Atkins For Life Quotes

There's no pain in packing up a life you don't remember.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Taking care of yourself means finding a balance that works for you, then having the discipline to maintain that balance.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die. - Abraham Lincoln

When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Though this was all but a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect; Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God’s sake, that they might not be sent to England.

The lesson to me is that you can focus on something going well, or something beautiful, or something interesting -- even amidst terrible times.

The trick is people who are most productive tend to say no to things that are unimportant to them and focus on what they believe matters.

It seemed in life, whenever you were wanted, it was for some discussion or explanation. Silence was just something to be filled.

Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.

Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don’t matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.

Proceeding when there are obvious issues is a dumb thing to do. Even if it’s inconvenient or painful, I’ve learned, I’m better off doing nothing when the only available choice has glaring issues.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

In the November 1940 week of nightmares, when mighty German planes bombed London, British bombers retaliated by attacking Berlin, where the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, was pressing Hitler for an answer to just exactly when German forces would invade the British Isles. We had heard of the conference beforehand,' Churchill told Parliament, ' and, although not invited to join in the discussion, did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.

1. Create space. 2. Try not to worry. 3. Don't do really dumb things. 4. Build character and make friends. 5. Care for yourself and others. 6. Laugh. 7. Do what you love. 8. Embrace change. 9. Learn from experience. 10. Have dreams and work towards them. 11. Epilogue. 12. Afterword - the world beyond us. 13. Acknowledgements.

denial – is common. Most of us ignore reality in some facet of our lives. It’s often easier to believe things will somehow solve themselves,

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

As Winston Churchill said: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

that I wasn’t going crazy. For a long time I thought that this story should begin with what happened to me at the church, when my life

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. -- Mark Twain

Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.

Although I heard From the outset that a meeting Can only mean to part, I gave myself to love for you Unconscious of the coming dawn.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In other words, just because something happened once doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen again in the same way.

This matters. Real friends - people you trust, respect, laugh with, and can rely on - are a vitally important part of life. No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends. As the expression goes: greed is a hole you can never fill

To allow yourself time to think, there are many non- technological tricks to managing information. All of them require you to make choices to focus your energy. I like to set aside blocks of time for specific activities - even to read or chat.

Of course, activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success -- being busy just means being busy. I know many people who work super hard to fill up the spaces in their lives, so they won’t have to think. A wise colleague calls this “numbing out”. They may accomplish their goals, but they’re unlikely to be fulfilled or do truly creative work. I know other people who fill their free time with meaningless activities. They’re also busy, but they neither achieve much, nor are they satisfied.

How many movies have you seen where the hero or heroine quits a job they hate to pursue their life dreams? These movies wouldn’t be made, and they wouldn’t resonate with so many people, if they didn’t contain an important desire that most people deny themselves.

Laugh. We’re all going to be dead anyway some day. So while you should try your hardest to make the most of your life, when something funny happens, when you make a mistake, or even (and perhaps especially) when bad things happen, it’s easier if you can laugh about yourself and the world.

I try to put things into two buckets: one I can do something about and one I can’t. The things I can’t do anything about, I try to ignore. There’s no use, for example, being jealous of other people’s success or good luck; it won’t make me any happier. Nor is there any upside in worrying about a bad situation in which I find myself. There is, however, a lot to be gained from considering how I can move to a better place.

Know yourself. To be happy, you need to pay attention to who you are, what you want, and how you feel, versus staying busy just doing ’stuff,’or doing what other people want or expect you to do. This requires both self awareness and introspection: if you pay attention to how you feel, what you like and what you want (as well as what makes you feel sad, angry, fearful and confused), the world is likely to look quite different. Many people are afraid of being introspective because they feel vulnerable. But without a willingness to open up, you won’t understand yourself and you can’t ultimately be truly happy.

Perhaps nowhere is modern chemistry more important than in the development of new drugs to fight disease, ameliorate pain, and enhance the experience of life. Genomics, the identification of genes and their complex interplay in governing the production of proteins, is central to current and future advances in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetic information modifies an individual's response to drugs and offering the prospect of personalized medicine, where a cocktail of drugs is tailored to an individual's genetic composition. Even more elaborate than genomics is proteomics, the study of an organism's entire complement of proteins, the entities that lie at the workface of life and where most drugs act. Here computational chemistry is in essential alliance with medical chemistry, for if a protein implicated in a disease can be identified, and it is desired to terminate its action, then computer modelling of possible molecules that can invade and block its active site is the first step in rational drug discovery. This too is another route to the efficiencies and effectiveness of personalized medicine.

This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).

collective nouns. I used to make lists of them: a watch of nightingales, a stare of owls, a mutation of thrushes, a murder of crows. I look at my hollow oak and I think of all the life teeming inside her, unseen, concealed, unappreciated but vital.

In love with life but not living

Manson attracted the attention of another woman, Patricia Krenwinkel, on Manhattan Beach in 1967. Krenwinkel later said that Manson was the first person who had ever told her she was beautiful and that she had sex with him on the first night they met. Thoroughly transfixed by Manson and desperate to become one of his girls, Krenwinkel left her job, car, apartment, and last paycheck behind and returned with the budding family to San Francisco. Krenwinkel gave Manson her father’s credit card and the foursome survived for a while by stealing and writing bad checks. Susan “Sadie” Atkins was the next woman to join the Manson Family. Atkins was an ex-convict who was supporting herself by topless dancing. Manson was drawn to Atkins when he learned that she had danced in a cabaret led by the self-styled leader of the Satanic Church, Anton LaVey. Atkins was a heavy drug-user when she met Manson and was easily convinced to join his family and to set about recruiting more members, preferably male. Atkins was able to lure Bruce Davis to join the family in the fall of 1967, the first male member and a man who was later described as Manson’s right-hand man. Davis met the family when they were in Oregon. Manson had traded his minibus for a full-size yellow school bus and had taken his family on a tour of the American West; he had decided the family should move to Los Angeles. The Haight had become too dangerous, Manson said, life would be better for the family in L.A. What he didn’t tell his family was that the real reason he wanted to move to Los Angeles was to pursue his dreams of stardom. Charles Manson was looking for a record deal.

In late 1968, Manson seized upon a new text for his prophecies: a musical training manual designed to help him create an army out of his cult—the Beatles’ 1968 album known as “the White Album.” Manson said that the Beatles had channeled his own teachings and used them to create the White Album, which he saw as a vehicle for sharing those teachings with the world. Whether Manson truly believed this fanciful idea is difficult to discern, but his starving, acid-frazzled followers believed it wholeheartedly. According to Manson, the White Album expressed the Beatles’ need for a spiritual savior and contained coded messages explicitly directed at him. Manson was, he believed, the savior the Beatles were looking for. Manson also used the coincidence of the Beatle’s song “Sexy Sadie,” his nickname for follower Susan Atkins, to prove his point and focused on the lyrics of “Piggies,” a song about class struggle, assuring his followers that they were the piggies the Beatles were writing about.

At the same time, Beausoleil got into trouble with a biker gang who hung out at Spahn Ranch. Beausoleil had sold mescaline manufactured by Gary Hinman to the bikers, who reported that the drugs were actually poison. They wanted their money back. Manson convinced Beausoleil to confront Hinman and demand from him not only the drug money but anything else of value he possessed. Beausoleil drove with Bruce Davis, Susan Atkins, and Mary Brunner to Hinman’s house on July 25, 1969. At the house, Beausoleil pulled a gun on Hinman when he refused to give back the money. There was nothing wrong with the mescaline, Hinman said. Susan kept the gun on Hinman while Beausoleil searched the house, but Hinman managed to overpower her, causing Beausoleil to beat him. Eventually, Davis drove back to Spahn Ranch to pick up Manson, who wanted to take part in what was to follow. Manson brought a sword and used it to slash Hinman’s face and cut off part of his ear. After Manson left, Beausoleil continued to beat Hinman over the course of the night and into the next day, with Susan and Mary still present. Hinman maintained that he had no money and threatened to call the police as soon as they left. Beausoleil called Manson to tell him about Hinman’s threat, and Manson ordered him to kill Hinman, making the murder look as though the Black Panthers did it in retaliation for the murder of Lotsa Poppa. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and used his blood to write the phrase “political piggy” on the wall. Beausoleil, Susan, and Mary tried to remove their fingerprints from Hinman’s home before they drove away in his cars. It took two weeks before anyone found Hinman’s body.

Sharon did have house guests to keep her company, though. Abigail Folger, the heiress to the Folger Coffee Company and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski, were also living at Cielo Drive. On the evening of August 8, 1969, Sharon made phone calls to her sister and her friend to cancel plans she had made, saying that she was tired and would spend the night in with another friend, Jay Sebring. The foursome, Sharon, Jay, Abigail, and Wojciech, ate at a local Mexican restaurant before returning to Sharon’s home at Cielo Drive. At 11.30 pm, Manson took his follower and right-hand man Tex Watson to one side and explained to him what he had to do. For the good of the family, Manson said, Tex had to lead the others to Cielo Drive to “totally destroy everyone in that house” and steal whatever they could. It’s unclear whether Manson even knew who was now living in that particular house, but he must have known they were rich and that they would serve as an example to the rest of the world that no one was safe. Manson rounded up Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and new follower Linda Kasabian. Dressed in black, the girls grabbed their knives and jumped into the car with Tex. Manson rested at Spahn Ranch, waiting for news from 10050 Cielo Drive. When the group arrived at the house, Tex climbed a telephone pole and snipped the wire. It was only now that the group had arrived that Tex told the girls exactly what they were there to do. If the girls were shocked, they didn’t show it, and they dutifully followed Tex’s lead in what came next. Steve Parent, an 18-year-old friend of the caretaker at Cielo Drive, was the first to be murdered. Parent was leaving the property in his car, having just visited his friend, when Tex shot him four times. Tex then entered the house through an open window and told the girls to follow him inside. New follower Kasabian was terrified and unable to help, so Tex told her to go back to the car and keep watch. In the sitting room of the house, Tex woke Wojciech who had fallen asleep on the couch, and Susan ventured upstairs where she found Abigail reading in bed. Abigail saw Susan but wasn’t alarmed at first. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to be in the house. But when Susan brandished a large knife and told Abigail, Sharon, and Jay to go with her downstairs, the group were terrified. Tex tied a rope around Wojciech’s throat, threw it over a beam in the house, and tied it around Sharon’s throat. Tex demanded money and grew furious when no one produced any, then he shot Jay in the stomach. As Sharon and Abigail screamed in terror, Tex stabbed Jay, over and over again. Realizing that no one was going to escape alive if he didn’t do something, Wojciech tried to break free, causing Susan to attack him with a knife. Wojciech was able to overpower Susan, so Tex shot him twice then battered him with the handle of his gun. Incredibly, Wojciech still managed to escape the house, but Tex caught up with him on the lawn and ended his life with a knife. Abigail also broke free of Patricia, but she caught her and stabbed her repeatedly. Tex finally ended Abigail’s life with his knife. Sharon was the only person still alive in the house; she pleaded for her life and the life of her unborn child. As Sharon begged, Susan Atkin’s began stabbing her, being sure to stab her directly through her pregnant stomach. Later, Susan said she “got sick of listening to her so I stabbed her and then I just stabbed her and she fell and I stabbed her again, just kept stabbing and stabbing.” The group almost left without writing the bloody graffiti Manson had explicitly told them to leave behind. Susan went back into the house and used a towel to write “PIG” on the front door of 10500 Cielo Drive in the victims’ blood.

Manson robbed the LaBiancas first, taking Rosemary’s purse from her. Next, he collected Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten from the car and brought them into the house, giving Tex the horrifying instruction to “make sure everybody does something.” Then Manson got back in the car and drove away from the LaBianca home with Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, and Clem Grogan inside. Inside the house, Tex Watson killed Leno LaBianca by stabbing him in the throat multiple times with a bayonet. He then used his bayonet on Rosemary who was trying to fight off Patricia and Lesley. Patricia stabbed Rosemary again when Tex, heeding Manson’s instruction that everyone should take part in the murders, told Leslie to take over. Leslie stabbed Rosemary LaBianca 16 times. Tex carved the word “WAR” into Leno’s stomach before all three murderers wrote the words “Rise,” “Death to pigs,” and “Healter Skelter (sic)” on the walls in blood. As a parting gesture, Patricia stabbed Leno’s corpse with a carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach alongside the steak knife she left in his neck. While all of this had been going on, Manson was driving the other family members around Los Angeles. Manson bought them chocolate milkshakes with Rosemary LaBianca’s money then had Linda ditch Rosemary’s wallet in the hope that a black person would find it and incriminate themselves in the LaBianca murders. But the killing still wasn’t over. Manson pressed the others to find out if they knew anyone in the Venice Beach area they were driving through. Linda Kasabian admitted to knowing an actor who lived nearby. Manson handed Linda a knife and told her to knock on this actor’s door and stab him. Manson also gave his gun to Clem, instructing him to shoot the actor if Linda was unable to stab him to death. Faced with the task of murdering an innocent man, Linda balked and told the others that she couldn’t remember where the actor lived. Manson drove back to Spahn Ranch, and the rest of the gang hitchhiked back.

Our bodies were designed by evolution to thrive on the African savanna. Twenty thousand years ago, people didn’t sit in forests or caves staring at computer screens, talking on telephones, or watching television. We were made to move, and our brains were made to think while in motion.

There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live. - Jean de la Bruyere

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Although what makes you passionate generally doesn’t change over time, what you want to do sometimes does.

Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

Closely allied with the contribution of chemists to the alleviation of disease is their involvement at a molecular level. Biology became chemistry half a century ago when the structure of DNA was discovered (in 1953). Molecular biology, which in large measure has sprung from that discovery, is chemistry applied to the functioning of organisms. Chemists, often disguised as molecular biologists, have opened the door to understanding life and its principal characteristic, inheritance, at a most fundamental level, and have thereby opened up great regions of the molecular world to rational investigation. They have also transformed forensic medicine, brought criminals to justice, and transformed anthropology.

The shift of chemistry’s attention to the processes of life has come at a time when the traditional branches of chemistry—organic, inorganic, and physical—have reached a stage of considerable maturity and are ready to tackle the awesomely complex network of processes going on inside organisms: human bodies in particular. The approach to the treatment, more importantly the prevention, of disease has been put on a rational basis by the discoveries that chemists continue to make. If you plan to enter this field, then genomics and proteomics will turn out to be of crucial importance to your work. This is truly a region of chemistry where you can feel confident about standing on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded you and know that you are attacking disease at its roots.

Then there is the dark side of chemistry. It would be inappropriate in this account of chemistry’s great achievements for no mention to be made of its ability to enhance humanity’s ability to damage and kill, for those achievements have come at a cost, in some cases to human life, in others to the environment.

So to make the most of your life, say no to things that don’t matter, work hard at what you love, and occasionally take time away from your core focus to rest so that your mind can be quiet for great insights to come.

Ideally, you want a job you’d do even if you weren’t paid to do it. That’s not an economic reality for most of us, but it’s the right goal to shoot for.

I try not to obsess on the past, but to learn from it. I try not to worry about the future, but to prepare for it. And while it’s difficult sometimes, I try to take pleasure in the moment, even when bad things happen.

I try to put things into two buckets: one I can do something about and one I can’t. The things I can’t do anything about, I try to ignore.

There are many things that are not nearly as dramatic, but can have a similarly negative long-term impact.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

To build trusting friendships, I’ve learned, it’s critical to be true to my passions, and express how I feel and what I want. If I weren’t open and honest, I wonder what sort of friends I’d have?

No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

You may not have the parents or the siblings you’d have chosen. You may not look the way you’d have picked. The people you love may not always love you back. You may not live where you’d like. You may not have the job you want, or get the promotion you believe you deserve. If you get married, it may not work out the way you thought it would. If you have children, they won’t always do what you’d like, and they may disappoint you sometimes. I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

To learn from your experience and the experience of others it’s important to try to be dispassionate in looking at the world and analyzing it.

Progress depends on action.

Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Most of us do the opposite -- with predictable results.

activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success

Further Reading Atwood, Kathryn. Women Heroes of World War II (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Copeland, Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2010). Cragon, Harvey. From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, 2003). Edsel, Robert. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Hachette Book Group, 2009). Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line (William Morrow, 2004). Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Hachette UK Book Group, 2005). Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma (Random House UK, 2014). Mazzeo, Tilar. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris (HarperCollins, 2015). Mulley, Clare. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). O’Keefe, David. One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada, 2013). Pearson, Judith. The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Hachette Book Group, 2014). Sebba, Anne. Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Stevenson, William. Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2007). Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Random House, Inc., 2011). Witherington Cornioley, Pearl; edited by Atwood, Kathryn. Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Chicago Review Press, 2015). From the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee/Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) Archives. NW32823—Demonstration of Kesselring’s “Fish Train” (TICOM/M-5, July 8, 1945).

We also live in a super competitive world. It’s likely the only way you’ll stand out at what you do is if you work very hard for long periods of time. It’s said that to become an expert in a given activity requires about 10,000 hours of practice. At 40 hours a week (doing nothing else, which is extremely unlikely) it takes five years of solid work to master a subject. And I’ve found the only way people have the stamina to outwork others, year after year, is when they love what they do.

Assuming your basic life needs are being met, you can choose to be happy if you want -- even when you make mistakes, or are in the middle of some pretty awful circumstances. If, however, you’re the sort of person who chooses to be unhappy, or filled with anxiety, chances are you’ll probably succeed with that as well. In thinking about this, I keep Mark Twain in mind: The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Atkins diet is not a "quick diet" as it is often presented. It is more a way of life. In obese individuals with cardiovascular disease, high blood sugar or triglycerides, or persons with epilepsy Atkins diet shows up as very successful long-term solution.

Other ex-lawyers become advocates in entirely different fields. Jen Atkins went from law to nursing, spending several years at home in between careers. As a cardiology nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, she now advocates for the youngest patients at a critical time. One of her long-term goals is to become an advocate for improving health care on a national level. Counseling

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. What else do you really need to know? :)

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Oh, and there's something else I'd never thought I'd end up being... and that's so completely in love with you that I can face all the shit life wants to throw at me, because it also gave me you

Sopilak took his hand and welcomed him to the circle, and picking up the rhythm, Atkins joined the chant, for he too honored the splendid white bear, that creature of the north that had been so majestic in life, so brave in death.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

Without chorophyll, the world would be a damp warm rock instead of the softly green haven of life that we know, for chlorphyll holds its magnesium eye to the sun and captures the energy of sunlight, in the first step of photosynthesis. For reasons we shall explore, magnesium has exactly the right features to make this process possible. Had the kingdom lacked this element, chlorophyll;’s eye would have been blind, phtosynthesis would not take place, and life as we know it would not exist.

the biggest mistake women make is they assume they can change men.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. - Abraham Lincoln

Character, I’ve found, is one of the most important things in life. Reputations can be manipulated in the short term, but people tend to get the reputations they deserve over time. Reputations are your personal brand. They’re influential in how well you do in both your professional and personal lives.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. -W. Edwards Deming

Alexander Graham Bell said: “When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Through chemistry we can unravel and comprehend the once inscrutable mysteries of the natural world. We can understand the green of a leaf and the red of a rose, the fragrance of a herb and new-mown hay. We can understand, in a halting but increasing way, the intricate and complex reticulation of processes in the natural world that constitute the awesome and multifaceted property we know as life. We are beginning, even more haltingly, to understand the chemical processes in our brains that enable us to perceive, wonder, and understand.

I want to share with you the thought that chemistry provides the infrastructure of the modern world. There is hardly an item of everyday life that is not furnished by it or based on the materials it has created. Take away chemistry and its functional arm the chemical industry and you take away the metals and other materials of construction, the semiconductors of computation and communication, the fuels of heating, power generation, and transport, the fabrics of clothing and furnishings, and the artificial pigments of our blazingly colourful world. Take away its contributions to agriculture and you let people die, for the industry provides the fertilizers and pesticides that enable dwindling lands to support rising populations. Take away its pharmaceutical wing and you allow pain through the elimination of anaesthetics and deny people the prospect of recovery by the elimination of medicines. Imagine a world where there are no products of chemistry (including pure water): you are back before the Bronze Age, into the Stone Age: no metals, no fuels except wood, no fabrics except pelts, no medicines except herbs, no methods of computation except with your fingers, and very little food.

Life is easy to identify but remarkably difficult to define. Too tight a definition excludes what looks like life and too loose captures too much. The capacity to self-replicate is a component of the definition, but not without its problems, as a mule is alive but sterile, and computer software can replicate itself, but we do not, in all honesty, think of it as being alive. It might be tempting to ascribe livingness to an entity that has emerged by evolution, but that would exclude the first living entity and any that we might synthesize from scratch in future. Organisms are organized structures; but so is an integrated circuit. Organisms are organized structures built and sustained by the flux of energy through their interiors and its dissipation into the surroundings; but so are the patterns of convection that can arise in heated liquids and, indeed, the atmosphere, to give rise to the weather: think tornado and hurricane. All known organisms are built from compounds of carbon; but if we succeeded in building a replicating, conscious, self-sustaining, energy-dissipating entity from silicon, would we deny that it was alive? Is a virus alive?

Like greater understanding coming from giants standing on the shoulders of earlier giants, the information in our genes has grown through the ages with information pitted against information, serendipitous junk waking up to discover that it is information, in an ever-changing arena. If you favour deep understanding without relinquishing wonder, or more positively and strongly, favour doubling wonder through deepening understanding, then bask in the illumination of that extraordinarily potent idea, that all living things have merely stumbled into their brief interlude of life. Not only are we stardust, we are the children of chaos.

More than anything, he wanted to open the window and jump out. He didn't want to hit the ground, he didn't want to roam or walk on those grotty, grimy, secretive streets. Not anymore. He wanted to jump out of the window and fly. It was so unfair. Being chained down here, with all the dustbin lorries and bin bags and dog muck and Costa cups. The birds got to fly away from it all. They came down, hopped about, and then took off when it all got too much. Found a tree. Or a mountain, or a river. Kept going. Higher and higher, further and further away. And singing, all the time, they were singing, and that was because they were free.

We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes noted: Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

A lot of apparently ’successful’ people believe they should delay enjoying life until later. First they work incredibly hard to get into the ’right’ schools; then they work even harder to get a coveted job; and then they work harder still for years to get to a certain position, or make a certain amount of money. The net of this whole adventure is that frequently it’s not until late in life, when a person’s health may be going, and a lot of their life is behind them, that they stop to think about what they want. And, by then, there may not be much they can do about it. They can't recover the time. And many people don’t even stop to think.

Warren Buffett refers to Rose Blumkin, a woman who escaped the Nazis before immigrating to America and founding Nebraska Furniture Mart, as having the ultimate standard for friendship. Ms. Blumkin apparently said she had a hard time making friends. She would ask herself: if the Nazis were to return, would a particular person hide her?

so

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.

have little doubt you’ll feel better if you have chosen to give something back. Our time on earth is limited, but you can extend your influence by helping

You need to understand your values and your priorities.

If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. -Dale Carnegie

Remember: take small steps. They work. Big steps often don’t. Over time, small steps add up, and you end up in a different place.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson

As Benjamin Franklin wrote: “You may delay, but time will not”.

If you live your life authentically, keep your word, admit mistakes, and admit what you don’t know, you’ll find people will trust you more over time, and you’ll become wiser too.

I once had a smart boss who told me if I wanted to do my best work, I needed to do fewer things, and really focus on what mattered. That was great advice. Many people confuse want to with have to. In other words, just because someone else wants you to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. You can’t get more time, so how you spend the time you have is critical. Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don’t matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.