is not about individuals becoming great in order to impact the world, it is about discovering the greatness of individuals as they use what they already have to touch the lives of the dying, sick and poor. It is about normal people with careers, fami...
The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy’s writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral valu...
My mother's mother came to this country in the usual way--she got on a boat with other immigrants and sailed from Sicily. She wasn't one of them, however: neither tired nor poor or part of any huddled mass. Instead, she traveled alone, with her money...
Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to evil are evaluated at the...
What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? ... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-c...
If the gooseberry said: 'I haven't the heart to be a real proper gooseberry because if everyone were a gooseberry the world wouldn't continue to exist' this would be a stupid argument and the world would be deprived of a useful fruit. If you are call...
In a world so empty of human life, there was comfort in the thought that an invisible realm of spirits was aware of their existence, cared about their actions, and perhaps directed their steps. Even a stern or inimical spirit who cared enough to dema...
We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the w...
Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter...
A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the worl...
Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it's something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words,...
Sales is a solo endeavor, a cold and lonely venture. Or it can be viewed in that aloof manner. It can also be viewed as something warm and symbiotic, and I think that’s what all the best salespeople have in common. They all choose to look at sales ...
They say, the sun brings life to the world. The sun will rise and look is it not a corpse? Everything is dead and there are corpses everywhere. Just people and around them silence__that is the world! "Love one another"__who said that? Whose command i...
Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buz...
We’d all lost ourselves and found something far more significant together. We reached with gaping wounds for a healing we desired so badly, like a blind man picturing the world around him—the lively children skipping rope, green grass, blue sky. ...
If you were to tell the thing down at the bottom of that pit it had napped through forty-two presidential inaugurations, eight British coronations, sixteen popes and three number ones by the Danish pop group, Aqua, it would have told you to stop talk...
The intangible, as you can guess, creates some decidedly strange and perceived dichotomies for scientific interpretations. Ask a scientist what the definition of electricity is and he might rattle off, “It is the physical phenomena arising from the...
We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves." The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest...
Knowledge can be acquired by a suitable and complete study, no matter what the starting point is. Only one must know how to 'learn.' What is nearest to us is man; and you are the nearest of all men to yourself. Begin with the study of yourself; remem...
Are you there? I call for you. I've been calling your name, Searching every place in my mind to find you, I've lost count of the days, the hours, minutes, and seconds. The world that looked so vast is now small and empty. Did you take all the magic w...
Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all ...
