True Life Image Quotes & Sayings

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world
not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. — Joseph Campbell

But God fears woman even more than He fears the devil -and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man ... — Joe Hill

The ship, built on one element, but designed to have its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, formed and fashioned with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life. — Remy De Gourmont

They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they've got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they. and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, "thus far, and no farther." That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life. — John Wyndham

The idea of mind separate from body goes far back in time. The most famous expression of this is the idea of the Platonic image discussed in the Socratic Dialogues (circa 350 BC). Socrates and Plato expressed the opinion that the real world was but a shadow of reality, and that reality existed on a higher, purer plane reachable only through and preserved in the mind. The mind was considered immortal and survived the crumbling corpus in which it dwelt. But only enlightened minds, such as theirs, could see true reality. As such, they believed people like themselves ought to be elevated to the position of philosopher kings and rule the world with purity of vision. (A similarly wacky idea was expressed by the fictional air force General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's classic dark satire Dr. Strangelove. General Ripper postulated that purity of essence was the most important thing in life.) — James Luce

I had witnessed first-hand that once I changed my vision of who I was in my career, my actions and behaviors in my work life changed immediately, permanently. Conversely, other times when I just tried to modify what I was doing daily in my behavior (follow up more on calls, be more organized, etc.), those changes were fleeting and I ended up right back where I started. The bottom line is this - we act in ways that support our true image of who we are. We do it without effort or struggle; we simple are that person. — David Clark

Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body. — Baldassare Castiglione

Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ's; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ's eyes. This is the meaning of the proposition that we can meet others only through the meditation of Christ. Human love constructs its own image of the person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

There are 2 versions of Self Image. Inner and Outer.
Get in touch with the inner self image and dispose of any concept of the outer world. Feel the energy that comes from this image and start being true from source of this energy. The source of god. — Matthew Donnelly

We are made in the image of God; we carry within us the desire for our true life of intimacy and adventure. To say we want less than that is to lie. — John Eldredge

There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty. — Steve Maraboli

You were created in the image of God. The image of God. And it is only through God that you can find the true meaning of life. And it is only through God that you can truly find fulfillment.
And it is only through God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that you can be saved. — Calvin W. Allison

His ambition was not to become wealthy or to be well known, an image which society for some reason dictates each individual should prescribe to, instead his only ambition was to be at peace with himself, if he could achieve that than anything else he might need would follow. From now on he would question all things in life, but especially the rules and regulations of all authority institutions; he would take nothing on face value and only would accept what he personally knew to undeniably be true. — Andrew James Pritchard

Well, look. You're the kid sister, but you always had a good, clear image of what you wanted for yourself. You were able to say no when you had to, and you did things at your own pace. But Eri Asai couldn't do that. From the time she was a little girl, her job was to play her assigned role and satisfy the people around her. She worked hard to be a perfect little Snow White - if I can borrow your name for her. It's true that everybody made a big fuss over her, but I'll bet that was really tough for her sometimes. At one of the most crucial points in her life, she didn't have a chance to establish a firm self. If 'complex' is too strong a word, let's just say she probably envied you."
Excerpt From: Haruki Murakami. "After Dark." iBooks. — Haruki Murakami

For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him, the character is not a whole laboriously assembled from individual traits, but a person, insistently living before his eyes, distinguished from the otherwise identical vision of the painter by his continuous life and action. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. 'If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,' Jesus said, 'he will find his true self.' A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate
humble obedience
but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested. — Elisabeth Elliot

True holiness, we surely ought to remember, does not consist merely of inward sensations and impressions. It is much more than tears, and sighs, and bodily excitement, and a quickened pulse, and a passionate feeling of attachment to our own favourite preachers and our own religious party, and a readiness to quarrel with everyone who does not agree with us. It is something of "the image of Christ," which can be seen and observed by others in our private life, and habits, and character, and doings. — J.C. Ryle

A creature that hides and "withdraws into its shell," is preparing a "way out." This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being. — Gaston Bachelard

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty,
nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such
awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him. — Theodor W. Adorno

I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life. Wherever I've traveled
Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan
I've found the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns,we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us. — Barry Lopez

Sholem [a painter] was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing. [ ... ]
"It's like with improv," Misha said. "True improv is about surprising yourself
but most people won't improvise truthfully. They're afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that's cheating! And cheating's bad for an artist. It's bad in life
but it's really bad in art." -p.20-1, How Should A Person Be — Sheila Heti

It would be wholly impossible for me to say whether this cloudy, silently disturbed, unraveled sky is mirrored in my soul or the reverse, whether or not I read the image of my own inner life in this sky. Sometimes everything is so completely uncertain! There are days when I am convinced that no man on earth can recognize certain moods of air and cloud, certain tones of color, certain fragrances and movements of moisture as finely, as exactly, and as truly as I can, with my old, nervous sense of poet and wanderer. And then again, as today, it can be doubtful to me whether I have seen, heard, and smelled anything after all, whether everything that I took to be true is not merely an image cast outward, the image of my inner life. — Hermann Hesse

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. — Cheryl Strayed

The more we listen to the voices of others, voices unlike our own, the more we remain open to the transcendent forces that save us from idolatry. The more we listen to ourselves, the more we create God in our own image until God becomes a tawdry idol that looks and speaks like us. The power of the commandments is found not in the writings of theologians, although I read and admire some, but in the pathos of human life, including lives that are very unlike our own. All states and nations work to pervert religions into civic religions, ones where the goals of the state become the goals of the divine. This is increasingly true in the United States. But once we believe we understand the will of God and can act as agents of God we become dangerous, a menace to others and a menace to ourselves. We forget that we do not understand. We forget to listen. — Chris Hedges

Each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly. The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature. Ah! if man would but see that hope is from within and not from without - that he himself must work out his own salvation! He is there, and within him is the breath of life and a knowledge of good and evil as good and evil is to him. Thereon let him build and stand erect, and not cast himself before the image of some unknown God, modelled like his poor self, but with a bigger brain to think the evil thing, and a longer arm to do it. — H. Rider Haggard

10:13 Your situation is not unique! Every human life faces contradictions! Here is the good news: God believes in your freedom! He has made it possible for you to triumph in every situation that you will ever encounter! 10:14 My 1dearly loved friends! Escape into his image and likeness in you where the 2distorted image (2idolatry) loses its attraction! (Dearly loved friends, translated as 1agapetos; to know the agape love of God is to know our true identity! The word, agape, comes from agoo, meaning to lead as a shepherd guides his sheep, and pao, to rest, like in Psalm 23, "he leads me beside still waters where my soul is restored; by the waters of reflection my soul remembers who I am! Now I can face the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil!") — Francois Du Toit

It is a turn of events that highlights a certain human arrogance about our destructive powers. It is only hubris to imagine that we can destroy nature, or the world. It is the mirror image of the industrialist's egotistical desire to exploit and control it. And it is true that we can kill off continents of forest and destroy species by the thousands, and even wreak climate change. But once we're gone, the rest of nature will rush on, as it has after so many other cataclysms, growing over and through and out of us. The apocalypse we can create is for ourselves and for our cousins, but not for life on Earth. — Andrew Blackwell

Have suggested throughout this book that the New Testament itself answers the first half of each of these prayers in terms, primarily, of a clear list of character traits whose radical novelty is generated from within the life, vision, achievement, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself. These events, taken together, constitute Jesus's followers as the true, image-bearing human beings, the royal priesthood. I have proposed, further, that according to the New Testament the way God the Holy Spirit answers the second half of the prayer is by renewing the individual heart and mind so that we can freely and consciously choose to practice those habits of behavior which, awkward and clumsy at first, will gradually become second nature. — N. T. Wright

To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. — William Shakespeare

An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language - language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of a fingertip - and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings. — Cynthia Ozick

If you spend time judging and criticizing people, you will not have time to heal from your pain or brokenness. You cannot love yourself when you judge or criticize others who are created in God's image and after His Likeness...in which you are also created. Love cannot operate from a space of pain. Love and hurt cannot reside in the same space. — Kemi Sogunle