Quotes by Writers - Page 80

If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why – unlike scientific progress – is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.
Rebecca Goldstein
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
Rebecca Goldstein
If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.
Rebecca Goldstein
I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.
Rebecca Goldstein
The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever.
Joseph Campbell
The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.
Rebecca Harding Davis
We live our entire lives thinking we know those closest to us. But do we ever really?
Hilary Grossman
Everyone's memories and feelings are subjective, and we're teach trapped in our own perspectives. But the difference between perspectives, collectively, create objectivity.
Bao Shu
Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys. The sun that gilds the summits will gild them more for him than for someone at the top who must endure the bright light; and the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it.
Fernando Pessoa
It's all about perspective. The sinking of the Titanic was a miracle to the lobsters in the ship's kitchen. (Oct 4, 2011)
Wynne McLaughlin
It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.
S.J. Watson
I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
What's optimism? said Cacambo. Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.
Voltaire
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Aldous Huxley
I think I am going to have to supercharge my optimism to arm myself for the battle ahead. Trust me, it is going to be a battle.
Rebecca Bloom
A word about my personal philosophy. It is anchored in optimism. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism, there is no reason to carry on. If we think of the struggle as aclimb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finall yreach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the "real" top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we've reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably.Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, "Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?" Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. "Because it's there." Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known. Paradocically, they give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heighs of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare - an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.
Saul D. Alinsky
What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.
Voltaire
One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
Voltaire
Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
Voltaire
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
Voltaire
Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?
Terry Moore
I picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?
Hilary Mantel
Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.
Mia Couto
To call up modern versions of the old stories, one has to go forth and live life. As a result then, one will have the challenge of not only living the story, taking it all in, but also interpreting it in whatever ways are useful. So too, one will reap the reward of telling all about it afterward. One's interest in the world, and in having experiences, is really an interest in hearing, having, living one more story, and then one more, then one more story, till one cannot live them out loud any longer. Perhaps it should be said that the drive to live out stories is as deep in the psyche, when awakened, as it is compelling to the psyche to listen to stories and learn from them. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. in Introduction to the 2004 edition of The hero with a thousand faces (J.Campbell)
Joseph Campbell
Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.
Okey Ndibe
The greatest thing ever in the history of the world and of all of human endeavor from time immemorial is stories.
Rainn Wilson
When did it start? Easy. Where it always does, at the beginnin.
Mia Gallagher
I can't imagine a life without a story.
Banana Yoshimoto
Knowing how to dream is more important than the story, because the story tells itself.
Dejan Stojanovic
The length of novels, poems and stories, is measured by the number of missing words; a thousand pages become one, one becomes a thousand.
Dejan Stojanovic
Mother! what a world of affection is comprised in that single word; how little do we in the giddy round of youthful pleasure and folly heed her wise counsels. How lightly do we look upon that zealous care with which she guides our otherwise erring feet, watches with feelings which none but a mother can know the gradual expansion of our youth to the riper yours of discretion. We may not think of it then, but it will be recalled to our minds in after years, when the gloomy grave or a fearful living separation has placed her far beyond our reach, and her sweet voice of sympathy and consolation for the various ills attendant upon us sounds in our ears no more. How deeply then we regret a thousand deeds that we have done contrary to her gentle admonitions! How we sign for those days once more, that we may retrieve what we have done amiss and make her kind heart glad with happiness! Alas! once gone they can never be recalled, and we grow mournfully sad with the bitter reflection.
Fanny Kelly
In life, as in knitting, don't leave loose ends. Take the time to thank the people who matter in your life.
Reba Linker
Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Gratitude is the appreciation of things that are not deserved, earned or demanded - those wonderful things that we take for granted.
Renée Paule
I have learned over a period of time to be almost unconsciously grateful--as a child is--for a sunny day, blue water, flowers in a vase, a tree turning red. I have learned to be glad at dawn and when the sky is dark. Only children and a few spiritually evolved people are born to feel gratitude as naturally as they breathe, without even thinking. Most of us come to it step by painful step, to discover that gratitude is a form of acceptance.
Faith Baldwin
Most of us forget to take time for wonder, praise and gratitude until it is almost too late. Gratitude is a many-colored quality, reaching in all directions. It goes out for small things and for large; it is a God-ward going.
Faith Baldwin
Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Voltaire
Baptized in a river when I was a teenager. I go to church most Sundays. My favorite Bible verse is ‘Jesus wept.’”“Because it’s the shortest?” He almost smiled.“No. Because it says that Jesus knew what it meant to grieve. He’d just let his best friend in the world die of illness when he could have gotten there in time to save him. I’m thinking he was between a rock and hard place, and the hard place let his friend die. He grieved. Then, when he could, he went and raised his friend from the grave, and he knew that if he did that, he’d die himself.
Faith Hunter
The unwholesome may be otherwise, but the Whole is ever holy.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Don’t worry, eventually everything falls into its rightful place.
Fakeer Ishavardas
If you do not want others to laugh at your inherited god and faith, then, do not follow a hateful and stupid, a man-made sod and ism, mate.
Fakeer Ishavardas
The 'Big Bang' idea of pseudo armchair pundits, too is as much a theory as a human-like big buffoon, that your so-called 'holy' books call god.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Until you get it that in reality you, and the enemy you hate, are identically and inseparably 'One', of a single make, you're one big silly mistake.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Only that 'holy' book which teaches you to love all beings - animals or human things - read. Another one, idiots do, You let go, God speed.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Everyday, do more than you could; seek more than you should; understand more than is understood. Thus only a man stops being a hood.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Mostly, all book-told gods are as little as the little men who wrote them idiots into existence.
Fakeer Ishavardas
All life is One Life.
Fakeer Ishavardas
There is no god out there but Oneness of All That Is.
Fakeer Ishavardas
If you cannot insult a god, you yet do not "get" God.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Were a million people to believe in bullshit, it yet is just bull crap.
Fakeer Ishavardas
If anybody tells says you have to follow his or her #religion or you're going to hell, tell that silly ass to go to hell. Be well.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Simply put, That Which Is - what most of us call God - is not a physical person nor a this or that spirit etc. Is the Quintessence of All That Is.
Fakeer Ishavardas
In utter humility, bow to What Is. And in time, crying one's guts out, howling, bowing to IT, "knowing" comes. As a gift of the Divine.
Fakeer Ishavardas
The Only God left standing 'There' is Oneness and Unity of Everything. And not a fancied man-like god - yours or mine. Get 'IT'?
Fakeer Ishavardas
Your body may not be, but the quintessence your being and entity is made-up of, is forever.
Fakeer Ishavardas
All personal god, yours or mine, are false. Unto existence nothing but an infinite oneness walks.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Come on, let your silly egotistical self be gone! And then only THAT WHICH IS will be shown.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Whenever the cloud of ego threatens to engulf me, I remind myself of my roots. It helps keeping my feet on the ground.
Faraaz Kazi
We all must do what we have to do to get where we need to be. Ultimately, you make that final decision yourself.
Mark Boyer