Our evil cannot diminish his love. Our goodness cannot increase it. Our faith does not earn it anymore than our stupidity jeopardizes it. God doesn't love us less if we fail or more if we succeed. God's love never ceases.1 — Max Lucado

I only have one story now.
The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold onto him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being. — Alice Hoffman

He took a deep breath. It was no matter. Of course his feelings were stronger, as they should be. He was to be the leader of their household, after all; it would not do for him to feel less than she did. And she was a lady. She would have kept her feelings in check until she was sure of his. Poor dear, she likely wondered why he had not spoken up. He had walked with her almost daily but spoken nothing of love or marriage. How could he have let her suffer so? — Elizabeth Adams

When a man does not admit that he is an animal, he is less than an animal. Not more but less. — Michael McClure

...we must be careful to avoid the error of reductionism, as if the whole of the Spirit's ministry can be reduced to Christology, as if the Spirit does nothing but glorify Christ. It's the mistake of arguing that the primary purpose of the Spirit's coming is the sole purpose of his coming. The principal aim of the Spirit in what he does is to awaken us to the glory, splendor, and centrality of the work of Christ Jesus. But this does not mean that it is less than the Spirit at work when he awakens us also to his own glory and power and abiding presence. — Sam Storms

Not to have a thing is less humiliating than to beg it. — Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S

Still, on 'Friends', we had some guest-stars who were less than spectacular, not the stunt-casting, but just regular guest-stars, and they weren't particularly great actors, but the material was so good that they scored. It's the writing. — Matt LeBlanc

A mother's body against a child's body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life ... The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn't stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here. — Eve Ensler

It is less what one is that should matter, than what one is not. — Wei Wu Wei

he had sixty thousand as good soldiers as ever trod the earth; better than any European soldiers, because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought. European armies know very little what they are fighting for, and care less. — Ulysses S. Grant

Whether advanced driver training helps drivers in the long term is one of those controversial and unresolved mysteries of the road, but my eye-opening experience at Bondurant raises the curious idea that we buy cars - for most people one of the most costly things they will ever own - with an underdeveloped sense of how to use them. This is true for many things, arguably, but not knowing what the F9 key does in Microsoft Word is less life-threatening than not knowing how to properly operate antilock brakes. — Tom Vanderbilt

Since the soon-to-be outnumber the living; since the living have greater impact on the unborn than ever before thanks to depletion of natural systems, atmospheric disruption, toxic residue, burgeoning technology, global markets, genetic engineering, and sheer population numbers; since our scientific and historic understandings now comfortably examine processes embracing eons; and now that our plan-ahead horizon has shrunk to five years or less - it would seem that a grave disconnect is in progress. Our everhastier decisions and actions do not respond to our long-term understanding, or to the gravity of responsibility we bear. "The — Stewart Brand

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function? — Barbara W. Tuchman

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep. — Mike White

Prayer that craves a particular commodity - anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity — Harold Bloom

She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel grinder that Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it could all be snatched away. — Jodi Picoult

You earn your future, Malta Vestrit." The bead-maker cocked her head at her. "What does tomorrow owe you?" "Tomorrow owes me?" Malta repeated in confusion.
"Tomorrow owes you the sum of your yesterdays. No more than that." Amber looked out to sea again. "And no less. Sometimes folk wish tomorrow did not pay them off so completely. — Robin Hobb

About actors' lives ... I'm not the person to ask. I don't live an actor's life and I really don't know. I probably read less about actors' lives than you all do. So, I'm in the dark about all of that, sorry. — Tilda Swinton

Illusion doesn't mean that something is not real. Illusion simply means that something is less real than something else. This life and this world certainly exist - who is to say the reality of the dream is not real? — Frederick Lenz

We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious. — Julian Jaynes

No less a question than this: Whether he should allow himself to fall in love with Pet? He was twice her age. (He changed the leg he had crossed over the other, and tried the calculation again, but could not bring out the total at less.) He was twice her age. Well! He was young in appearance, young in health and strength, young in heart. — Charles Dickens

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves. — Alice Miller

I would not have Drool reading Cicero or crafting clever riddles, but under my tutelage he had become more than fair at tumbling and juggling, could belch a song, and was, at court, at least as entertaining as a trained bear, with slightly less proclivity for eating the guests. With guidance, he would make a proper fool. — Christopher Moore

The notion that women are less aesthetically profound and innovative than men
just not very important, if you know what I mean
doubtless spreads back to our beginnings as upright animals: the males hunted and killed for the family while the females stayed home in the cave and tended the strange little creatures they were giving birth to. — Edward Albee

Every reader's experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism. — Thomas C. Foster

The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century.

Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.

We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology. — Gerald Holton

Two hundred years from now, she had - I will? she thought wildly - stood in front of this portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, furiously denying the truth that it showed. Ellen MacKenzie looked out at her now as she had then; long-necked and regal, slanted eyes showing a humor that did not quite touch the tender mouth. It wasn't a mirror image, by any means; Ellen's forehead was high, narrower than Brianna's, and the chin was round, not pointed, her whole face somewhat softer and less bold in its features. But the resemblance was there, and pronounced enough to be startling; the wide cheekbones and lush red hair were the same. And around her neck was the string of pearls, gold roundels bright in the soft spring sun. — Diana Gabaldon

Make no mistake,' He says, 'if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect - until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well pleased with me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less. — C.S. Lewis

A child's death is really of less value than an adult's. I mean, what could you really accomplish in a year? Not much, and that's not even talking about, you know, pay-wise. — Zach Braff

We must also realize-students, teachers, and laymen alike-that even when we have accomplished the task that lies before us, we will not have accomplished the whole task. We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less wil satisfy the needs of the world that is coming. — Mortimer J. Adler

The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [ ... ]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [ ... ]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one. — James Hillman

Something else emerges from this discussion about us as human individuals: we're not fixed, stable intellects riding along peering at the world through the lenses of our eyes like the pilots of people-shaped spacecraft. We are affected constantly by what's going on around us. Whether our flexibility is based in neuroplasticity or in less dramatic aspects of the brain, we have to start acknowledging that we are mutable, persuadable and vulnerable to clever distortions, and that very often what we want to be is a matter of constant effort rather than attaining a given state and then forgetting about it. Being human isn't like hanging your hat on a hook and leaving it there, it's like walking in a high wind: you have to keep paying attention. You have to be engaged with the world. — Nick Harkaway

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

What nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing. — Andrei Tarkovsky

The man who has grit enough to bring about the afforestation or the irrigation of a country is not less worthy of honor than its conqueror. — J. Arthur Thomson

Of course smart people know a lot and can therefore accomplish more than others less gifted. But hire them not for the knowledge they possess, but for the things they don't yet know. — Eric Schmidt

humans are fully capable of loving cats and dogs and tropical fish. If they can love something much less intelligent than humans that does not talk and looks nothing like them, why can they not love one another? Certainly, — Hiroshi Yamamoto

Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that's permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Money matters but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude. — Eric Weiner

Getting a handle on why wolves do what they do has never been an easy proposition. Not only are there tremendous differences in both individual and pack personalities, but each displays a surprising range of behaviors depending on what's going on around them at any given time. No sooner will a young researcher thing, 'That's it, I've finally got a handle on how wolves respond in a particular situation,' than they'll do something to prove him at least partially wrong. Those of us who've been in this business for very long have come to accept a professional life full of wrong turns and surprises. Clearly, this is an animal less likely to offer scientists irrefutable facts than to lure us on a long and crooked journey of constant learning. — Douglas W. Smith

At any rate', said I, 'we can now state the problem accurately. People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don't you think that all you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people? — C.S. Lewis

Idle Jeffrey, when asking his cousin for money: "I fear I have not a mercenary tendency."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cousin, Plantagenet Palliser: "Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bred. The man who plows, so he may live, does so because, luckily, he has mercenary tendencies."

Jeffrey: "Just so, but you see I am less lucky than the plowman."

Palliser: "There is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. The desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combines with honesty, and they cannot take you astray. — Anthony Trollope

Where are you going?" Millie whispered, although why she was whispering was a bit of a mystery since the sound of yelling, along with a lot of cursing, was flowing into the house. "I'm not just going to sit here while everyone else is fighting my battle." She made it all the way to the door, crawling on her stomach, no less, before she was forced to stop when she encountered a pair of shoes. They were nice shoes, a little dusty, and unfortunately, they belonged to none other than Bram. "You weren't trying to sneak out to help, were you?" he asked, squatting down next to her. "I might have been." "There's no need. Silas has been secured." Lucetta frowned. "He came down here on his own?" Holding out a hand, Bram helped her to her feet before he smiled. "Apparently, yes. I imagine those women he hired weren't too keen to travel the country with him. Aiding and abetting men on the run usually results in a stint behind bars, and they must have decided he wasn't worth that." "I — Jen Turano

100% of a Guru's marketing plan depends on you holding the belief that you are not enough; that you were created less equipped than necessary to fulfill your purpose. What if you let go of that belief and connected with the truth of your innate power to change and shape your life? You ARE enough. You CAN change and shape your own life. Anyone who tells you different is simply lying. Your life has immeasurable potentiality for greatness; act accordingly. — Steve Maraboli

The actual legacy of Desert Storm was to plunge the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote. Yet in post-Cold War Washington, where global leadership and global power projection had become all but interchangeable terms, senior military officers...were less interested in assessing what those difficulties might portend than in claiming a suitably large part of the action. In the buoyant atmosphere of that moment, confidence in the efficiency of American arms left little room for skepticism and doubt. As a result, senior military leaders left unasked questions of fundamental importance. What if the effect of projecting U.S. military power was not to solve problems, but to exacerbate them? What if expectations of doing more with less proved hollow? What consequences would then ensue? Who wear bear them? — Bacevich

Creative people in particular traditionally have strained relations with systems, structures, standards, and other perceived constraints on their creative freedom. Nowhere is this clearer than in big organizations where people often complain that "the systems" kill creativity, longingly thinking back to the halcyon days when the company was young and less bureaucratic. Going back to the unstructured start-up days is not an option, however. Established companies require a different kind of innovation: they need a culture in which creativity is part of the corporate ecosystem. The key to building a creative culture is not to declare war on systems, processes, and policies, but to embrace and redesign them so they support and actively enhance innovative behavior. Managers, in other words, have to fight systems with systems, creating an architecture of innovation in their teams and departments. The primary aim is to help people behave more like innovators. — Paddy Miller

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. — Margaret Atwood

Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice. — Kurt Vonnegut

It's not that parents love their children less than in generations past. It's that they no longer receive consistent societal support for the belief that parenting is their highest priority ... TV messages championed rather then detracted from wholesome ideals ... maybe "the old days" before the societal changes of the '60s weren't perfect, but they allowed a bevy of family-friendly forces to surround parents with encouragement for their mission ... — Diane Medved

It is also important to notice that Satan enters the biblical scene as part of God's creation. This means that he is not all powerful. He is only alive because God gives him life. He is a deadly deceiver, but his power is infinitely less than God's power. So we shouldn't be terrified of Satan's power, but we do need to be wary of his lies and manipulation. — Francis Chan

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright

I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. — Ayn Rand

Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead ... — Og Mandino

There's been a lot of things said about me
Since that awful day
I'm not the person that I used to be
And that I'll never be the same
That's true - no doubt
But I know more now what life is about
I laugh louder
Cry harder
Take less time to make up my mind
and I
Think smarter
Go slower
I know what I want
And what I don't
I'll be better than I've ever been — David Levithan

There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew. — Patrick Ness

It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store? — Milton Friedman

Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make. Am I right? — Robin Hobb