The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. 'Toxic' comes from toxicon, Pendell tells us, with a root meaning of 'a poisoned arrow.' ...
If you are not in control of your thoughts then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power, regardless of whatever else you accomplish. If you are not aware of the thoughts that you are thinking in each moment, t...
I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to w...
But what were you supposed to do with that weight? Once it was on you? Just be a man? Just suck it up? Maybe you were. Maybe that was the real test. Maybe that is exactly the thing that made you a man: the ability to function with the worst possible ...
Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it...
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and he...
Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite...
Our stories are timeless and tested. They are about us, a people of tremendous strength.Our songs are full of love and life— and the ups and downs of both. They are soulful with the rhythms of a heart that is in sync with nature and wonderment. Our...
AA is a spiritual program and Step 3 is a quintessentially spiritual Step. It is the ultimate anti-self Step. Thus, in a very real sense, we cannot practice the 12 Steps of AA merely as self-help. They are not intended to be. – p. 159
By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who ca...
The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the tran...
Sexual fantasies say a lot about the emotional places we go to in our minds. When you find out what’s so sexy about something to you or your lover, you will both want to do it more and you might start to crave the searching for whatever else you ha...
To truly try means to accept God's love, his healing, to accept the world can be ugly, but your heart doesn't have to be. It takes courage, Finley the warrior. You haven't held on to your anger and bitterness in search of healing, but as a banner of ...
I think the tingles are important. They are real, and I am in favor of their survival. But they are not the basis for a satisfactory marriage. I am not suggesting that on should marry without the tingles. Those warm, excited feelings, the chill bumps...
Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in inco...
I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Irania...
His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man o...
Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Ba...
It wasn't chance at all, Gilly. People are yearning creatures. They imagine and strive and hope. Stories about an enchanted band of vagabonds existed before the Carnival itself. But those fairy tales become the focal point of billions of daydreams, a...
My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes...
He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and...
