Quotes by Professors - Page 47

Texting is more direct. You don't have to use conversation filler.
Sherry Turkle
Sometimes the best discoveries are the result of simple observations
Dr. Seyed Reza Agha Seyed Hosseini
What makes us threaten the things we want most?
Jim Shepard
Fragments are the only forms I trust.
Donald Barthelme
She can look at you and make you feel like you’re the only one in the world. Even if it’s not true, she can make you feel that way. And with her child, it would be true. She would look at her child for as long as her child needed.
Adam Berlin
Perhaps trust had to be accompanied by a measure of common sense, and a hefty dose of realism about human nature. But that would need a lot of thinking about, and the tea break did not go on forever.
Alexander McCall Smith
A change in those moments, some switch turned off forever, the end of trust or safety or love, and how do we ever find the switch again?
David Vann
Don't let strangers touch you." And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenager, who do you harm. It is always the ones closest to us: the suave chauffeur, the skilled photographer, the kind music teacher, the good friend's sober and dignified husband, the pious man of God. They are the ones your parents trust, whom they don't want to believe anything against.
Azar Nafisi
A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we've seen previously. We should know better.
Gregory Maguire
I lie to her. Because this world is not safe. The people who are supposed to protect us, the people we are supposed to trust -- I know that sometimes they are the ones who do the most harm.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Like the Biblical Israelites, Americans who are afraid want to put their trust in actors who can effectively protect them, but rather than turning solely to the Lord, modern citizens might choose to put their trust in government experts.
Bethany Albertson
Sometimes, the most dangerous people were the ones you trusted most.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?Is there icing on it? he'd said.Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.
George Saunders
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.
Elie Wiesel
In the darkness, fear my light.
Susann Cokal
At least when it comes to light pollution what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.
Paul Bogard
Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he’d glow.
Christopher Barzak
You’re like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards.
Christopher Barzak
There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Having your evening coffee overA field guide of trails or alpine blossoms& so I need now to ask youWhich of the old journals did you firstOpen to a map of my long wanderingWhen did you first know I'd come back& how did you find yourself here& how did you know this single lanternYou are reading by was the last possibleLight to lead me home?
David St. John
After many years the woman died, of natural causes. And a few years after that, the ogre died. Eventually, his mistresses died, down on the ground, in the people village, over decades. The war men and women died. The human girl who had escaped her early death died, across the land, over by the ocean, in her shack of blue bowls and rocking chairs. The witch, who had originally made the cake and made up up the spell and given it as a gift to her beloved ogre friend, died. The cake went on and on. Time passed...And the cake, always wanting to please, the cake who had found a way to survive its endlessness by recreating its role over and over again, tried to figure out, in its cake way, what this light-dappled object might want to eat. So it became darkness, a cake of darkness. It did not have to be human food. It did not have to be digestible through a familiar tract. It lay there on the dirt, waiting, a simmering cake of darkness. Through time, and wind, and earthquakes, and chance. At last the cloak fell out of the tree and blew across the land and happened upon the cake where it ate its darkness and extinguished its own dappled light. The cloak disappeared into night and was not seen again, as it was only a piece of coat shaped darkness now and could not be spotted so easily, had there been any eyes left to see it. It floated and joined with nowhere. Darkness was overtaking everything, anyway, pouring over the land and sky. The cake itself, still in the shape of darkness, sat on the hillside. 'What's left?' said the cake. It thought in blocks of feeling. It felt the thick darkness all around it. 'What is left to eat me, to take me in?'Darkness did not want to eat more darkness, not especially. Darkness did not care for carrot cake, or apple pie. Darkness did not seem interested in a water cake or a cake of money. Only when the cake filled with light did it come over. The darkness circling around the light, devouring the light. But the cake kept refilling, as we know. This is the spell of the cake. And the darkness eating light, and again, light, and again, light, lifted.
Aimee Bender
Maturity understands that there’s darkness in the world but that there’s no need to dwell in it: we can lighten up and offer illumination to others.
Gina Barreca
At sunrise, everything is luminous but not clear
Norman Maclean
Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
Aimee Bender
Full minds create chaos.
David W. Jones
This … perception of impermanence … gives rise to the knowledge that even those things which seem most intimate to us – such as our emotions – are transient states which come and go. … From … detached observation it … becomes clear that even one's conscious mind is but a process like everything else. Most people regard their mental life as their true inner essence ( … ), but insight meditation discloses that the stream of consciousness is just one more facet of the complex interaction of the five factors of individuality, and not what one 'really is'.
Damien Keown
By learning to observe without becoming involved, the pattern of stimulus-response which underlies most human behaviour can be broken. Little by little the realisation dawns that one is free to choose how to react in all situations … The grip of long-standing habits is weakened and replaced with a new sense of freedom.
Damien Keown
The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn't fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers.She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn't know the name for this is the Prisoner's Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means "show of lights." But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions would not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.
Dana Spiotta
Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (
Jon Kabat-Zinn
In our spreading materialist wasteland, more and more people thirst for contemplation, including political wheel-dealers, tycoons, and military top brass, stressed out by the rigors of their professions. Are we to suppose that everyone doing deep breathing on a meditation pillow is communing with the God of Christians? Not necessarily. What unites us to God is the practice of love. If prayer, or any other religious act, is not grounded in that, it is an offense to God.
Dean Brackley
Stillness offers an experience of being and a recognition that being . . . my essence . . . is a part of all Being, all Essence.
Nancy J. Napier
Depending on their psychic make up, for some people, closing the eyes or being quiet produces anxiety and increases mental agitation. In such situations it is better to undertake the practice of yoga–whether physical yoga or meditation–with other people with whom one is comfortable and at ease. Gradually, as we see more and more clearly their roots, the fears and the imaginings will diminish. Mental distractions are harder to overcome when practicing alone. (109)
Ravi Ravindra
Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them in reality.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
When our hopes for performance are not completely met, realistic optimism involves accepting what cannot now be changed, rather than condemning or second-guessing ourselves. Focusing on the successful aspects of performance (even when the success is modest) promotes positive affect, reduces self-doubt, and helps to maintain motivation (e.g., McFarland & Ross, 1982).... Nevertheless, realistic optimism does not include or imply expectations that things will improve on their own. Wishful thinking of this sort typically has no reliable supporting evidence. Instead, the opportunity-seeking component of realistic optimism motivates efforts to improve future performances on the basis of what has been learned from past performances.
Sandra L. Schneider
Real education happens only by failing, changing, challenging, and adjusting. All of those gerunds apply to teachers as well as students. No person is an “educator,” because education is not something one person does to another. Education is an imprecise process, a dance, and a collaborative experience.
Siva Vaidhyanathan
There will be danger; some of you may not live to complete your lessons. It's a risk you take. This world is bigger than you and it will go on, regardless.
Nnedi Okorafor
Life without death simply isn't life, but death
Juliet Daniel
At each small success we should not become our own heroes in our minds
Dr. V. V. Rao
A popular myth is that learning is largely a matter of motivation. Increasingly, the key to effective learning in the information era is how you think, not how you feel.
Kathryn Alesandrini
Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city’s underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It’s long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That’s what we’re after, isn’t it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel’s length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains?
Ander Monson
The people I've known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers.
John Gardner
Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive?
Marjorie Agosín
I hope that you will be faced with difficult choices and decisions, trials that won’t undo you, but that will drive you toward reflection and understanding. Trust that your fears will sometimes tell you about your desires. You will see that you can survive the terror that comes with growth and change, with vulnerability and risk.
Donald Antrim
Learn always and wherever possible, knowing that you'll never learneverything.
Eraldo Banovac
One should learn by considering one's own failures that are a part of life.
Eraldo Banovac
Learning continuously is the best way to build one's intellectual capacity.
Eraldo Banovac
One may sleep as long as one prefers, but one should know that each hour of excess sleep is an hour lost for learning.
Eraldo Banovac
The First BookOpen it.Go ahead, it won't bite.Well. . . maybe a little.More a nip, like. A tingle.It's pleasurable, really.You see, it keeps on opening.You may fall in.Sure, it's hard to get started;remember learning to useknife and fork? Dig in:you'll never reach bottom.It's not like it's the end of the world--just the world as you thinkyou know it.
Rita Dove
While you can't hold on to everything forever, you're a fool if you sell back your college books at semester's end: have you learned nothing of this life?
Ander Monson
Just cuz you get to the end doesn’t mean you know what happened.
Karen Tei Yamashita
Super Mario Bros. hooks newcomers because there are no barriers to playing the game. You can know absolutely nothing about the Nintendo console and still enjoy yourself from the very first minute. There's no need to read motivation-sapping manuals or grind through educational tutorials before you begin. Instead, your avatar, Mario appears on the left-hand side of an almost empty screen. Because the screen is empty, you can push the Nintendo controller's buttons randomly and harmlessly, learning which ones make Mario jump and which ones make him move left and right. You can't move any further left, so you quickly learn to move right. And you aren't reading a guide that tells you which keys are which--instead, you're learning by doing, and enjoying the sense of mastery comes from acquiring knowledge through experience. The first few seconds of gameplay are brilliantly designed to simultaneously do two very difficult things: teach, and preserve the illusion that nothing is being taught at all.
Adam Alter
The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.
David Williamson Shaffer
Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.
David Williamson Shaffer