Quotes by Professors - Page 32

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Philosophers in the scholastic tradition have usually defined intellectual certitude as a proposition in which we have no reasonable 'fear' of the opposite proposition turning out to be the truth. But this "fear" of which the medieval scholastics spoke does not convey their teaching to a mind trained in the proper formalities of the English language. A lack of fear, in this context, means that we cannot judge the opposite to be possible and that we are fully conscious of the reasons why we cannot. We have no reason permitting us to withhold assent to the proposition at hand. "lack of fear, " in this context, is something intellectual; it is not really a "lack of fear," in the emotional sense at all, and "fear" —in English - connotes the emotional. A man can possess intellectual certitude about a proposition and still fail to possess subjective or emotional certitude. He can emotionally fear the opposite, even though he cannot think the opposite to be a possibility. A man ca be absolutely certain that a God exists and still feel His absence. pg 172
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Honor, More charged, 'is the religion of tragedy.' Emotions such as love, hate, ambition, pride, and jealousy, 'form a dazzling system of worldly morality,' which contradicts 'the spirit of that religion whose characteristics are charity, meekness, peaceableness, longsuffering, gentleness, forgiveness.
Karen Swallow Prior
There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.
Alexandra Kleeman
To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.
Leon Eisenberg
Very little of what he learned of people’s actions began or ended with either the noble ideals or the fiendish wickedness he had been taught lay behind all great struggles. There was something comforting in this.
David Anthony Durham
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Always think about the needs of others because being a part of a group isan essential characteristic of human nature.
Eraldo Banovac
Adapting to changes represents an important characteristic of human nature, essential for the development of human society.
Eraldo Banovac
How wrong and petty any life is.
David Wojahn
Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.
David Morrell
Consumers presented with six choices on an item were twice as likely to buy as consumers overwhelmed with 24 varieties of the same item.
Sheena Iyengar
The simple rule: some get saved, but most don't. The choices are important before the years begin to go so very fast.
Jill McCorkle
The only sane response to change is to find the opportunity in it.
Jeff Jarvis
Like the line of love, I thought. Once crossed you can't go back. Like the line between past and future. Or maybe really the line between past and now. The now my father spoke of. When I raced ... I would cross the line and there was no more thinking about what was going to be because it was. It happened that fast.
Adam Berlin Belmondo Style
It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.
Alexander McCall Smith
Surprising choice proves hardest to come by. Most choices, even the disastrous ones, are predictable.
Carrie Snyder
Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
It's like algebra, that's all. I just have to figure it out, step by step.
Hollis Seamon
Getting there, that's what's important even if you can't get back.
Thomas O'Malley
You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.
Gregory Maguire
And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.
Gregory Maguire
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
Victor Davis Hanson
What did “good government” really mean? Langlie and his brotherhood promised an end to political corruption. (There’s no evidence that Langlie ever even took a drink, much less a bribe.) The days of “honest graft” were over, at least for a while. But seen from another perspective—that of ordinary citizens without access to Langlie and Abram’s elite network—Langlie didn’t so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn’t opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn’t want to have to break the law to serve them.
Jeff Sharlet
A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on earth outside the framework of an organized state.
Joseph Reese Strayer
He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot...
John Gardner
As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.
Chinua Achebe
Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character.
Gregory Maguire
She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
Azar Nafisi
There was a touch of prairie about the fellow.--hans vollmanYes.--roger bevins iiiLike stepping into a summer barn late at night.--hans vollmanOr a musty plains office, where some bright candle still burns.--roger bevins iiiVast. Windswept. New. Sad.--hans vollmanSpacious. Curious. Doom-minded. Ambitious.--roger bevins iiiBack slightly out.--hans vollmanRight boot chafing.--roger bevins iii
George Saunders
There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.
Dan Chaon
That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character.
Emily Raboteau
The guaranteed cure for heartbreak: find pain that’s much, much worse.
Will McIntosh
And all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.
Junot Díaz
A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another.
Alexander McCall Smith
No, Ashok. Love is not a tap. It flows and flows like blood from a wound, and you can die of it.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
To be heartbroken means to have a story
Austin Wright
My heart is beating like it's lonely, like there's nothing else inside of me.
Junot Díaz
Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.I have closed my arms again. They must do without.To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb. Do not write!Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may.Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know?To hear that you love me, when you are far away,Is like hearing from heaven and never to go. Do not write!Do not write. I fear you. I fear to remember,For memory holds the voice I have often heard.To the one who cannot drink, do not show water,The beloved one's picture in the handwritten word. Do not write!Do not write those gentle words that I dare not see,It seems that your voice is spreading them on my heart,Across your smile, on fire, they appear to me,It seems that a kiss is printing them on my heart. Do not write!
Louis Simpson
It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
Junot Díaz
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
Toni Morrison
You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
Junot Díaz
fear is something i don't you experience unless you have a choice. If you have a choice, you're liable to be afraid. But without a choice, what is there to be afraid of? You just go along and do what has to be done.".,
Mitchell Zuckoff
Tangerine tango was still in. Cardigans without buttons were in. Bahia bands were in. Senhor do Bonfim. Make a wish? But hardly anyone considered the most radical move: be yourself. Beauty is always a revolutionary act.
Chris Campanioni
The more you give, the more you want to do it—as do others around you. It's like going to the gym. If you've been working out your kindness muscles, you get stronger at it. — Nipun Mehta
Adam M. Grant
Will I ever realize the American Dream? Maybe, if I keep dreaming, hoping and working harder and harder every single day, and being mindful of the fact that the American Dream, just like genius and success, is, in Thomas Edison’s words, “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” (BrainyQuote). Just because some people realize the American Dream at an early age doesn’t mean others will never realize it a little bit later, sometimes when they almost stop dreaming. The American Dream has no deadline. For millions of immigrants who traveled thousands of miles – either by air, or by boat, by walking, or even by swimming – to reach the land of opportunity and the land of the free, the Dream is, like hope, the last thing to die.
Zekeh Gbotokuma
Ignorance is the source of all problems you encounting on your life time.
Dr. Michael Mnyameni
Don't try to be different, that's not you, but just try to be yourself & that will make all the difference.
Michael Moses
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
Gary Shteyngart
She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?
Anne Carson
Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.
Toni Morrison
They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.
Gregory Maguire
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
André Aciman
If you look closely you'll find all my lovers inscribed on my skin.
Jill Ciment
Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think. . . I know what I'm talking about.
John Barth
Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values…as we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.
Sheena Iyengar
It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction - a pitiable fellow going into his middle-age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.
John Williams
A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
John Williams
The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.
Chris Campanioni