I visualize myself winning the Olympic Pentathlon, inventing a phone that can be controlled by brain waves, or doing the laundry. I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also ly...
It is impossible to control outcomes or results, although most of us have been programmed from a very young age to believe otherwise. The idea that we can perform actual ‘magic’ causes tremendous dysfunction, unnecessary suffering and prevents th...
In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God...
Instead of complimentary breakfasts, why not complimentary compliments? Telling someone they’re looking skinny is sure to help them lose weight faster and feel better than, you know, actually eating.
After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d ac...
Reading requires actual . If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and st...
Those who are in pain – most of the world’s populations at any given moment – do not do a lot of thinking, speaking, or writing about suffering. All their energy goes into surviving. That is why a lot of what is said and written about suffering...
You know on crime shows where they put a sample in a machine, push a button, and it magics them up a description of what it is?” “Ahh yes. I’m familiar” “Like that, but with less magic” Amy squinted, blinked, and shook her head at the scr...
Being "married for a mission" can revitalize a lot of marriages in which the partners think they suffer from a lack of compatibility; my suspicion is that many of these couples actually suffer from a lack of purpose.
The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much...
I have come, more and more, to believe that the way we are in the world actually has an impact on the world. When we are respectful, joyous, grateful, engaged, the world responds to that in concrete ways. When we are angry and resentful, or selfish o...
Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart," he read aloud from an old essay on marriage that he found in his files. "Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness...and looks forward to happiness...
What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.
There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though ...
...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.' 'Actually, it's the other way round. In a p...
K.T. sighs. “If you mess with her head, I’ll personally hunt you down, but otherwise, good luck. If you can get her to talk, you’re a freaking miracle worker. Hell, if you can get her to actually smile, her parents might throw you a party.
When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.
I am not sleeping with you." "We could probably manage it, though. Without getting too involved." "No," she said. "But why? I mean, if we're trusted friends? And it doesn't interfere with our responsibilities?" "Did that line ever actually work for y...
You may scoff and say I only make ten dollars an hour, but if at the end of an eight hour shift I made eighty dollars, and I only actually did ten minutes of real work in that eight-hour span of time, then I’d say I make 480 dollars an hour.
I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.
Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds--who used to be a passionate Yeats fan--is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were di...