We can either own our circumstances and be creative in them, or we can throw up our hands and say, I cannot be held accountable because the conditions are not ideal.
I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.
[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
Commitment doesn't have conditions. A compassionate samurai follows through whether it feels good or not; average people do what they feel like doing.
The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.
God’s grace does not require a condition to abound. However to obtain the promises of his blessings, you have to strive for it, fight for it, work hard for it and insist upon it.
Hans Selye, the pioneer in the understanding of human stress, was often asked the following question: "What is the most stressful condition a person can face?" His unexpected response: "Not having something to BELIEVE in.
The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, a...
There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ....
A day came when I should have died, and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Never worry for fear you have broken a man's heart; at the worst it is only sprained and a week's rest will put it in perfect working condition again.
Waiting is an exercise of faith that demonstrates the condition of our hearts. Waiting on God is an act of faith. And faith is what separates the men from the boys.
One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It’s hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It’s implicit.
...one cannot but wonder how an environment can make people despair and sit idle and then, by changing the conditions, one can transform the same people into matchless performers.
Liberty is the first condition of growth. It is wrong, a thousand times wrong, if any of you dares to say, 'I will work out the salvation of this woman or child.
My autism is a very mild form. It was diagnosed at the age of 25, partly because it wasn't diagnosable as a teenager (this is Asperger's syndrome, specifically). But there were certainly traits within that condition, within the autism spectrum in gen...
I grew up on a farm in Oregon, an adopted child, with one sibling, and parents the age of all my peers' grandparents. We lived in isolation from the people around us, and it was always a struggle to cope with as a child. The heart can really expire u...
An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world w...
Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much se...
The most important thing about Jazz at Lincoln Center is the fact that it's the first time that perhaps the most important art form in American culture has a place to really exhibit itself and dedicated to its own particular conditions of performance...
