Quotes by Writers - Page 104

Don’t be surprised by your greatness. Be surprised that no one expected it.
Rebecca Maizel
Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.
Alan W. Watts
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Alan W. Watts
Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
Alan W. Watts
You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
Alan W. Watts
Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.
Alan W. Watts
If you're alive, kick into drive. Chase whimsies. See if you can turn dreams into a way to make a living, if not an entire way of life.
Kevin Smith
When you have a goal, there will also be a result.
Mohiro Kitoh
Numbers are important to the life, you better stay good at arithmetics.
Ahtizaz Wani
CHAPTER VIConcerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One's Own Arms And AbilityLET no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
Niccolò Machiavelli
People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realis
Dylan Moran
If one does not develop, one goes down. In life, in ordinary conditions everything goes down, or one capacity may develop at the expense of another.
P.D. Ouspensky
I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness.We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.
Simon Pegg
All wisdom contracts then expands, contracts then expands. That is how consciousness evolves.
S. Kelley Harrell
When we accomplish one thing, our ego wants to bask in the glory, though our soul is ready to move on to the next.
S. Kelley Harrell
We grow from our dreams.
Dejan Stojanovic
I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
Emily Carr
Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.... The philosophy of atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it a philosophy, is static and fixed.
Emma Goldman
The doing and the daring are the magic keys to unlocking the treasure chest.
Reba Linker
If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we could paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive - if only for a few seconds more - the possibility of transformation. -The Thought Experiment
George Saunders
My body is a political battlefield.It is a place of war, of death and suffering, of triumph and victory, of damage and repair, of blood and tears and sweat.It is a place where memories go to find purpose for their existence.It is a place where humans cast all inhibitions aside to discover what exists at their very core.It is a place of growth wearing a mask of destruction.It is a challenge, not for the faint of heart, beckoning us to face it with eyes wide open.The only war is within. When you are ready to fight it, the field awaits.
Agnostic Zetetic
I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go. One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.
Banana Yoshimoto
You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Only ever doing what feels comfortable is a form of suicide.
Oli Anderson
Familiarity breeds contempt, for others at first, but then inwardly, contempt towards ourselves.
Oli Anderson
You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests. I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect. I didn’t even think, be a writer. Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.
Lidia Yuknavitch
even so did you feel yourself swept away by that inward migration about which no one had ever said a word to you…A great wind swept through and delivered from the matrix the sleeping prince you sheltered- man within you. You are the equal of the musician composing his music, of the physicist extending the frontier of knowledge…you have reached an altitude where all loves are of the same stuff.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I felt the pain and the glory of growth, was straining and shuddering with it.
Nnedi Okorafor
Dialogue with the self is the source of all insight and insight is the only thing that can change your life.
Oli Anderson
Dialogue can help you find out if you’ve been brainwashed or not.
Oli Anderson
In the realm of the unknown, difficulties must be viewed as a hidden treasure! Usually, the more difficult, the better. It's not as valuable if your difficulties stem from your own inner struggle. But when difficulties arise out of increasing objective resistance, that's marvelous!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If.
Herman Melville
there is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations
Antoine De Saint Exupery
A person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks, questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of a long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don't go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent.
José Saramago
I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?
Aidan Chambers
Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still w
Mervyn Peake
I think that being a soul in flesh is really challenging and we should all give ourselves more credit.
S. Kelley Harrell
What we strive to restore and re-animate will never come from the promises of the middle class politicians, but will come instead from the spirit of the last Delphic prophecy, which foresaw that, ‘One day Apollo will return and it will be forever’.
Guillaume Faye
ABOUT: KAHLIL GIBRAN "His power came from some great reservoir of spiritual life else it could not have been so universal and so potent, but the majesty and beauty of the language with which he clothed it were all his own." -- Claude Bragdon
Claude Bragdon
Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.
Francis de Sales
You must know, my own love, that in each element there exists a race of beings, whose form scarcely differs from yours, but who very seldom appear to mortal sight … you now see before you, my love, an undine.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué
We all know what we have to do what the inkling provokes us. We have to do the right thing. We have to make that extra push out of bed, or off the sofa. We must just do it.
Mark Andrew Poe
As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.
Banana Yoshimoto
There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water.
Banana Yoshimoto
In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For everyone searched his neighbour’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.
Olaf Stapledon
You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.
A.S. King
In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there…For everyone searched his neighbor’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.
Olaf Stapledon
The more we wait, the more everything and everyone looks like a grain of sand escaping between our fingers before vanishing into the wind.
Fábio Moon
A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.
Robert W. Service
I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.
Banana Yoshimoto
I’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That’s me.A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.
Rohinton Mistry
Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.
Agnostic Zetetic
Jason knew his life would never be the same again. British intelligence now had an ace up their sleeve, and Jason had to overcome his fears and deal with the secret world he was now a part of. He would have to grow a tough shell around himself. Despite his many friends, his grandparents and love of his father, he was painfully aware he was very much alone in this world. When it came down to it, there was only one person he could really rely on in the world,and he was called Jason Steed.
Mark A. Cooper
I can push everything into the dark.But it leaves me empty.And the dark always ends up finding me in my sleep
Rebecca Donovan
Walking alone is not difficult but when we have walked a mile worth a thousand years with someone then coming back alone is what is difficult.
Faraaz Kazi
I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I'm a thousand others.
Faraaz Kazi
If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays with you.
Tim Burton
Dad? Dad, no. No. I can't. I can't. Why are you saying these things?""Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz