Own Terms Quotes & Sayings

Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them. — Willa Cather

We forget the gospel when we neglect our adoption and think that we're still just a hired servant. The Father doesn't let us come to him on those terms. We will either come as sons or we will stay with the pigs. He won't let us earn anything from him because there will be no boasting in his sight. It will either be that Jesus and his glorious gospel has the preeminence or we will go it on our own. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

The best way to keep from being a victim is to write your own terms." It — Jean Hegland

In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die. — George Pattison

For women ... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique. — Gloria Steinem

French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they're threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
— David Stanley

The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of "creative, meaningful work" are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of "true romance" puts an impossible burden on personal relationships. We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. — Christopher Lasch

We are very hip on the fact that America's always No. 1. On this we are not, in terms of the number of women in our legislative branches and obviously as head of state. We need to push on that. I hate to say this: It isn't all men's fault. I think some of it is our own attitude and approach. Some of it very healthy, that women want to make choices about their lives and how they want to spend their time, and what they value. — Madeleine Albright

If directors, actors and writers have the ability to drop their alpha-male egos, you will always get better work. In terms of my own demands, I actually want fewer lines. If I can lose a line and do it with my face, I'd rather do that. — Max Beesley

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map ... nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin's terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. — Rebecca Solnit

Your being alone is important and has validity beyond any philosophy. That is the message that you are trying to give to yourself. You are each trying to rediscover for yourselves, in your terms now - after centuries of myths and distortions - the validity of your own beings. — Seth

Jessica Jones is its own animal, I think each one of these series is its own animal. There is some connective tissue, in terms of referencing the Marvel Universe, but it glances off of the other stories. — Melissa Rosenberg

Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him more materialistic and careerist than his own. "When I went to school,it was right after the sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in,"he said. "Now students aren't even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. — Walter Isaacson

You have to be able to grow and move with the organism that is the music industry. You need to maintain flexibility. Ownership of your own stuff is key and then you're able to dictate on a present-terms basis what would be the most effective way to protect yourself and what you've created. You also don't want to lock yourself into a situation where a major label owns part of your touring and merchandise. — Eddie Vedder

I think every filmmaker wants ... I don't know about every filmmaker. I certainly want my films to just exist. I want them to be judged for what they are and analyzed, accepted, criticized, whatever you want to call it, on their own terms, not as part of some mall-cop genre. — Jody Hill

A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times. — David Bowie

Sunrise to sunset, that's life, my darling.
I loved the way he said that, my darling. I liked it more because he rarely uses the expression as a term of endearment for Dick, he had terms of his own, this was mine and it made me level in some way. — Gillibran Brown

Stepping into God's story means abandoning a deeply held desire to make meaning of our own lives on our own terms based on the preciousness of our own feelings. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

My mum taught me a lot about fashion in terms of knowing what looks good on you and developing my own sense of style. Even when we were shooting the Sunglass Hut campaign, we went through racks of clothing together, and ultimately I decided on a short, more fitted peplum dress, while Mum opted for a sexy blazer and black leggings. — Georgia May Jagger

It seems that every text has more sources than it can reconstruct within its own terms. — Judith Butler

That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace. — Bessie Head

The president is the most powerful man in the world, and it would be great to be him because of that, but really, I could only see myself doing it under my own terms. I think I'd make a better dictator. — A.D. Aliwat

In terms of my own film experience, I'm definitely used to morose and very heavy, heavy dramas. — Mia Kirshner

What worries me, especially, is that public opinion over here is patting itself on the back every morning and thanking God for theAtlantic Ocean (and the Pacific Ocean). We greatly underestimate the serious implications to our own future ... Things move with such terrific speed these days, that it is really essential to us to think in broader terms and, in effect, to warn the American people that they, too, should think of possible ultimate results in Europe and the Far East. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study. — Michael Chabon

The life each of us lives is the life within the limits of our own thinking. To have life more abundant, we must think in limitless terms of abundance. — Thomas Dreier

Part of the blame lies with intellectuals who are unable or unwilling to convey their ideas in terms that will play down to the cafe. But anyone who sits in that cafe and dismisses complexity by reveling in their own simplicity is no less pretentious. — Michael Perry

People are hungry for success - that's nothing new. What's changed is the definition of that success. Increasingly, the quest for success is not the same as the quest for status and money. The definition has broadened to include contributing something to the world and living and working on one's own terms. — Blake Mycoskie

Be excellent in your own terms. — Abhijit Naskar

We [Americans] choose not to understand the world on terms other than our own. — Ralph Peters

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths. — Alain De Botton

Behind the mask of diplomatic and political cooperation and partnership with the United States and Europe, the current Russian leaders are following the strategy of their predecessors and working towards a 'New World Order'. When the right moment comes the mask will be dropped and the Russians with Chinese help will seek to impose their system on the West on their own terms ... — Anatoliy Golitsyn

And suddenly she knew exactly why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It wasn't that he was unusually attractive, or ambitious, or even charming. He was partly those things, but more important, he seemed to live life on his own terms. — Nicholas Sparks

Dying on your own terms, this is the greatest gift anyone can bestow upon a mortal man. — Mario Stinger

Women have their own strengths, like fashion. In technology, we can contribute in a big way in terms of the design of the user interface. — Weili Dai

He called his approach non-teleological thinking, or "is thinking." The term non-teleological was coined by Steinbeck's best friend, Edward F. Ricketts; and as the two men articulated their shared philosophy, they emphasized the need to see as clearly as a scientist: that is, to accept life on its own terms. "Is thinking" focused not on ends but on the process of life, the Aristotelean efficient cause of nature. — John Steinbeck

I have no fear; I have nothing to lose. I'd rather burn out than fade away, and I would rather go out in a blaze of glory on my own terms than let anybody dictate anything to me in my career. I had the chance to wrestle The Undertaker [on Smackdown in 2013], and one thing I took away from it was that he looked me in the eye and said, 'Trust your instincts because you've got great instincts.' — Dean Ambrose

The owners and top managers of most news media organizations tend to be conservative and Republican. This is hardly surprising. The shareholders and executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining the free enterprise system, for example, income from offended advertisers. These owners and managers ultimately decide which reporters, newscasters, and editors to hire or fire, promote or discourage. Journalists who want to get a head, therefore, may have to come to terms with the policies of the people who own and run media businesses. — Edward S. Greenberg

Few have abilities so much needed by the rest of the world as to be caressed on their own terms; and he that will not condescend to recommend himself by external embellishments must submit to the fate of just sentiment meanly expressed, and be ridiculed and forgotten before he is understood. — Samuel Johnson

People relate to the spirit of the band, which is to live your way and succeed on your own terms. There's no hypocrisy in being successful and still railing against conformity. — Paul Stanley

Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid. — Catharine Cox Miles

He merely reared his children as best he could, and in terms of the affection his children felt for him, he best was indeed good: he was never too tired to play Keep-Away; he was never too busy to invent marvelous stories; he was never too absorbed in his own problems to listen earnestly to a tale of woe; every neight he read aloud to them until his voice cracked. — Harper Lee

Boring' can be a lot of fun. Especially if it's on your own terms. — Hugh MacLeod

Many women, particularly young women, have claimed the right to use the most explicit sex terms, including extremely vulgar ones, in public as well as private. But it is men, far more than women, who have been liberated by this change. For now that women use these terms, men no longer need to watch their own language in the presence of women. But is this a gain for women? — Margaret Mead

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. — Humphrey Carpenter

I agree that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency. — Ayn Rand

I've always felt a bit of an outsider. It used to worry me that, in terms of TV, I did not look like 'the girlfriend' or 'the daughter'. That pushed me to write my own stuff, as I thought no one else was going to write me a lead in the sitcom. — Miranda Hart

A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms. — Jacob M. Appel

Growth has failed on its own terms. You can't have infinite growth in a world of finite resources. — Andrew Simms

The Air Force has it far worse than the Navy in terms of existential fears, primarily due to the rapid rise and unbelievable dissemination of drones, where seemingly now every military unit has their own miniature air wing of what would have recently passed as toys. — Thomas P.M. Barnett

We are our own worst enemies. How banal and trite that sounds, but [ ... ] have come to believe that all the greatest truths are trite and banal, when spoken aloud in their simplest and most honest terms. Perhaps they can only be imparted in the Cant, in a language which writes itself onto your heart so that you understand not just the words but all the shattering ramifications of of a sentence which, when heard without true understanding, seems quite risibly simplistic.
We are our own worst enemies.
People die. — Hal Duncan

The woods were a boon; all too often, the forest offered danger and mystery. Yet it could be liberating. If you entered that wild place on its own terms, you might be accorded wisdom. — John Burnside

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character. — Ayn Rand

The language and the "people" of the unconscious are symbols, and the means of communications dreams.
Thus an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man's relation to his own unconscious. And since in Jung's view the unconscious is the great guide, friend, and adviser of the conscious, this book is related in the most direct terms to the study of human beings and their spiritual problems. — C. G. Jung

I'd say, [writing memoir] not so much a model, but maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice. — Cornel West

Sooner or later you learn that there's a conspiracy of little people in this world to cut you down to their size. And then you grow up and make your choice: to live on their terms or your own. — Samuel Taylor

There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them. — Daniel Keys Moran

The old leftism had primarily a negative approach - that is, the orientation was towards negating what currently existed. Capitalism was a thing that could be fought more or less on its own terms, you could win terrain (geographical or otherwise), defend it, and take more. The strategic and tactical focus was on what would do most to lead to a defeat of capitalist forces, in whatever form they took - whether a colonial government or a greedy factory owner. This model of conflict is at its most literal in, say, a guerilla war, but it applies to all possible terrains of class struggle. Concessions by capital and established strongholds of working class power, even if reformist or imperfect, were to be leveraged as much as they could towards a further defeat of capitalism. — Anonymous

As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so. — John Fusco

Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet
in the wrong universe. — Revilo P. Oliver

Self-esteem comes from being able to define the world in your own terms and refusing to abide by the judgments of others. — Oprah Winfrey

Allison, how you live your life is up to you. I can only give you the skills you need to survive. But eventually, you will have to make your own decisions, come to your own terms about what you are. You are Vampire, but what kind of monster you become is out of my hands. — Julie Kagawa

There are two basic groups of German verbs ... strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don't follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on your own terms ... Like people, ... The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are the same. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms. — Dan Simmons

I think it's impossible to judge whether another person should come out. You just hope they will on their own time and their own terms. — Billie Jean King

As long as we refuse to think in terms of world good and world goods, of world order, world peace, we shall murder and betray one another. It can go on till the crack of doom, if we wish it to be thus. Nothing can bring about a new and better world but our own desire for it. Man kills through fear - and fear is hydra-headed. Once we start slaying there is no end to it. An eternity would not suffice to vanquish the demons who torture us. Who put the demons there? That is for each one to ask himself. Let every man search his own heart. Neither God nor the Devil is responsible, and certainly not such puny monsters as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, et alia. Certainly not such bugaboos as Catholicism, Capitalism, Communism. Who put the demons there in our heart to torture us? A good question, and if the only way to find out is to go to Epidaurus, then I urge you one and all to drop everything and go there - at once. — Henry Miller

We ought to care for those closest to us in terms of relatedness. After our immediate family, we ought to pursue our calling diligently as employees and provide just incentives (perhaps through profit-sharing) and reasonable care for our workers as employers. We should seek the wisdom of teachers and elders in society and look to them for leadership, while rejecting their folly when it is discerned. We must put our children and their education, both at home and in school, before our own entertainment, pleasure, and success. We ought not to tolerate insolence or haughtiness in them; nor ought we to punish them too severely, but should lead them as good teachers, by example and patient instruction. — Michael S. Horton

The decision to move to the second post-college city (or suburb, or town), however, is usually made independent of friends. No matter if you do it for love, career, family, or school, the second move is on your own terms. — Rachel Bertsche

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. — Rebecca Solnit

I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do. — Patti Smith

All of us need to begin to think in terms of our own inner strengths, our resilience and resourcefulness, our capacity to adapt and to rely upon ourselves and our families. — Steven Pressfield

To be true to ourselves, however, is not an easy task. We must break free of the seductions of society and live life on our own terms, under our own values and aligned with our original dreams. We must tap our hidden selves; explore the deep-seated, unseen hopes, desires, strengths and weaknesses that make us who we are. We must understand where we have been and where we are going. — Robin Sharma

Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination. — Judith Butler

Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work. — Clifford Ross

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text. — Jonathan Galassi

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that's the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we're hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you? — Iain Banks

Who helped you most? Most often they (suffering people) answer by describing a quiet, unassuming person. Someone who was there whenever needed, who listened more than talked, who didn't keep glancing down at a watch, who hugged and touched, and cried. In short, someone who was available, and came on the sufferer's terms and not their own. — Philip Yancey

Oh, I thought that I was giving him so much!
And he to me - and the giving and the taking
Seemed so right: not in terms of calculation
Of what was good for the persons we had been
But for the new person, us. If I could feel
As I did then, even now it would seem right.
And then I found we were only strangers
And that there had been neither giving nor taking
But that we had merely made use of each other
Each for his purpose. That's horrible. Can we only love
Something created by our own imagination?
Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable?
The one is alone, and if one is alone
Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams. — T. S. Eliot

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications. — Meghan Daum

It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable. — Anne Waldman

W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is
and always will be
ourselves. — Ian Mortimer

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy. — J.G. Ballard

People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world. — Oliver Sacks

Even though we can reach for the outer limits of our temperaments, it can often be better to situate ourselves squarely inside our comfort zones ...
Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality
neither overstimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call "optimal levels of arousal" and what I call "sweet spots," and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before. — Susan Cain

Everyone is caught in the web of his or her own actions and is bound by past karmas (actions). Good and bad are relative terms. Every action takes one to the next place. — Sharon Gannon

You don't need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn't mean you're incapable of real love or that you'll never love anyone else again. It doesn't mean you're morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That's all. Be brave enough to break your own heart. — Cheryl Strayed

It is often observed that the first casualty of war is truth, but how do you tell the truth without betraying the sacrifice of those who accepted the terms of battle? War is a sacrificial system that creates its own justification. — Stanley Hauerwas

The people have now come to realize that the only way to deal with the oppressor is to deal on our own terms and this was done. — Bobby Seale

My identity is mostly as a songwriter and lyricist and singer. I also have a lot of production ideas but I have my own limitations in terms of what instruments I'm actually proficient at and what I can do myself, so I really love working with people on the production end; just really going for it with orchestration and instrumentation and production. That's where I see myself going: maintaining my integrity and abilities as a songwriter, but applying it to different contexts, to where I can put on a huge feathered costume and roll around in the ocean. — Mirah

We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong.
God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We should trust Him. It was not that long ago that Jesus came and it will not be that long before He returns. — Douglas Wilson

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. — Eula Biss

I didn't like how my NBA career ended because I wanted to go out on my own terms. But nobody tried to believe in me, that I could go back and play. I can still play at 39. — Tim Hardaway

We're in our own world, and we're in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve3 a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I've got to live in terms of this society. It's ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I'm not living. But I mustn't allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one's own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn't accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you. — Joseph Campbell

This is what meditation means: how to be not identified with the mind - how to create a space between yourself and your own mind. It is difficult because we never make any separation. We go on thinking in terms that the mind means me: mind and me are totally identified. If they are totally identified, then you will never be at peace; then you will never be able to enter the divine, because the divine can be entered only when the social has been left behind. — Rajneesh

You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output - how much you produce - not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution. — Jean Shinoda Bolen

There are no extra people alive today. Every single one of us is here for a reason, a special purpose - a mission. Yes, build a beautiful life for yourself and those you love. Yes, be happy and have a lot of fun. And yes, become successful, on your own terms rather than on those suggested to you by society. But - above all else - be significant. Make your life matter. Be of use. And be of service to as many people as possible. This is how each of us can shift from the realm of the ordinary into the heights of the extraordinary. And walk among the best who have ever lived. It — Robin S. Sharma

I think I have broken into the mainstream, and I think that may happen in a broader way, but I want to do it on my own terms, not become a standard producer. — Joe R. Lansdale

All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer, to be able to create one's own terms for what one does. — Kenneth Tynan

First, we must see that our negative actions arise due to prejudice and erroneous judgments. The discrimination that labels some as 'friends' and others as 'enemies' must be perceived as the root of our problems. We need to see that we label people and things in terms of our own desires, our own wishes. These wishes are transitory. The labeled objects are, themselves, impermanent. Such labeling is therefore very confused and false, yet it persists, and we continue to create suffering for ourselves. To avoid this, we need to develop equanimity for all beings suffering in samsara, tossed to and fro by their fleeting delusions, just like ourselves. — Zongtrul Losang Tsondru

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.
It's the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry. — Mark Doty