Quotes by Public Speakers - Page 8

The root systems of these lies we tell ourselves tend to grow together. It’s all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn’t conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.
Donald Miller
This doesn't mean that we stop helping people set goals or that we stop expecting people to grow and change. It means that we stop respecting and evaluating people based on what we think they should accomplish, and start respecting them for who they are and holding them accountable for what they're actually doing. It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are. It means that sometimes when we're beating ourselves up, we need to stop and say to that harassing voice inside, "Man, I'm doing the very best I can right now.
Brené Brown
Allah, Most High, has truly blessed us. He has created just for us the mysterious spirit that He has breathed into us and by so doing distinguished us from all other physical creation. He has adorned us with our incomparable intellect, which further distinguishes us from all else in this creation. What other creature on this planet -another gift He has blessed us with- can even begin to create the likes of this Internet? Will we not stop, give thanks to our Merciful and Generous Lord? Will we not stop and realize how precious our lives are and begin to show each other more love, mercy, kindness and empathy? Will we not stop, take time, and reflect?
Imam Zaid Shakir
But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.
Orson Scott Card
Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier then he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.
Orson Scott Card
You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not.
Orson Scott Card
When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
Donald Miller
Be kind to every person you meet because we don't know their battles.
Zelda la Grange
Compassion is not a virtue -- it is a commitment. It's not something we have or don't have -- it's something we choose to practice.
Brené Brown
If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species.
Orson Scott Card
A saint or monk can afford to be compassionate to all, but a leader or boss cannot always be kind. He may soon be without a job himself if he is unduly compassionate, and chances are, no one would show him any compassion then.
Awdhesh Singh
In church, the rules of the lifeboat don't apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.
Donald Miller
I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.
Orson Scott Card
No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.
Brené Brown
Requiring accountability while also extending your compassion is not the easiest course of action, but it is the most humane, and, ultimately, the safest for the community.
Brené Brown
When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help. The danger of tying your self-worth to being a helper is feeling shame when you have to ask for help. Offering help is courageous and compassionate, but so is asking for help.
Brené Brown
Dr. Kristin Neff is a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She runs the Self-Compassion Research Lab, where she studies how we develop and practice self-compassion. According to Neff, self-compassion has three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Here are abbreviated definitions for each of these: Self-kindness: Being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Common humanity: Common humanity recognizes that suffering and feelings of personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience—something we all go through rather than something that happens to “me” alone. Mindfulness: Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. Mindfulness requires that we not “over-identify” with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negativity.
Brené Brown
O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!
Orson Scott Card
I think that's why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don't get that, they feel as though they're going to die. And so they lash out. But it's a terrible thing to wake up and realize the person you just finished crucifying wasn't Jesus.
Donald Miller
Anybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn't Jesus' fault.
Donald Miller
Maybe that's who you are, what you remember.
Orson Scott Card
Everything we do means something.
Orson Scott Card
The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.
Donald Miller
Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.
Malcolm Gladwell
The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
Malcolm Gladwell
Of course, he didn't know anything about these Indonesians, or why they would have been there at this moment to save his life, but the fact that they had guns and weren't firing them at him implied that for the moment, at least, they were his dearest friends.
Orson Scott Card
Want to know who I am?Your responses indicate that you have a normal desire to share yourself with others. However, this need is not being adequately fulfilled at present.As a result, you unconsciously attempt to treat this emptiness with momentary interests and temporary passions. If left unaddressed, this imbalance leads to impulsive behavior and unnecessary risks.Past betrayals have left you generally suspicious of others’ behavior, particularly regarding romantic relationships. You fear you may be exploited if you open yourself too fully. Consequently, you often seek some proof of a new friend’s or lover’s sincerity before you decide to trust them.Further complicating your relationships is the anxiety you have about your unfulfilled personal and professional goals. You fear that you’ve made decisions that weren’t in your own best interest, or failed to take advantage of opportunities when they presented themselves.The desire to overcome these challenges sometimes lead you to seem pushy or even arrogant. Because this competitive urge is not always apparent to others, they are often surprised by it.However, the passion that underlies your desire for success is unique. This makes you unlike others. You cannot simply accept what life has to offer; you aspire for more.Between each inhale and exhale we die and are reborn.
Micheal Tsarion
That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends.
Orson Scott Card
He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying among friends.
Orson Scott Card
Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.
Brené Brown
And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.
Orson Scott Card
Folks write down the name of someone who fills them with frustration, disappointment, and/or resentment, and then I propose that their person is doing the best he or she can. The responses have been wide-ranging...One woman said, "If this was true and my mother was doing the best she can, I would be grief-stricken. I'd rather be angry than sad, so it's easier to believe she's letting me down on purpose than grieve the fact that my mother is never going to be who I need her to be.
Brené Brown
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.
Orson Scott Card
So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.
Orson Scott Card
Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness--we feel as if we're missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone...Longing is not conscious wanting; it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we've lost.
Brené Brown
Heartbreak is an altogether different thing. Disappointment doesn't grow into heartbreak, nor does failure...It comes form the loss of love or the perceived loss of love...Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost.
Brené Brown
Achilles might be a good papa to the family, but he was also a killer, and he never forgives.Poke knew that, though. Bean warned her, and she knew it, but she chose Achilles for their papa anyway. Chose him and then died for it. She was like that Jesus that Helga preached about in her kitchen while they ate. She died for her people. And Achilles, he was like God. He made people pay for their sins no matter what they did.The important thing is, stay on the good side of God. That's what Helga teaches, isn't it? Stay right with God.I'll stay right with Achilles. I'll honor my papa, that's for sure, so I can stay alive until I'm old enough to go out on my own.
Orson Scott Card
I believe what Jesus said was, 'I the Lord will forgive whom I will forgive. But of you it is required that you forgive all men.
Orson Scott Card
... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.
Malcolm Gladwell
We are only human when we are part of a community. ... I tried to isolate you, but it could not be done. I surrounded you with hostility; you took most of your enemies and rivals and made friends of them. ... You were a part of them; they carried you inside them all their lives.
Orson Scott Card
Our silence about grief serves no one. We can't heal if we can't grieve; we can't forgive if we can't grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.
Brené Brown
A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive - and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down. - Chapter 8
Malcolm Gladwell
At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has given you without holding them accountable.
Donald Miller
Whether you are a man or woman, make sure that you see the person that you are considering to build a relationship with for who they are, not what you want them to be.
Imam Khalid Latif
Better to have the trust of the people than their respect. With trust, their respect could be earned later; without it, respect could never be deserved, and so to have it would be like poison.
Orson Scott Card
We can't pack down hurt, nor can we off-load it to someone else while maintaining our authenticity and integrity. Most of us have been on the receiving end of one of these outbursts. Even if we have the insight to know that our boss, friend, colleague, or partner blew up at us because something tender was triggered and it's not actually about us, it still shatters trust and respect. Living, growing up, working, or worshipping on eggshells creates huge cracks in our sense of safety and self-worth. Over time, it can be experienced as trauma.
Brené Brown
Talk to ourselves in the same way we'd talk to someone we'd love. Yes, you made a mistake. You're human. You don't have to do it like anyone else does. Fixing it and making amends will help. Self-loathing will not. Reach out to someone we trust--a person who has earned the right to hear our story and who has the capacity to respond with empathy.
Brené Brown
Numb the dark and you numb the light.
Brené Brown
If we are going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light. To set down those lists of *what we're supposed to be* is brave. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.
Brené Brown
He captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen.
Donald Miller
we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they’re workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we’re on the right track.
Orson Scott Card
My master wishes to see you," said the mounted man."When the planting's done," I said."Lord Barton is unaccustomed to waiting.""Then he should rejoice, for he'll learn something new today." I went back to the garden. Soon the servant left.
Orson Scott Card
The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.
Orson Scott Card
You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.
Orson Scott Card
The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person's soul, into their being, before they can effect change.
Donald Miller
Life is a dance toward God, I began to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing out practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.
Donald Miller
I've learned all I'm ever going to learn from you.
Orson Scott Card
From you I can learn things that nobody knows.
Orson Scott Card
The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.
Orson Scott Card
If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.
Orson Scott Card