Despite the best of intentions, people create rules variously and often in reaction to behaviors deemed unacceptable to the larger goals of the group. That is why we often find ourselves revising the rules when new conditions reveal their loopholes.
Every day that we read the news we have the possibility of being confronted with a fact about our world that is wildly different from what we thought we knew.
When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it's more like a whole symphony orchestra.
To be silent. In hopes of not offending, in hopes of being accepted. But what happened to people who never spoke, never raised their voices? Kept everything inside? Gamache knew what happened. Everything they swallowed, every word, thought, feeling r...
There's a bug inside you. Growing in you, eating everything you've forced yourself to forget, everything you don't want to think about. Your bug will decide your fate one day. And... chances are, you will die because of it.
Shane looked faintly injured. “I make it my business to know everything about silver. And I saw your notes. I study up on everything when it comes to your boss, anyway.” There was a flicker of jealousy about that, but she didn’t have time, or e...
Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could only be moments away from disaster. That everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment...
When you change the way you see and interpret events, suddenly everything will be different for you. Everything will make sense.
Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have thi...
And is it not the artists that make art? Well, no: criticism is now the substance of art making to such a degree that many of today’s public artists do away with the product as an issue, and make public debate the contents of their art. In doing so...
In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.
If a human being is to ascend to the heights of life, they must first know who they are, where they currently stand, and what they are actually (in truth, not in their limited idea) capable of doing, becoming, and achieving in the world.
Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why ...
He'd been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they'd be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you wo...
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capaci...
Like all living things, you were created for unlimited growth and possibilities. Keep growing. Keep changing. Be everything you were meant to be.
There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep...
If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would be stymied. Fortunately, we do ...
The scent of growth, quiet and green, hung heavy in the air. I heard everything. I saw everything. I could count the craters on the moon. I could count every mosquito buzz past, bypassing my tender skin out of respect for a fellow bloodsucker.
In 1916, Infants' and Children's Wear Review insisted upon pink for boys and blue for girls. In 1939, Parents magazine claimed that pink was a good color for boys because it was a pale version of red, which was the color of Mars, the war god. Blue wa...
Put in the bluntest possible terms, what I discovered was that the U.S. secret intelligence community was collecting only information it considered secret, while ignoring the eighty to ninety percent of the information in the world, in all languages,...
