At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally conde...
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its onl...
It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the norma...
God structures his authority based on how he operates internally—that is, how each member of the trinity sees and interacts with each other. God never asks us to function in our obedience outside his personal examples.
I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that t...
Tell me, Nana, If for example we had been a love couple, Would a hug have been enough to wash away my sadness? Or then; does every single being carry this loneliness, like a burden? I wans't intending to monopolizing you I just wanted you to need me.
That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to ...
Teaching is the art of serendipity. Each of us has the experience of finding out that something we intended as only the most casual of remarks, or the stray example, changes the way some students thought to the point of changing their lives.
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 ...
Thalia had gotten herself turned into a pine tree when she was twelve. Me ... Well, I was doing my best not to follow her example. I had nightmares about what Poseidon might turn me into if I were ever on the verge of death--plankton, maybe. Or a flo...
Thalia had been turned into a pine tree when she was 12. Me... well, i was doing my best not to follow her example. I had nightmares about what Poseidon might turn me into if i were ever in the verge of death—plankton, maybe. Or a floating patch of...
She recalled him as a forceful and witty speaker with a ready repartee and a penetrating voice. He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: "And I presume on the eighth ...
The greatest lessons I learned from my father didn't come from lectures or discipline or even time spent together. What has stuck with me is his example. From watching, I chose whether to be or not to be like him.
I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate wor...
Certain things are expected of you when you’re a demon. Take the grotesque bodies, for example. Powerful, lethal, but definitely not beauty pageant material. Which is why the more talented among the demon race normally reverted to a basic human for...
I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pi...
The psychologist Charles Moser, for example, pointed out that those inclined to divide the "sane" from the "insane" in terms of frequency of sex and intensity of desires overlook the possibility that sex itself may be the most meaningful part of a pe...
Today and onwards, I stand proud, for the bridges I've climbed, for the battles I've won, and for the examples I've set, but most importantly, for the person I have become. I like who I am now, finally, at peace with me...
-You don’t want to come out and celebrate with me tonight? What’s more important than the fact that I just got a job? -My grandpa just died. -Oh, shit. I’m sorry, man. -Oh, no, he’s still alive. I was just giving you an example of so...
What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it wi...
People look at a chair and say, “It’s just a chair,” but I like to think it’s more than a chair. I like to seek deeper meaning in things, even inanimate things. I know this makes me sound like a complete nutcase, but (a) I swear I’m not, an...