Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 77

The universality of reason is a momentous realization, because it defines a place for morality. If I appeal to you do do something that affects me—to get off my foot, or not to stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning—then I can't do it in a way that privileges my interests of yours if I want you to take me seriously (say, by retaining my right to stand on your foot, or to stab you, or to let your children drown). I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can't act as if my interests are special just because I'm me and you're not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.You and I ought to reach this moral understanding not just so we can have a logically consistent conversation but because mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other's children when they get into trouble, and refrain from knifing each other than we would be if we hoarded our surpluses while they rotted, let each other's children drown, and feuded incessantly. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we'd both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one where we both are unselfish.Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.
Steven Pinker
Dream big dreams! Imagine that you have no limitations and then decide what's right before you decide what's possible.
Brian Tracy
I have been made to realize tonight that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for any cause.
Guy Gavriel Kay
We all love animals. Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner?
k.d. lang
I took it back: he didn't just hate himself down deep. He'd made plenty of room in there for me, too.
Michelle Rowen
Wasnt it more important to be loyal to what was right or to those people you knew and cared about? What was the good of killing people or being hateful to them because someone you didn't know was doing something hateful to someone ekse you didn't know?
Janet Lunn
Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.
Drake
People have been bred to hate for generations -- eons, maybe. Some fundamental urge. Something implicit in the human condition.
Allan Dare Pearce
Hatred is like fire. It burns the one who harnesses it. It's also extremely hard to see more helpful truths through its flames.
Morgan Rhodes
A man once told me that there are infinite places love will take you, but revenge is the business of hate, and there is only one place hate will take you---the end. The end of you and the end of everything you once stood for. But I welcomed my end.
Tara Brown
She’d forgotten to love, but she also forgot to hate. (about Clara’s mother, who had dementia)
Louise Penny
I was hated, you know. I made no secret of the fact that I was an atheist. People told me there are no atheists in fox holes. That's nonsense. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]
Pierre Berton
My mother is quite the character. You'd hate her. Sometimes I think I hate her too, but mainly I feel sorry for her. Which is kind of worse.
Karina Halle
They feared you, and love can’t exist when there’s that much fear.
Michelle Sagara
Self-governance does not mean no one is responsible. It means everyone is.
Heather Marsh
The water cleansed his soul of the clutter and junk he had acquired through advice from those who were loud, but wrong. Many who had claimed to be wise had filled him, like so many others, with fear, hate, and judgement - all emotions that could not be carried be carried into Eternity.
Scott Thompson
…hate's got to be a disease with me.
L.M. Montgomery
I am a physician, and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity, and equality. One that inoculates them against hatred.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
Hate is a strong emotion. Much more stronger than indifference. But those who burn with hate can also love just as intensely.
Morgan Rhodes
We always hate people who surprise our secrets…
L.M. Montgomery
Why should one hate you when you were so small? Could you be worth hating?
L.M. Montgomery
Do they hate the idea of her, because she's different from them, and that in this difference there might be some sort of inferiority or superiority that is hers or theirs, that in the end threatens the potential happiness of everyone?
Steven Galloway
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
Anne Carson
If God's love encompasses the whole world and if everyone who does not believe in him will perish, then surely this question needs to be asked: When, after two thousand years, does God's plan kick in for the billion people he 'so loves' in China? Or for the 840 million in India? Or the millions in Japan, Afghanistan, Siberia, Egypt, Burma ·.. and on and on?Why would a God who 'so loved the world' reveal his message only to a tiny minority of the people on earth, leaving the majority in ignorance? Is it possible to believe that the Father of all Mankind would select as his Chosen People a small Middle Eastern nation, Israel, reveal His will exclusively to them, fight alongside them in their battles to survive, and only after their failure to reach out to any other group, update His plan for the world's salvation by sending His 'only begotten son,' not to the world but, once again, exclusively to Israel?
Charles Templeton
What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.
Steven Erikson
Whether something is wonderful or horrible, the most harmful thought we can think is “Will this last forever?
Vironika Tugaleva
Viktor Frankl said the Concentration camp survivalist said no matter how much mental or physical abuse had been given nobody could cause him to think about anything he didn't want to think about
Bob Proctor
What you hope for determines what you live for. What you hope for determines WHO you live for. Hope misplaced can devastate you.
James MacDonald
Pride rises above and against the knowledge of God, acting as if He is unworthy to be retained in our thoughts.
James MacDonald
We must rip the foundations out from under all the bastions of human reasoning that say, "I don't need God!" We must demolish every non-God story of life. We must pulverize every God-is-not-good life narrative.
James MacDonald
In counseling, we don't simply help people to change one thought; we help people to understand the pattern of their thinking – their mindsets.
James MacDonald
The marquee scrolling across our minds trying to reinterpret life reads: "God-Against-Us." This becomes the dominant lens through which our flesh interprets life. We no longer give our loving Father the benefit of the doubt. Instead, we view every event as conclusive proof that God is against us.
James MacDonald
Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence.
Eckhart Tolle
The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
There is nothing typical about my profession.’ Suddenly I did not want to talk about it any longer. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any longer.
Patrick deWitt
It might feel, at least to some of us, that our opinions about issues such as abortion and the death penalty are the products of careful deliberation and that our specific moral acts, such as deciding to give to charity or visit a friend in the hospital—or for that matter, deciding to shoplift or shout a racist insult out of a car window—are grounded in conscious decision-making. But this is said to be mistaken. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are not judges; we are lawyers, making up explanations after the deeds have been done. Reason is impotent. "We celebrate rationality," agrees de Waal, "but when push comes to shove we assign it little weight.
Paul Bloom
For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?
Alice Munro
As a man I’d been a cool customer. As a woman I was a hot tamale.
Barry Webster
There was something about the man that was throwing her right off, and it had everything to do with the boner in his pants.
Rosanna Leo
Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.
Margaret Atwood
Karate is not about techniques and their execution, but about boldness, integrity and fight for justice and common good
Soke Behzad Ahmadi
The borders of man, defined by politics, war, and faith - all three manifestations of delusion - meant even more to gods.
Michael R. Fletcher
A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
Robertson Davies
Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.
R. Scott Bakker
Once a man began thinking with his body, intelligent decisions came few and far between.
Tanya Huff
The sexiest thing about men is how they are with kids... If they are great with kids they are real men ... selfless, powerful, comforting ... Too bad so many men suck!
Pamela Anderson
The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.
Ann Voskamp
My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.
Yann Martel
...you want things to remain the same, which they never can, and so you’re wounded by your own feelings & resentful others don’t seem to care...
John Geddes
...the feelings that pass between us are deeper than fleshly touches...
John Geddes
...that's the essence of me - I don't think, I feel - at best, I think-feel...
John Geddes
...you were there when they trampled me - you picked me up, healed me and gave me back my feelings - is it any wonder I love you?...
John Geddes
Of course, being open and vulnerable will lead us to, sometimes, experience pain. But what is pain? It is simply a feeling. It is not forever. If you get pain from some person or thing too many times, you can always walk away. To risk a lifetime without pleasure simply to avoid pain is ludicrous.
Vironika Tugaleva
You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.
Heather O'Neill
You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn't get it. And they all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.
Heather O'Neill
What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.
Louise Penny
Love isn't a choice. I can't control how I feel about him any more than I can control the sun in the sky. But what I can do is control what I do with those feelings.
Karina Halle
Is it love? I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Sometimes I think I’m just addicted to him. Or that he’s cast some kind of horrible curse on me where I’m to follow him for the rest of my life, doomed to fall for his lies over and over again.
Bey Deckard
Being must be 'felt' it can not be 'thought.
Eckhart Tolle
When your focus is on how you feel about things in the world then the things of the world slip from view, your little boat of learning things for what they are are swamped by the swells of how you feel about them. With hard work and with learning, the things of the world are still somehow out there, waiting for you to know about them, no matter how you feel. They survive how you feel about them and they are there before and after the storms of your feelings roar through and abate. Feelings aren't much of a compass to go by.
Stephen Jenkinson