Thought Provoking Quotes - Page 4

You’re more capable than you know. Deep down, you have… a magick inside you that you’ve tucked away. That needs release. It’s a connection to who you are and what you are capable of. - Evan

Mira Monroe

Sometimes money is the only thing that people have and they feel threatened when they think they are losing it.

Mika Chanell

Knowledge is what enables one to be wrong. (p. 11)

Mike Higton

Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you...she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...

Julie Otsuka

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

Orhan Pamuk

News is something worth knowing that you didn't know already. (by an "earnest young woman" in his journalism class)

David Brinkley

How do you explain to your friend's mother why a night out with friends has left her daughter dying from an ecstasy overdose?

A.C. Flanagan

Shattered by the cumulative effect of so much horror and death, Joan was again afflicted by a crisis of faith. How could a good and benevolent God let such a thing happen? How could He so terribly afflict even children and babies, who were not guilty of any sin?

Donna Woolfolk Cross

But ask us to prove even to ourselves we are right in our belief, and we are in a quandary.

J.W. Sire

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.

Pearl S. Buck

Simply by living in this particular time and space, you're doing something nearly 100% of all other humans ever never could. Don't waste it.

Bill Loguidice

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

Jennifer Haigh

Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity?

Karl Jacoby

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities.When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.

Robert M. Pirsig

The old tales of China tell us that all things may grow and change. A stone may become a plant. A plant may become an animal. An animal may become a human. A human may become a god.Just so, a snake may become a woman. And we are told of one who did.

Aaron Shepard

We live by our labors from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune.

Kamala Markandaya

If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world.

Robert Masello

There's still a question I must put to you," said the cunger woman. "Can you give up Joshua to keep him?

William H. Hooks

Take that rose bush, for example. We are all looking at the same plant, but our perception of it varies according to the way we each think and see. One person may see a vigorous rose, another may see a rose that could benefit from a little pruning, and a third may see a mess that no amount of attention would save. The rose bush isn't changing; it's the way we personally perceive it that differs, the way each of us thinks that colors our perception.

Sydney Banks

Be patient with everyone you meet, for you may never know whether your words were the last they ever heard.

L.J. Kane

I'm fighting alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

Han Kang

Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim

Eduardo Galeano

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.

Yann Martel

The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.

Tom Robbins

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

Chris Cleave

BAIT GOATThere is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.

Kay Ryan

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened.

Christina Baker Kline

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

Katherine Paterson

It was very bad if the council had resorted to recruiting men. By tradition men were our last line of defence, their physical strength bent towards the single and most important task of protecting our homes and children. This meant the council had decided that our only defence was to defeat the enemy, period. Anything else meant the end of Darre.

N K Jemisin

...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.

Katherine Paterson

Have you ever been in a conflict with someone who thought he was wrong. If you are not wrong, then you will be willing to consider how you might be mistaken.

The Arbinger Institute

They Were all clad in the same uniform of misery and filth. For all of time, for all of eternity

James Riordan

I have mo prejudice against the Southern people... They are just what we would ben in their situation. If slavery did not now exits amongst them, they wld not inrtoduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up... I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. (p52)

Russell Freedman

I don't understand," Belle cried. "I gave you gold. You only gave me grief.

William H. Hooks

The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles.

Cheikh Anta Diop

God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Everyone who’s born has come from the sea. Your mother’s womb is just a sea in small. And birds come of seas on eggs. Horses lie in the sea before they’re born. The placenta is the sea. Your blood is the sea continued in your veins. We are the ocean — walking on the land.

Timothy Findley

There's only one thing a bully respected: bigger bully.

Lisa Kleypas

How can the removal of beauty from a world so lacking in beauty be anything but tragic?

William Goldman

There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream

Haruki Murakami

But was that not the task you set me? To defend the helpless against the strong?" "Indeed it was Master Weed. But who is to say who is helpless, and who is strong?" .........."If you seek the power to alter fate, you must also bear responsibility for the consequences. For you cannot change the fate of only one being; all fates are intertwined." "I performed the task," I protest. "I did what you bid me do." "You defended the weak from the strong." Larkspur speaks as if from far away. "But who will defend these poor weak infants against you!?

Maryrose Wood

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.

Robert M. Pirsig

Do you think it is better to fail at something worthwhile, or succeed at something meaningless

Tommy Wallach

This is how everything should end: with the forgotten remembered, the wounded healed, and the sinners forgiven.

Jenny Hollowell

Lead us not into temptation' often means, among other things, 'Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, de

C.S. Lewis

Over the course of your life you are actually hundreds of different people. You are a different person at the coffee shop than you are at the bar, and a different person for the dry cleaner than you are for your boyfriend, and a different person at work than you are on vacation. You are nobody in particular. But once somebody finds you and loves you, you have to keep being the person that they love. You want thier love. You need to keep getting it even if it means pretending...but no one loved her and so she could keep changing.

Jenny Hollowell

I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one and the same. For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me - as a girl and later as a woman - to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

Lisa See

Call it professional interest. You see, Jessamine, love is a kind of poison; one of my favorite kinds, in fact. It infects the blood; it takes over the mind; it seizes dominion over the body. It amuses me to think of him pining for you. Aching for what he cannot have. The loneliness in his soul is festering like a wound. There is nothing I could do for him that is worse that what you have already done, my lovely. And I assure you, in his case there will be no cure.

Maryrose Wood

I missed the future.

John Green

There is a saying that "paper is more patient than man";it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days,while I sat chin in hand,feeling too bored and limp even to make up my mind whether to go out or stay at home. Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don't intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook,bearing the proud name of"diary",to anyone,unless I find a real friend,boy or girl,probably nobody cares.And now I come to the root of the matter,the reason for my starting a diary:it is that I have no such real friend. Let me put it more clearly,since no one will believe that a girl of thirteen feels herself quite alone in the world,nor is it so.I have darling parents and a sister of sixteen.I know about thirty people whom one might call friends--I have strings of boy friends,anxious to catch a glimpse of me and who,failing that,peep at me through mirrors in class.I have relations,aunts and uncles,who are darlings too,a good home,no--I don't seem to lack anything.But it's the same with all my friends,just fun and joking,nothing more.I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round.We don't seem to be able to get any closer,that is the root of the trouble.Perhaps I lack confidence,but anyway,there it is,a stubborn fact and I don't seem to be able to do anything about it.

Anne Frank

The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help. They ignore the reality that a new version of the same old problem will be waiting at the end of the trip- the relative you cringe to kiss.

Markus Zusak

...People would make the decisions they wished to make and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy.

Rachel Joyce

Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened."Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.

Umberto Eco

‎"Tell me, sir, what is a butterfly?""It's what you are meant to become. It flies with beautiful wings and joins the earth to heaven. It drinks only nectar from the flowers and carries the seeds of love from one flower to another. Without butterflies, the world would soon have few flowers.

Trina Paulus

And if anyone asks, you're Chinese. The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese." "And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain." "In your dreams," said the boy. "In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King.

Julie Otsuka

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

Jack Kerouac

I have no fear, I have only love

Stevie Nicks

You flesh bodies are so obsessed with goodness, yet no other form of life on earth is capable of such cruelty. You need only convince yourselves your transgressions serve some 'purpose.' Even if it is only greed, or lust, or the raw desire for power that drives you. You will spill the blood of your kinsmen, lay waste to the earth itself, wreak havoc, and cause unspeakable suffering---any and all sins are justified, as long as they are a means to your precous, righteous 'purpose'.

Maryrose Wood

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

Rebecca Wells

It's not," Mormont told him. "Gods save us, boy, you're not blind and you're not stupid. When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?

George R.R. Martin

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Thought Provoking Quotes - Page 4

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