Because the culture we breathe and work in rushes against rest. It equates our worth with production and wealth and fame. The more we work toward those goals, the more society assigns us worth.
I do not perceive why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty. Woman's usual occupations of hand and mind will be as open to me then as they are now; or with no important variation. If I draw less, I shall read mo...
The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you seem to be naturally motivated to continue.
Under Capitalism the most important thing is to squeeze out more and more money for a few people to spend. This means that most of the other people -- as well as the earth and the sea and all the creatures and plants and goggas -- have to pay the pri...
More and more obstacles seem to be other people's issues that form in the way of a hand to block one, to take notice of them? Sometimes noticing ahead of time, and taking the time to notice them, makes the hand part of an arm that embraces you. The o...
A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by frictio...
I've never wanted more, until I met you." I gasp, reeling. Oh my. Isn't this what I want? He wants more. He wants it, too! My inner goddess has back-flipped off the podium and is doing a cartwheels around the stadium. It's not just me.
Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more inti...
Our images of God matter. Just as how we conceptualize God affects what we think the Christian life is about, so do our images of God.
We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the m...
The more you are grateful for what you have the more you can live fully in the present. When you live in the present moment the greater you can build stepping stones for a brighter future.
I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.
Destiny is no more than the fulfillment of purposive potentialities within us. The human cerebral cortex is a single sheet composed of more neurons than there are stars in the known universe folded like a paper crane to fit in a quart-sized cubbyhole...
Then he heard a terrible cry that pulled at his insides, that expressed agony of a kind that neither flame nor curse could cause, and he stood up, swaying, more frightened than he had been that day, more frightened, perhaps, than he had been in his w...
Most people think the more money, luxury or fame they have, the more successful they are; but I think that the true sign of success depends on how many positive emotions they experience each day.
So there was love, once. More than love. And now there is more than hate. Mortals have no words for what we gods feel. Gods have no words for such things. But love like that doesn't just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is a...
He stood and inhaled, then walked a few more feet, stooped, and prodded a chunk of rabbit fur. “I’m definitely thinking something with more body parts,” I said. “Like a head.” He gave a snort of a laugh. “It’s probably around here somew...
I gaze out of the window at the lanes of red taillights streaming towards the hills, the city laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, the view confirming that I was much more alone than I thought, and all those red lights inspired nothing more tha...
Too many people think that finding the reason God placed us here on earth will come in one assignment with a big title and complete job description. I believe that discovering our purpose will unfold slowly, like a seed planted deep in the ground.
I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
