Our Surroundings Quotes & Sayings

Truly, the better a person you are, or become, the harder life becomes. No longer are you omnipotent, but are made flaccid. You are exposed to the horrors of the world. I decree that it is harder to live than to die, but sacred are the few whom have chosen to live. The uneducated man possesses the aptitude to destroy his surroundings. It isn't until you are educated in both realms that you stop living for yourself. We must wear the hearts of our opponents on our sleeves in order to be worthy of the pride we wear on our shoulders. Victories against other flesh are only victories when not worn as trophies. Always remember - the futility of man is only surpassed by its greatness. — Phil Volatile

It's time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it's our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen. — Jocelyn K. Glei

Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that nothing is ever lost. — Paul Auster

In familiar surroundings our manners are cheerful and easy, but only transport us to places where we know no one and no one knows us, and Lord! how uncomfortable we become! — Susanna Clarke

The wisest is he that knows only that he knows nothing. God only knows. We mortals are only troubled with morbid little ideas, sired by circumstance and damned by folly. The human head can absorb only the flavorings of its surroundings. We assume that our faith political and our creed religious are founded upon our reason, when they are really made for us by social conditions over which we had little control. — William Cowper Brann

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there's nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whether we are in the city, the countryside, or the wilderness, we need to sustain ourselves by choosing our surroundings carefully and nourishing our awareness in each moment. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Most of us choose our companions and surroundings to reflect ourselves. — Frank Herbert

Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings - the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky - Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence. — Anton Chekhov

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our "hump" - that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable - that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes. — Tom Robbins

We are what we see. We are products of our surroundings. — Amber Valletta

Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures - such was our course and the surroundings of it. — Mark Twain

Our goals are not achieved if all our energy given to us to achieve the goal and self-actualization is directed towards being accepted by our surroundings and to meet their requirements — Sunday Adelaja

Curiosity's primal. Our senses scan our surroundings, alerting us most urgently about sudden change. Useful, that. Change can mean opportunity. It can mean danger. Finding lunch or being lunch. We're hard-wired to notice the unexpected, then take action. — Julie Czerneda

PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein - hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings - is etched indelibly on our minds. "A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all," writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years. — Michio Kaku

In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book. — Andy Rooney

It is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject -- that is, to bring back into our own heads -- the living quality which we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one find in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, which is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead, and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane... — Philip K. Dick

I feel very strongly we are spiritual beings in a physical body, and we should make our surroundings as beautiful and soulful as possible. — Alexandra Stoddard

Nurture your felt love for nature. Never deny it. That love is the eons, the purifying intelligence, beauty and diversity of nature sustaining us in its perfection. Our disconnection from this love and its advice produces our hurt, greed and destructiveness. We must reconnect and restore its peaceful voice in our thoughts, soul and surroundings. — Michael J. Cohen

Those who have never seen a leopard under favourable conditions in his natural surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring, of this the most gracefuL and the most beautiful of all animales in our Indian jungles. — Jim Corbett

The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. — Aldous Huxley

It is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world. — Wendell Berry

When we develop the heart chakra, we begin to influence the surroundings with our spiritual presence.
When we develop the communication chakra, we begin to influence the country with our spiritual presence.
When we develop the seventh chakra, we begin to influence the world with our spiritual presence without doing anything. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted - even for a few seconds - they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. They had the mental distance to think and reflect, even on the smallest scale.
These early humans evolved the ability to detach and think as their primary advantage in the struggle to avoid predators and find food. It connected them to a reality other animals could not access. Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution - the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind. — Robert Greene

In the midst of the complexities of modern life, with all its pressures, the spirit of man needs to refresh itself by communion with unspoiled nature. In such surroundings- occasional as our visits may be- we can achieve that kind of physical and spiritual renewal that comes alone from the wonder of the natural world. — Laurance S. Rockefeller

You don't live in the real world, Z. From what you've told me, I don't think you ever have. You're like me. You live inside this illusion. She motioned to our virtual surroundings. — Ernest Cline

O God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, forgive me for becoming so enthralled with my surroundings that I forget to look up and gaze into Thy face. The radiance of Thy face is all I really need. Amen. — A.W. Tozer

Things that are different, things that don't fit into our own typical surroundings, do tend to set off some sort of subliminal trigger in most people. Your pulse beats faster, you become more aware of your environment, more in touch with your fight-or-flight response. — Rysa Walker

Our vision is to create an exceptional lifestyle offering worthy of Tamarack's incredible surroundings. All of our partners involved in this development are committed to delivering the highest level of quality and luxury possible. We are excited to have Fairmont join us in this endeavor. — Andre Agassi

The march to our duty here, not merely to ourselves, but to our surroundings, must proceed. God wills it. — William H. O'Connell

We are partly instrumental in deciding what we perceive by selecting what is significant for us.
Two people can be present in the same room and yet experience it quite differently. This is because we contribute our own meaning or our own interests when we perceive our surroundings. — Jostein Gaarder

Our brains are bombarded by something like eleven million pieces of data - that is, items in our surroundings that come at all of our senses - at once. Of that, we are able to consciously process only about forty — Anonymous

So we have in this summer of 1996, rerun or not, and as always, faithless custodians of capital making themselves multimillionaires and multibillionaires, while playing beanbag with money better spent on creating meaningful jobs and training people to fill them, and raising our young and retiring our old in surroundings of respect and safety. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

We are gifted with freedom, but with that freedom comes the reality of the unknown and the responsibility to be aware of our surroundings and on guard against those who would do us harm. — Mike Crapo

The world carried on before we arrived. We make our entrance, adapt to our surroundings and join the chase to nowhere. We depart without fulfilment. The world carries on. — Kamil Ali

Women have to be careful and teach their girls to be aware of their surroundings and never be alone with testosterone-crazed boys. A lot of little lives are being ruined and our society is to blame. Our kids are just searching and being curious but they are dangerously looking for the wrong kind of attention. — Pamela Anderson

Obviously, therefore, we must be able to transcribe what is in us into our mental and objective consciousness, by establishing a relationship between the life in us and observation of that life in Nature. This we find supremely well expressed by the ancient Egyptians. It is a knowledge of magic, pure and sane, which can lead rapidly toward the spiritual goal of our lives, owing to the fact that we can evoke, by means of the sympathy of analogues in our surroundings, the consciousness of the heart latent in us. — R. A. Schwaller De Lubicz

If we forget what used to be, then we've lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings. — Maya Lin

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. — Jacob Bronowski

A person influenced by circumstances can become viciously envious or affectionately kind. Our company and our surroundings have a crucial effect on our consciousness. How important it is to be an instrument to bring out the inherent good of each other rather than the worst. — Radhanath Swami

Our surroundings fade and we exist in unison, two people who once shared cups of coffee, unprecedentedly ourselves in a changing world. — Caroline George

But so long as we are occupied with any other object than God Himself there will be neither rest for the heart nor peace for the mind. But when we receive all that enters our lives as from His hand, then, no matter what may be our circumstances or surroundings - whether in a hovel, a prison, a dungeon, or a martyr's stake - we shall be enabled to say, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places" (Psa 16:6). But that is the language of faith, not of sight or of sense. — Arthur W. Pink

Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.'
But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.
For us, the world was full of beauty; for the other, it was a place to be endured until he went to another world.
But we were wise. We knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard. — Chief Luther Standing Bear

Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it's way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love. — Haruki Murakami

Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings ... It's something we make inside ourselves. — Corrie Ten Boom

Tell me again what we're doing here," I said, running a continuous scan of our surroundings.
Fang popped some Cracker Jack into his mouth. "We're here to watch manly men do manly things."
I followed Fang's line of sight: He was watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who were not doing manly things, by any stretch of the imagination. — James Patterson

To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting. — Piet Mondrian

Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have trained ourselves not to be present. We have extended our bodies, created enhanced selves that might be called our "techno-selves." Our techno-selves are both bigger and smaller than our former selves. Bigger in that we have tremendous powers to communicate with the invisible world. Smaller in that we have sacrificed some of our contact and experience with the visible, immediate world. We have marginalized our direct sensory experience. — Alan Lightman

Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that - in my humble opinion - allows us to put the present into much better perspective. — Mohsin Hamid

knowledge of who we are prevents us from being distracted by the demands of our surroundings — Sunday Adelaja

Home is the heart of life Home is where we feel at ease, where we belong, where we can create surroundings that reflect our tastes and pleasures Making a home is a form of creativity open to everyone. — Terence Conran

Maybe she's not looking at me, but beyond me. In the depths of our crater lake, all is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remnants of some faint, distant memory. — Haruki Murakami

Why do we love certain homes, and why do they seem to love us? It is the warmth of our individual hearts reflected in our surroundings. — T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Tonight we were back to protecting Hesburn, our small community. We the hunters are here to stop the savage attacks that are terrorizing us and the people who take refuge in the cabins that we provide.

Ris Hallori and I were working together again, he preferred a bow and arrow to my choice of a shotgun. But there was no sign of Enya Ravnaar it was just us. We had to stay alert and be aware of any sudden sounds, Ris was on edge constantly checking his surroundings I kept a safe distance behind, he was quicker on his feet then I was. — Charon Lloyd-Roberts

No one can help us to achieve the intimate isolation by which we find our secret worlds, so mysterious, rich and full. If others intervene, it is destroyed. This degree of thought, which we attain by freeing ourselves from the external world, must be fed by the inner spirit, and our surroundings cannot influence us in any way other than to leave us in peace. — Maria Montessori

Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power. Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar. We counteract a deep feeling of insecurity by making of our existence a fixed routine. We hereby acquire the illusion that we have tamed the unpredictable. — Eric Hoffer

People need immediate places to refresh, reinvent themselves. Our surroundings built and natural alike, have an immediate and a continuing effect on the way we feel and act, and on our health and intelligence. These places have an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens in a democracy. In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become. — Tony Hiss

Anything allowed in the heart which is contrary to the will of God, let it seem ever so insignificant, or be ever so deeply hidden, will cause us to fall before our enemies. Any root of bitterness cherished towards another, any self-seeking, any harsh judgments indulged in, any slackness in obeying the voice of the Lord, any doubtful habits or surroundings, any one of these things will effectually cripple and paralyze our spiritual life. I believe our blessed Guide, the indwelling Holy Spirit, is always secretly discovering these things to us by continual little twinges and pangs of conscience, so that we are left without excuse. — Hannah Whitall Smith

Tea time is a chance to slow down, pull back and appreciate our surroundings. — Letitia Baldrige

Many of us spend our entire lives in the same bubble - we surround ourselves with people who share our opinions, speak the way we speak, and look the way we look. We fear leaving those familiar surroundings, which is natural, but through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define WHAT we are and discover WHO we are. — Adam Braun

Tech people like to stick to their knitting, and they measure their accomplishments by the growth of their company. Now the tech community is popping up and saying, 'We do need to be involved in our surroundings.' — Ron Conway

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? — Rachel Carson

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. — Karl Polanyi

All energy given to us for the achievements of goals and self-actualization is instead spent on deriving acceptance from our surroundings and compliance with the requirements of the society — Sunday Adelaja

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words "I" and "myself " must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many "growing communities" are as disastrous as cancer. — Alan W. Watts

For all the tantalizing and provocative character of the Viking results, I know a hundred places on Mars which are far more interesting than our landing sites. The ideal tool is a roving vehicle carrying on advanced experiments, particularly in imaging, chemistry and biology. Prototypes of such rovers are under development by NASA. They know on their own how to go over rocks, how not to fall down ravines, how to get out of tight spots. It is within our capability to land a rover on Mars that could scan its surroundings, see the most interesting place in its field of view and, by the same time tomorrow, be there. Every day a new place, a complex, winding traverse over the varied topography of this appealing planet. — Carl Sagan

Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder. — Austin Kleon

Cell phones, computers, and internet have made it so that we can interact with anyone around the world at any moment, but the quality of our relationships around us have become less transparent. We no longer see our neighbors as neighbors, or people as people. We have been taught to look through our eyes and not our hearts. It is critical that humanity strengthens the relationships between people and learns to help each other. We were all born on this planet with no idea of who we are, and are forced to develop based on our surroundings to form a sense of identity, but deep down we are all the same. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Our perceptions are influenced by our surroundings. — Asa Don Brown

The dream pool is pushed out in the open and the dappled depths of our imagination become a uniformly blue intruder, often out of scale with its surroundings and nearly always discordant in colour and texture. — Elisabeth Beazley

The relevance of these special properties of the hippocampus and their role in map learning comes from a consideration of the massive upsurge in our use of technology for wayfinding. By focusing on the blue dot of a phone map, rather than looking about at our surroundings and making the effort to form a genuine map, we are short-circuiting the processes that we've learned to use over previous millennia. As far as finding our way is concerned, we have become striatal stimulus-response machines, racing through time and space like feverish maze mice hunting for cheese. — Colin Ellard

So in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. — Marcel Proust

If you're worried you have a psychosis, you probably don't, but even if you do, there's help for it. Fighting with anxiety makes it worse; instead, accept the anxiety, and it will become less scary. Take a moment to breathe and take stock of your surroundings. Remember what's real. Say, "This sucks, but it will pass." We aren't responsible for our thoughts, we are only responsible for what we do with them. Mental health care can and should be taken as seriously as physical health care. A diagnosis is not a bad thing. — Mara Wilson

Flyfishing does have its social aspects - on some of our crowded trout streams it can get too social - but esentially it's a solitary, contemplative sport. People are left alone with themselves in beautiful surroundings to try to accomplish something that seems to have genuine value. — John Gierach

There is no question that the objects that surround us impact our experience of the world. — Katherine Center

Everywhere science is enriched by unscientific methods and unscientific results, ... the separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them. — Paul Feyerabend

Too often in our culture of BlackBerrys and cell phones, people are disengaged and disconnected and distracted from their immediate surroundings. — Emily Giffin

[Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity. (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning) — Dallas Willard

The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit. — Charles Duhigg

Each us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self. That's why the same person who scorns his surroundings is different from the person who is gladdened or made to suffer by them. In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently. — Fernando Pessoa

We must all learn to adjust with our surroundings. — T-Pain

The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were
and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To — Charles Duhigg

The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. — Okakura Kakuzo

The classic metaphor for the necessity of uniting calm abiding and superior insight is a candle flame. When this flame is bright and there is no wind, it is
clearly visible and will also illuminate its surroundings. However, if the flame is bright but flickers in the wind, it will neither be seen distinctly itself nor clearly light up anything else. Likewise, if our mind is endowed with both the superior insight that sees true reality and the quality of calm abiding, through which we can one-pointedly direct this insight wherever we please, this mind will see both its own nature and the nature of all phenomena. — Karl Brunnholzl

God gave each of us a soul, which is a candle that He gives us to illuminate our surroundings with His light," the Rebbe taught at a 1990 worldwide Chanukah satellite linkup. "We must not only illuminate the inside of homes, but also the outside, and the world at large. — Joseph Telushkin

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives. — Robert Baden-Powell

Often we cannot hear God's gentle whisper because we allow the noise of our surroundings to choke out any possibility of recognizing His voice. — Shelene Bryan

Our potential is so great that we have the ability to change our lives, our surroundings and the global world with just an idea — Bruce Budden

Eventually we become part of our surroundings, and they become part of us. — Andrew Neiderman

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. — Ann Druyan

We should feel dissonance; we are, after all, immortals trapped in mortal surroundings. We lack unity because long ago a gap fissured open between our mortal and immortal parts; theologians trace the fault line back to the Fall. — Philip Yancey

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need - within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves. — Alain De Botton

However infinite the Universe may be, our true and practical universe is still the surroundings of the house we live in. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds. — Jane Hamilton

The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings ... The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

My paintings are inspirational for they allow the observer to experience infinite viewpoints and perceptions. They are not abstract for they represent what is actually more real than what our eyes are able to see. They allow the viewers to be inspired by taking their own perception beyond their senses and their surroundings. — Freydoon Rassouli

Our advanced art approaches a fragile but marvelous life, one that maintains itself by a mere thread, melting into an elusive, changeable configuration, the surroundings, the artist, his work and everyone who comes to it. — Allan Kaprow

Due to our act of Personal Irresponsibility, illegal businesses are set-up, our neighbourhoods are not secured and the economy directly and indirectly takes a big hit. The government alone cannot be blamed for this, because this is our neighbourhood and if we cannot take care of our immediate surroundings, then we are clearly not carrying out our responsibilities and we don't have any business blaming someone else. — Sunday Adelaja