Quotes by American Authors - Page 3264

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.
Cormac McCarthy
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
Josh Billings
One is often so busy doing life that it is easy to avoid evaluating whether you are putting your energy in the direction you value most.
Deborah Day
Wisdom comes from reflection.
Deborah Day
After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
We think a wise person is someone who solves problems. Truth is, a wise person is someone who avoids problems.
Prem Rawat
If you are what you eat, you are what you see and hear.
E.A. Bucchianeri
Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.
Harry Truman
a problem well put is half solved.
John Dewey
Wise random strangers at bars are modern-day Oracles of Delphi, except drunk and sometimes leaving abruptly when it's their turn for karaoke.
Kelly Williams Brown
Wisdom is not having God's perspective of the whole matter before us, but having God's perspective about what next response will honor Him while keeping us still usable to Him.
Jim Berg
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.
Randall Jarrell
I don't know what to say to fill the silence. I don't know how to fix this. It seems wrong to leave him, but I have to. There's no compromise, no alternative. Things just weren't meant to be, which seems like a pansy-ass thing to say, until it happens to you.
H.M. Ward
The greatest solution of all is to live and work in partnership with yourself, your family and friends, your work and community, your nation, your world, nature, and spirit.
Marc Allen
When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Guts are important. Your guts are what digest things. But it is your brains that tell you which things to swallow and which not to swallow.
Austin Dacey
Love is supposed to lift you up, not hold you down. It is supposed to push you forward, not hold you back.
Suzy Kassem
The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
Mark Twain
A primary requirement in every enterprise in habit-formation is self-confidence.
Ralph Alfred Habas
Love is being able to view a situation without adding duality to it.
Alaric Hutchinson
Relationships are steppingstones for the evolution of our consciousness. Each interaction we have, be it one of joy or contrast, allows us to learn more about who we are and what we want in this lifetime. They bring us into greater alignment…as long as we continue to move forward and do not get attached to hurt, anger, or being a victim.
Alaric Hutchinson
Vulnerability really means to be strong and secure enough within yourself that you are able to walk outside without your armor on. You are able to show up in life as just you. That is genuine strength and courage. Armor may look tough, but all it does is mask insecurity and fear.
Alaric Hutchinson
Insults sting but a little when they stem from a man's ignorance.
Susan Wiggs
. . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice.
James Lee Burke
...freedom can be a full-time job if you let it.
Pearl Cleage
The only way to heal yourself was to understand. Understand the love or the hate or the cowardice, or the impulsiveness, the lack of will of the one who hurt you--the circumstances that twisted them, the influences that warped them. And when you forgot yourself and saw the others with pitying comprehension, saw their tortured motives, a white, healing peace descended upon you. Your betrayal became an impersonal one, like a bridge giving way when you crossed it, lightning, a motor collision--you were in the way and you were damaged--that was all. It wasn't meant for you. When you understood, you were released into a new freedom and wisdom.
Mary Schumann
Any man who has got himself set over others and don't have any responsibility to something bigger than him is a son of a bitch.
Oakley Hall
One true king knew when to step aside and give up the reins of power—to remove his crown and relinquish his kingdom—all for the sake of glimpsing, just once in a lifetime, the face of a holy child.He was the Fourth to follow the Star.His gift was a secret.The rest of his journey is unknown.
Vera Nazarian
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. this is my symphony.
William Ellery Channing
Tennis taught me so many lessons in life. One of the things it taught me is that every ball that comes to me, I have to make a decision. I have to accept responsibility for the consequences every time I hit a ball.
Billie Jean King
Are you just gonna stare at Jack or are we gonna go?" Milo asked, poking his head into the bedroom.
Amanda Hocking
The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.
Saul Bellow
The brillant person who does not take heed is the same as the ignorant who does not know.
Debra E. Johnson
No one is ever going to give you something that they're too afraid to even claim for themselves. People don't know themselves, so they don't like to see other people figure it out and live their lives in ways that they themselves cannot. So they try to box you in, and limit you, so they don't feel inadequate. But you don't need their approval- the only person who ever, ever limits you is yourself.
Danielle Jordan
The friend is a human EdenBut Eden is so easily lostWhen you choose, choose wiselyBefore you share, count the cost
Genieve Dawkins
Who was to know what went on in a person's heart? A wise woman kept her own counsel.
Donna Woolfolk Cross
Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!
Mark Twain
I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
Henry David Thoreau
I think your vision gets better as you get older.
Jennifer Donnelly
From the cradle to the grave, joy and pain is the fertilizer for wisdom.
T.F. Hodge
There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time--the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.
Carson McCullers
Don’t follow someone else’s map. You should glean teachings from all directions, keeping true to those that bring progress yet remaining open to changes in yourself.
Deepak Chopra
Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
Chögyam Trungpa
Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
Herman Melville
Make your ideal your new real.
Derek Padula
I learned from Jurassic Park that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Christopher C. Starr
Knowledge & understanding mixed with ones convictions of 'experience' is hardly impositional". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
Being aware is being aware of one's own mind and the games it plays on itself.
Robin Macnaughton
So it is always preferable to discuss the matter of veganism in a non-judgemental way. Remember that to most people, eating flesh or dairy and using animal products such as leather, wool, and silk, is as normal as breathing air or drinking water. A person who consumes dairy or uses animal products is not necessarily or usually what a recent and unpopular American president labelled an "evil doer.
Gary L. Francione
Animals are property. There are laws that supposedly protect animal interestsin being treated “humanely,” but that term is interpreted in large part to mean that we cannot impose “unnecessary” harm on animals, and that is measured by what treatment is considered as necessary within particular industries, and according to customs of use, to exploit animals. The bottom line is that animals do not have any respect-based rights in the way that humans have, because we do not regard animals as having any moral value. They have only economic value. We value their interests economically, and we ignore their interests when it is economically beneficial for us to do so.At this point in time, it makes no sense to focus on the law, because as long as we regard animals as things, as a moral matter, the laws will necessarily reflect that absence of moral value and continue to do nothing to protect animals. We need to change social and moral thinking about animals before the law is going to do anything more.
Gary L. Francione
I reject animal welfare reform and single-issue campaigns because they are not only inconsistent with the claims of justice that we should be making if we really believe that animal exploitation is wrong, but because these approaches cannot work as a practical matter. Animals are property and it costs money to protect their interests; therefore, the level of protection accorded to animal interests will always be low and animals will, under the best of circumstances, still be treated in ways that would constitute torture if applied to humans.By endorsing welfare reforms that supposedly make exploitation more “compassionate” or single-issue campaigns that falsely suggest that there is a coherent moral distinction between meat and dairy or between fur and wool or between steak and foie gras, we betray the principle of justice that says that all sentient beings are equal for purposes of not being used exclusively as human resources. And, on a practical level, we do nothing more than make people feel better about animal exploitation.
Gary L. Francione
You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.
Kelli Jae Baeli
Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are
Harold S. Kushner
To say that a being who is sentient has no interest in continuing to live is like saying that a being with eyes has no interest in continuing to see. Death—however “humane”—is a harm for humans and nonhumans alike.
Gary L. Francione
The question to ask is what will satisfy you? What will bring you peace? And perhaps the answer to those is in asking yourself when you were last happy.
Eleanor Brown
humility is beyond our reach. if it were a product of reaching, we would instinctively be proud of reaching it. it is a gift.
John Piper
Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy
Phyllis McGinley
Women don't like to be told what to do. They like to be the ones telling us what to do. You want her to do something, you're gonna have to go about it a different way.
Cambria Hebert
The mind has a definite way of clothing one's thoughts in appropriate physical equivalents. Think in terms of poverty and you will live in poverty. Think in terms of opulence and you will attract opulence. Through the eternal law of harmonious attraction, one's thoughts always clothe themselves in material things appropriate unto their nature.
Napoleon Hill