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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 76fbf7d | To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence." | humanity individuality life | Frank Herbert | |
| 42cf0ae | Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 694a90b | It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will. | science-fiction | Frank Herbert | |
| f658773 | Maud'Dib could indeed, see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond the valley. Just so, Maud'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the fut.. | Frank Herbert | ||
| 67e5966 | Any conversation is a unique jazz performance. Some are more pleasing to the ears, but that is not necessarily a measurement of their importance | Frank Herbert | ||
| cceaa0f | We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 072019c | I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?" | philosophy theology | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 4c3ad2f | I find that some philosophers think that my whole approach to qualia is not playing fair. I don't respect the standard rules of philosophical thought experiments. "But Dan, your view is so counterintuitive!" No kidding. That's the whole point. Of course it is counterintuitive. Nowhere is it written that the true materialist theory of consciousness should be blandly intuitive. I have all along insisted that it may be very counterintuitive. T.. | qualia | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| e1029ca | We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future." | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 5cb22cc | My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse--and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of--a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there! | religion science | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 356b2a3 | Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 8728052 | There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 9cfcf2c | He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| b54104d | How can you hope to recognize good and evil for what they truly are if you have no belief in a moral authority greater than yourself? | Ted Dekker | ||
| 194dd55 | Grow up? Get herself straightened out? Her mind reeled from the verbal battering. No matter what she did, her father would tell her she was wrong. Worthless. Undeserving. | Ted Dekker | ||
| 2d79aa8 | At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling. | anticipation virgin-suicides | Jeffrey Eugenides | |
| f594a81 | Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 383b8e0 | But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| ce51c9f | I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| d8ae2e3 | Chucking her under her chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets." And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl." | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 6e1c975 | It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began t.. | Jeffrey Eugenides | ||
| 05ec204 | College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? Evolution had created the penis. It was a useful structure for getting certain things done. And if it worked for the pi.. | penises phallocentrism | Jeffrey Eugenides | |
| b8a5b19 | Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French. | english female french learning male | Jeffrey Eugenides | |
| 3eeb712 | Tolstoy went on to observe,"This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar.. | Doris Kearns Goodwin | ||
| 3be9795 | Achievements can bring you satisfaction but not happiness. | David D. Burns | ||
| 6bcc5cc | Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. | Stephen R. Covey | ||
| 67238fc | People who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done. | job proactive solution | Stephen R. Covey | |
| e20278d | Show me someone who is humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her through or around these challenges, and I'll show you supreme power of choice. | Stephen R. Covey | ||
| 4fbcedb | If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success. | Stephen R. Covey | ||
| 72e71a1 | Better never begin; once begun, better finish. | Dan Millman | ||
| 283bb73 | Use whatever knowledge you have but see its limitations. Knowledge alone does not suffice; it has no heart. No amount of knowledge will nourish or sustain your spirit; it can never bring you ultimate happiness or peace. Life requires more than knowledge; it requires intense feeling and constant energy. Life demands right action if knowledge is to come alive. | Dan Millman | ||
| 27c260a | They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense | true-crime | Truman Capote | |
| e40968c | She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle. | Truman Capote | ||
| 5567249 | That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true. | Truman Capote | ||
| e82c181 | Two features in his personality make-up stand out as particularly pathological. The first is his 'paranoid' orientation toward the world. He is suspicious and distrustful of others, tends to feel that others discriminate against him, and feels that others are unfair to him and do not understand him. He is overly sensitive to criticism that others make of him, and cannot tolerate being made fun of. He is quick to sense slight or insult in th.. | Truman Capote | ||
| 672cb74 | In school we only learn to recognize the words and to spell but the application of these words to real life is another thing that only life and living can give us. | Truman Capote | ||
| 0f62f3a | Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 3e686ad | She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough; it could not buy more than a few moments... | other-girls | Edith Wharton | |
| 5e9bbcb | You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! | Edith Wharton | ||
| e5fe81a | The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic | pain reality | Edith Wharton | |
| d2a0b03 | He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it, which was true. | Douglas Adams | ||
| 55f9ec1 | For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here." | Douglas Adams | ||
| 0c7ccc3 | Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of bother, hope that's all behind you now." "Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?" "Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things .. | humor | Douglas Adams | |
| 0c0d9eb | The only thing nicer than a phone that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all) was six phones that didn't ring all the time (or indeed at all). | intrusion phone quiet | Douglas Adams |