Quotes by Professors - Page 50

There is no mystery to happiness.Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn- or worse, indifference- cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present. But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning- the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life- a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. For myself, I have always chosen meaning.
Jed Rubenfeld
It is only once we stop taking everything for granted and fully open our hearts to the beauty that surrounds us that we will understand the importance of joining our hands in the construction of a better world for the people of generations to come.
Francisco Battiti
When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.
Dara Horn
You’re here. You’re real. Embrace that person you were, and make sure you have reason to like the person you’re becoming. The past you can’t change. The future is what matters.
David Walton
He had built his own future brick by brick around himself but there were no doors or windows, at least that was the way it seemed at the time he had thought to himself, I am locked in, it was like one of those ghost stories where you wake up and you are sealed in a coffin.
Dan Chaon
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
Leonard Sweet
You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.
Andrew Solomon
Success is relative, but happiness is absolute.
Eraldo Banovac
If one is not prepared to fail, there is no way to achieve success inbusiness and life.
Eraldo Banovac
This book began with the assertion that Margaret Fuller's life was her most remarkable creation. It is just possible, however, that her most wonderful creations may still lie in the future. Fuller's most precious gift to us may reside in the ideas and the works, still yet to be imagined, of women and men who follow her example. We may decide that, despite all that Margaret Fuller endured and suffered in order to become exceptional, her life, or rather her lives, well deserve imitating.
John Matteson
You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steel the hubcaps.
michael p naughton
As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn't particularly give a damn.
Gary Shteyngart
The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.
Richard Powers
You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps.” ― Michael P. Naughton,
michael p naughton
Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.
Morrie Schwartz
… mess is the material from which life and creativity are built …
Ralph D. Stacey
Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but never compose their own original scores.
Adam Grant
Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses. When
Adam Grant
Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new
Adam Grant
Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
Adam Grant
Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning.
Adam Grant
Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
Theodore Levitt
To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow.
M. Thomas Gammarino
In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.
N. Scott Momaday
Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.
John Barth
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
Joyce Carol Oates
You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?
Jean Thompson
Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.
Alexander McCall Smith
What do you mean by yuanfen?"She thought for a minute and replied, "It means: that apportionment of love which is destined for you in this world.
Lan Samantha Chang
I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.
Gregory Maguire
Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can't. I have failed to destroy my category.
Ben Marcus
Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other.
Sheldon Vanauken
If the first job one has in a given profession acts as a tuning fork for the career that follows, Frederick Thomas was attuned from the start to a pitch of the highest quality.
Vladimir Alexandrov
To live for the hope of something isn’t really living at all, and so, like a child putting away its toys and picking up a tool, he marched to Lyca’s bathroom, to shower off the stench of failure, soap up the death of hope, then wash away the ashes of his love for Daphne.
Mark A. Rayner
We make choices and are in turn made by them.
Sheena Iyengar
To be alive is to be dizzy and not to know exactly where to go.
Ander Monson
He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.-- John Williams, 'Stoner
John Williams
There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,
Alexandra Kleeman
Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages.
Dean Young
Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages. -from Instant Recognition between Strangers
Dean Young
For me, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them …
Morrie Schwartz
I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.
Joyce Carol Oates
A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world: to fight it back from himself and those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given that strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness.
Laura Florand
The human body is robust. It can gather strength when it's in mortal danger.
Toni Morrison
Fate refuses to stop at the pretty part of the tale; Fate insists on more tests of courage and wit, a terrible end, even if the heroine's heart be pure and her crime accidental.
Susann Cokal
Real strength isn’t control. It’s knowing when to let go.
Christopher Barzak
She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had the capacity for violence within her, residing beside her heart.
David Anthony Durham
She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survive in it.
David Anthony Durham
It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.
Claire Messud
You will be lonely, but you'll become strong.
Marie Rutkoski
Its hardness and solidity had been an odd kind of comfort. Do not wish for anything. Be and endure. The Old African had learned that enduring was power too, and just as he had been drawn to the boulder, so the slaves, after a while, were drawn to him.
Julius Lester
The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, "You're trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith or my hope.
Kiese Laymon
Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.
Toni Morrison
YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH TO BE WEAKAllow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of “up” and “down,” “good” and “bad,” “weak” and “strong,” until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.
Simon Baron-Cohen
empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.
Simon Baron-Cohen
Death releases the energy into air. If a true catastrophe is looming, the disturbance becomes such that a sensitive individual may become highly troubled by it. He may be aware exactly when and where it will occur. He may see an aura around people who are soon to die. Or he may see images of the disaster beforehand...
Jed Rubenfeld
[A] new finding shows that while in the 1940s, three-quarters of those surveyed claimed to dream in black and white, today, three-quarters say the opposite, that they dream in color. This reversal is attributed to a change in the number of people who grew up watching color rather than black and white television... another hint that our private dreams are intimately linked to our collective mediated experiences.
Katherine A. Fowkes