Perhaps we don’t progress, because there are so many views – so many paths to peace and happiness – that we get hung up on each path’s differences. Trying to sort out right from wrong when the rights mean so much to us that we can’t look at...
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if ...
Physical attraction did its part to glue them together, but something stronger than sexual attraction sealed the bond. When men and women grow apart, it is for the same reason they are drawn together; because they are finally, inherently too differen...
But with respect to religion itself, without regard to names, and as directing itself from the universal family of mankind to the divine object of adoration, it is man bringing to his maker the fruits of his heart; and though these fruits may differ ...
It’s amazing how just dressing differently can affect your influence; dress like a beggar and your assumed poverty gains you looks of contempt; dress in gold-lined robes and people are more willing to accommodate you; sport armour and you look stro...
How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tende...
It felt real, seeing his friend like that. It was like a gift. He wasn’t into spiritual bullshit, but damn. "Damn. That Mouse had become his friend was a gift, but a curse as well. If he’d left that whole situation alone, would Mouse — would Ja...
The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So pa...
Grandpa Sereno: "There is nothing as dangerous as fear, fear of people who are different than you. Fear is the REAL danger and we must start to put all our efforts into fighting THAT instead of each other. Fight fear not people!!! Let there be light!
Parents who daily read Robert Lewis Stevenson to their children and surrounds them with blocks, plastic animals, and some cardboard boxes or kitchen pots and pans are going to produce a qualitatively different child from those who spend that time on ...
If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules - since that is a description, not of the of death, but simply of death itself, seen from a different angle.
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous a...
She was a little thing, too, inciting that basic compulsion in him as a man to protect her in so hectic a place as post-war Israel. Even so, his actions were borne out of an entirely different instinct, altogether: to fool her and anyone within a dar...
It could all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit...
History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to le...
Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.
Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was just too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn't realize it until the day we killed him.
I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across univ...
There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened diff...
You're an unusual person," she said. "Bill didn't like you, but he never likes anything different. He's so—so prosaic. Don't you think that when a person gets older he should become—broadened in his outlook?
Sentimentality is so apt to creep in if we write at length about children as seen by their elders. And the reality of childhood, as we all experienced it, creeps out. For we all remember that our childhood, as lived, was immeasurably different from w...
