By making our defenseless planet the ultimate beneficiary of our economic activity, we align our values with a different set of motivations. When we begin to see life as an interdependent mesh, we place the survival of the human species on equal foot...
You perform as well as you believe yourself capable of performing. You are as effective as you believe yourself to be in whatever you do. You can never be better or different on the outside than you believe yourself to be on the inside.
Jack was unexpectedly moved when he swore allegiance to the king and country. He had served both for years, could easily have laid down his life. Yet it was different to pledge his loyalty and best efforts toward governing this nation. Dying was easi...
The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something ...
Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this lif...
There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into politic...
Every child comes into this world as a gift to humanity. It is up to us, as adults, to see that they are properly taken care of and given all the love and attention they deserve. If we did so, I have no doubt our world would be drastically different ...
What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing— , as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almi...
You can wait as long as you like, pretty one, it won't make any difference. He will never see you as anything more than some victim he has to protect. Why he thinks it his duty to protect you from the inevitable, I do not know... unless he knows some...
His very limbs feel different, as if they know that sometime soon there might be a little softness, a little love to spend like money, and the body's whole business won't be to keep itself alive on skinflint rations. Yes, she is a pleasant girl, inte...
Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog's owner. But no man --spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort-- may become a dog's Master without consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unrese...
Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before.
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not...
At the heart of the American paradigm is the perception that law and its agents . . . police officers, correctional officers, attorneys and judges . . . are color-blind and thus justice is impartial, objective and seeks la verdad (the truth). But, la...
This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this differen...
The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was...
I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happine...
There comes a time in some relationships when no matter how sincere the attempt to reconcile the differences or how strong the wish to recreate a part of the past once shared, the struggle becomes so painful that nothing else is felt and the world an...
By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were. ...Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferio...
We fall in love and let our minds fall apart.. We let ourselves fall, and keep falling.. Our minds are caught by one another, mixed up in a random puzzle, piece by piece put together into a different reality.
Thinking about work as a day job has made a big difference in the way I approach what I do. It also helped me not to confuse who I am with what I do.