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A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
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Clifford D. Simak
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A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
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Clifford Geertz
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Let it shine, the light in you.
Oh, and that's delighting me!
Various colors shining through.
Elated, it fills my soul with ecstasy.
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Ana Claudia Antunes (A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job)
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Don't devalue yourself, you are the world's most precious stone.
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Michael Bassey Johnson (The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes)
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Entrepreneurship has a trailblazing aura. It can change the way of our livings. Entrepreneurs are just like the national assets to be cultivated. They are motivated and remunerated to the greatest possible extent.
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Aman Mehndiratta (Aman Mehndiratta)
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Nonetheless the man (Hitler) had a remarkable ability to transform himself into something far more compelling, especially when speaking in public or during private meetings when some topic enraged him. He had a knack as well for projecting an aura of sincerity that blinded onlookers to his true motives and beliefs..
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Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
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I know there’s a reality
I never understood
As I wander in Utopia
But I find a courage In your aura
I know there’s a world
Better than this
Both for you and me
And I’ll show it
Because I believe in miracles
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Jazalyn (Hollow: a Love Like a Life)
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Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations. White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash. The
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Jesmyn Ward (The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race)
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Approachable people . . .
1. Use body language to their advantage.
2. Are open-minded to new people and new experiences.
3. Encourage others to feel better about themselves.
4. Are willing to be told not what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.
5. Provide an inviting aura that is warm and comforting.
6. Realize that authenticity and transparency earn trust.
7. Intuitively tune into the feelings and needs of others.
8. Are emotionally steady and respond appropriately when they sense awkwardness or discomfort in others.
9. Radiate happiness and curbs cynicism.
10. Provide a safe environment for others to express themselves.
11. Make others feel valued and appreciated.
12. Listen and consider other people’s viewpoints and opinions.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
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When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we've actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.
Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn't have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures, and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.
White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama's ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancements, there's a reaction, a backlash.
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Carol Anderson (The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race)
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Enthusiasm wins it all the time. While it may seem natural to wear a long face sometimes and go under the weather on occasions, experience has shown it is far better to be on the attack by constantly creating a momentum of energy, excitement and passion. Imagine you approaching every challenge with the trio of Passion, Excitement, and Energy? Add Hope to that list, and you will dare any challenge, scale any wall, and endure any pain. The positivity they produce around you is tremendous, They create an aura of possibility, or I dare say, invincibility. In this atmosphere, God is motivated to act on your behalf, rearranging people, resources and events, to open doors and create a way for you in the midst of hostilities. No wonder, enthusiasm was originally associated with the 'possession or presence of a god'.
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Abiodun Fijabi
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Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles.
Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state—as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two types of bureaucracy, especially if one pays too much attention to the striking psychological similarity of petty officials. But if the French people have made the very serious mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country—even though the consequence has been that nobody rules it. The French atmosphere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexation; but it has not created and aura of pseudomysticism.
And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when it becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowledge. Within the framework of such endless interpretive speculation, so characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth. There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inexhaustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and releases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is consistently checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence and controllable experience.
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Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
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At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word “fucking” as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian “solidarity” with the “latinos” and “Asians” in the kitchen, her generalizations about “right-wingers” and “Kansas” and “Peoria,” her facility with phrases like “men and women of color,” the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling’s neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling’s windpipe until it cracked.
Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms…
Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.
“If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.
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Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections)
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Let the starlight shine upon you, let it lead you to your peace...”
“Wil?” I murmured.
This was the lullaby Mother used to sing to us when we were little. The song Ethereal was supposed to be singing to her firstborn daughter, back at the dawn of time.
“It’s your fire that keeps you breathing and will never let you cease...
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Victoria Moschou (Guardian of the Auras (The Auras' Chest, #1))
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Stories create an aura of liveliness
Where every mind and soul revolve around it
-Pratima Raj
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Pratima Raj (Cocktales)
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Stories create an aura of liveliness
Where every mind and soul revolve around it
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Pratima Raj (Cocktales)
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The more often we fall in line with the poor language and attitude of the drowning masses, the more we sound and look like victims. We must never forget that ours is a world of distracted people craving Personal Freedom but often choosing to operate from fear. And so if we aren’t conscious with our will and vigilance, we risk sliding into their tragedy. Life can lose its vibrant aura and charm if we do not bend the energy of our minds toward positive engagement and appreciation
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Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power)
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When a person exudes passion, it is evident that they love what they are doing. Their passion projects an aura of confidence and decisiveness.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Being: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Presence & Essence for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #1))
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Energy & Aura. You release your own distinctive energy signature which naturally produces a physical presence. When you emit positive energy, thoughts, feelings, and vibrations, you attract more positives into your life.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
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They emanate an essence of caring, love, and compassion towards the people they know, and generously extend their aura to the new people they encounter.
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Susan C. Young (The Art of Being: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Presence & Essence for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #1))
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NASA engineers and technicians at the Cape were pushing themselves so hard in the final weeks people had to be ordered home to rest. It was a grueling time and yet the sort of interlude of adrenal exhilaration that men remember all their lives. It was an interlude of the dedication of body and soul to a cause such as men usually experience only during war. Well … this was war, even though no one had spelled it out in just that way. Without knowing it, they were caught up in the primordial spirit of single combat. Just days from now one of the lads would be up on top of the rocket for real. Everyone felt he had the life of the astronaut, whichever was chosen (only a few knew), in his hands. The MA–1 explosion here at the Cape nine months ago had been a chilling experience, even for veterans of flight test. The seven astronauts had been assembled for the event, partly to give them confidence in the new system. And their gullets had been stuck up toward the sky like everybody else’s, when the whole assembly blew to bits over their heads. In a few days one of those very lads would be lying on top of a rocket (albeit a Redstone, not an Atlas) when the candle was lit. Just about everybody here in NASA had seen the boys close up. NASA was like a family that way. Ever since the end of the Second World War the phrase “government bureaucracy” had invariably provoked sniggers. But a bureaucracy was nothing more than a machine for communal work, after all, and in those grueling and gorgeous weeks of the spring of 1961 the men and women of NASA’s Space Task Group for Project Mercury knew that bureaucracy, when coupled with a spiritual motivation, in this case true patriotism and profound concern for the life of the single-combat warrior himself—bureaucracy, poor gross hideously ridiculed twentieth-century bureaucracy, could take on the aura, even the ecstasy, of communion. The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, “Well, that Atlas vehicle’s given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we’re gonna make it.” Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it. It took on a religious dimension that engineers, no less than pilots, would resist putting into words. But all felt it.
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Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
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Michelangelo was not very handsome, with a forehead that was too broad, a crooked nose — broken during a brawl in his youth — bushy eyebrows, ears that stuck out a little. He couldn’t stand his own face, it was said. It was often said that if he sought perfection of features, beauty in faces, it’s because he himself lacked them completely. Only old age and fame would give him an unparalleled aura, like a kind of patina on an object that started out ugly. Perhaps it’s in this frustration that we can find the energy of his art; in the violence of the era, in the humiliation of artists, in rebellion against nature, in the lure of money, the inextinguishable thirst for advancement and glory that is the most powerful of motivators.
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Mathias Énard (Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants)
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Originalitatea unui popor nu se manifestă numai în creațiile ce-i aparțin exclusiv, ci și în modul cum asimilează motivele de largă circulație. Fenomenul asimilării devine din cale afară interesant și concludent, mai ales când temele și motivele se prezintă spiritului unui popor cu prestigiul intangibilității, cu aura lucrului supus unui regim special de protecție. În cazul legendelor, cum este cea povestită, motivele sunt sacrale, canonice. Cât de neconformist este în stare, totuși, spiritul unui popor să trateze și să modifice asemenea motive!
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Lucian Blaga (Luntrea lui Caron)
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Do you remember how our mothers kept telling us that we should be proud of who we were because we’d have to live with that self every single day for the rest of our lives? How we should always be the masters of our thoughts, embrace everything, both positive and negative, but never let our judgement be clouded, still learn from our
mistakes and experiences?
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Victoria Moschou (Guardian of the Auras (The Auras' Chest, #1))
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I've walked in many places where my energy was misunderstood. But, I've also walked in many spaces where my energy connected.
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Mitta Xinindlu
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Réalise toi. Réalise tes capacités. Sois sincère envers toi même en priorité. Continue d’avancer sur le chemin de la bravoure. Persévère sur le sentier de ta passion. Marche, et ne t’arrêtes pas tant que tu n’auras pas atteint ton but.
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Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
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I realised the power of the human aura through my dealings with other people. Some would measure me up, and want to compete with or against me. Whereas, some would see a leader in me. A leader whom they could trust. There were no words or actions involved. It's always the aura that shifted the atmosphere in the room.
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Mitta Xinindlu
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Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations.
Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation.
Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success.
Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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He is well-mannered and generous. Kind and dignified. Loving and loyal. There is an aura about him that sets him apart.
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Gift Gugu Mona (A Man of Valour: Idioms and Epigrams)
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Male Name-Pictures JAMES (Jim)—a Slim Jim JOHN—a toilet (my apologies to anyone named John) ROBERT (Bob)—a buoy bobbing on the water’s surface MICHAEL (Mike)—a microphone WILLIAM (Bill)—a dollar bill DAVID—a statue RICHARD—I’m sure you can think of something for this one CHARLES—a river (I’m from Boston) JOSEPH (Joe)—a cup of coffee THOMAS (Tom)—a drum CHRISTOPHER (Chris)—an “X” (like a crisscross) DANIEL (Dan)—a lion (lion’s den) PAUL—a bouncing ball MARK—a bruise (as in, “That’s gonna leave a mark!”) DONALD—a duck GEORGE—a gorge KENNETH (Ken)—a hen STEVEN (Steve)—a stove EDWARD (Ed)—a bed BRIAN—a brain RONALD (Ron)—a man running ANTHONY (Tony)—a skeleton (Bony Tony) KEVIN—the number seven JASON—a man being chased (chasin’) MATTHEW (Matt)—a welcome mat Female Name-Pictures MARY—the Virgin Mary PATRICIA (Pat)—a baseball bat LINDA—beauty crown (linda means “pretty” in Spanish) BARBARA—barbed-wire fence ELIZABETH—an ax (Lizzie Borden) JENNIFER—a heart (Jennifer Love Hewitt) MARIA—a wedding dress (as in, “I’m gonna marry ya”) SUSAN—a pair of socks (Susan sounds like “shoes and . . .”) MARGARET (Peg)—a pirate’s peg leg DOROTHY (Dot)—Dots candy LISA—the Mona Lisa NANCY—pants KAREN—a carrot BETTY—a poker chip HELEN—a demon SANDRA (Sandy)—the beach DONNA—a duck (as in, Donald) CAROL—bells (“Carol of the Bells”) RUTH—a roof SHARON—a toddler throwing a fit because she doesn’t want to share MICHELLE—a missile LAURA—an “aura” SARAH—cheerleader’s pom-poms (rah-rah!) KIMBERLY—a very burly woman named Kim DEBORAH—a bra A great way to practice this technique is to jump on Facebook and just start browsing profiles. You’ll have an endless supply of names and faces from which to try creating name-pictures and associations.
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Tim David (Magic Words: The Science and Secrets Behind Seven Words That Motivate, Engage, and Influence)