Quotes by Professors - Page 75

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and let it come in.
Morrie Schwartz
There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.
Harry Crews
Every fool has an idea how to change the world. Wise people think about how to improve the world around them.
Eraldo Banovac
In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.
Gina Barreca
Who is truly wealthy? That man to whom the agreeable and disagreeable, wealth and woe, past and future, are the same. What is the most wondrous thing on earth? Each day countless humans enter the Temple of Death, yet the ones left behind continue to live as though they were immortal.
Chitra Lekha Banerjee Divakaruni
Two footsteps do not make a path.
Nnedi Okorafor
Thought doesn't wrap around awareness. Awareness wraps around thought.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.
Gregory Maguire
You ought to know, you were my best friend. You were. I know you loved me. I loved you.No one should have gone through what we went through, but we did. And it kills me to think of it.But I didn't love you like you loved me. I don't hate you for that. It just makes me sorry, that there isn't someone else who could love you better.I know when you think about how I went, you'll get it. I was always uneasy about being alive. The idea of being dead makes me feel clear. When I think of it. It makes me think peace, peace, peace. It makes me happy. I am looking forward to it, to the absence of everything. And so I want you to be happy for me, that this is better for me. That I found what I needed. I know you won't be. But it's the last thing I want. You happy.
Alexander Chee
Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It's all there -- passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.
Alexander McCall Smith
It is worth remembering one of the important lessons of the Buck story: a small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.
Paul A. Lombardo
As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him. Wasn't I?
Viet Thanh Nguyen
It is useful to study different traditions in order to be free of attachment to any one way of expressing what is beyond expression. (x)
Ravi Ravindra
Whoever is full of wisdom is naturally compassionate; in fact we recognize that someone has gained spiritual wisdom by seeing their compassionate behavior. . . . Individuals and countries with power need to develop wisdom and compassion, for without these attributes, there is a danger that the power will be used to oppress and exploit others. (31)
Ravi Ravindra
No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.
Alexander McCall Smith
Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.
Rachel Naomi Remen
If love goes too far, it turns into cruelty.
Haruo Shirane
While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Karl R. Popper
Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever.
Rachel Naomi Remen
In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.
George Saunders
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl R. Popper
I saw God wash the world last nightWith His sweet showers on high and then when morning came i saw Him hang it out to dryHe washed it each blade of grassand every trembling tree;He flung His showers against the hills and swept the rolling seathe white rose is a cleaner whitethe red, a richer redSince God washed every fragrant faceand put them to bedtheres not a bird theres not a beethe wings along the way but is a cleaner bird or beethan it was yesterdayi saw God wash the world last nightah would He wash meas clean of all my dust and dirtas that old birch tree!
Dr. W. L. Stiger
Life is suffering Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering amelioratedTruth is the handmaiden of loveDialogue is the pathway to truth Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and smallSo speech must be untrammeled So that dialogue can take placeSo that we can all humbly learn So that truth can serve loveSo that suffering can be amelioratedSo that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God
Jordan B Peterson
God's image…is found not best in individual humans, but in humans as they relate to each other.
Luke Timothy Johnson
...a deep and even paranoid suspicion continues to disparage higher criticism of the Bible, as if someone could publish a paper that would unravel God. (p. 151)
Robin R. Meyers
LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.
Anne Carson
Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew--in the incontestable way that children know things--that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.
Martha Cooley
But then again, that's what the Book of Job was about to her, a cautionary tale about wanting there to be a God, wanting there to be someone who could enact what a God could enact, or who could sanction what the Devil would do. You want this, people? You want these kinds of powers? No, you don't, and here's why, and here's why it's sheer vanity to want them in any other entity. Look what sort of violence would rain down. Poor Job, sure, poor Job with his hives and his financial losses — though who needs three thousand camels? — and too bad about the kids, forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold, sure, too bad, but it's God who's the miserable bastard here. Look what he got himself up to! No good could come of that type of power; that's what the writer of the Book of Job was saying, and she knew the writer was right.
Michelle Latiolais
Different states of consciousness project different images of God–loving or vengeful or jealous, energetic or terrifying, and different images of God affect the nature and quality of our response to God. . . . The image or idea of God as wrathful and jealous will have a different effect than the image or the idea of God as loving. Similarly, whether God is regarded as male or female will have a significant impact on the culture. (29)
Ravi Ravindra
Rafael?””Yeah?”„Do we all have monsters?”„Yes.”„Why does God give us so many monsters?”„You want to know my theory?”„Sure.”„I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
Martin Amis
Before I could turn to look up, a voice boomed from the heavens: "What the heck is going on down there?
Kat Falls
As fallible humans, we usually slip too far over one edge or the other - all wrath and judgment or all grace and love.
Eric Wilson
By Hays' reasoning, penetrating a rectum with a penis is a violation of how God meant humans to function. However, penetrating a human body with a sword, a common way to kill people in biblical times, is acceptable. Apparently human bodies were designed to be penetrated by metal implements, but not by flesh.
Hector Avalos
One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.
Bart D. Ehrman
I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.
George Saunders
Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us.
Gregory Maguire
She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position.Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information.
Alexander McCall Smith
There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.
Alexander McCall Smith
The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Michael Eric Dyson
This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he's surest of, the artist puts under pressure to see if they will stand.
John Gardner
Sometimes a clearly defined error is the only way to discover the truth
Benjamin Wiker
Truth, like a little dog, will always find its way out into the street.
Michael Mejia
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
Richard M. Rorty
..we all do it. We talk about people we don't like until they become famous. Then we love 'em.
Daniel Black
The worst thing about talk ... is that there's no way to lay it to rest. Every fresh breeze brings a new speculation.
Susan Wittig Albert
Just because they're a story doesn't mean they're not real.
Heather Bouwman
I almost cried. But I didn't, because if you're in seventh grade and you cry while wearing a blue floral cape and yellow tights with white feathers on the butt, you just have to curl up and die somewhere in a dark alley.
Gary D. Schmidt
Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out.""Yes, sir," Andrews said."Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you — that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old.""No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is.""You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet. . . .
John Williams
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol Oates
The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.
Bart D. Ehrman
Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.
Adam Levin
Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, "Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?
Julie Schumacher
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
Andrew Solomon
But just because you love something, I added to myself, doesn't mean you'll ever be great. Not if you don't work. Most people stink at the things they love.
Amy Chua
There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Love is different. Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.
Morrie Schwartz
I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.
Harry Crews
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
Andrew Solomon
We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
B.W. Powe
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
P.C. Hodgell