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I want to live my life in such a way that when I get out of bed in the morning, the devil says, "aw shit, he's up!
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Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
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This life is for loving, sharing, learning, smiling, caring, forgiving, laughing, hugging, helping, dancing, wondering, healing, and even more loving. I choose to live life this way. I want to live my life in such a way that when I get out of bed in the morning, the devil says, 'aw shit, he's up!
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Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
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The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever - a hunter.
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Hilary Thayer Hamann (Anthropology of an American Girl)
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Majority wins, but majority is not necessarily right and sometimes majority is awfully wrong.
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Amit Kalantri
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If you know what He has done at infinite cost to himself—He’s put you into a relationship so that you’ll never be rejected by Him—then your motivation when you sin is to go get Him. You want fellowship with Him. When the thing that most assures you is the thing that most convicts you, you’ll be okay because when you’re convicted of sin in a gospel way it drives you toward God.
Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.
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Timothy J. Keller
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Life can be awful. Life can be ugly.
And still there are those who smile at the darkness, anticipating the beauty of an eventual sunrise.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
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As water cannot rise higher than its source, so the moral quality in an act can never be higher than the motive that inspires it. For this reason no act that arises from an evil motive can be good, even though some good may appear to come out of it. Every deed done out of anger or spite, for instance, will be found at last to have been done for the enemy and against the kingdom of God.
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A.W. Tozer (The Root of the Righteous)
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The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi
ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.
The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.
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Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
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It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular; it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.
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A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
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I know the pain was awful, but to never make yourself vulnerable again, to never step into areas that suggest new warmth and light, is to continue living under the cold shadow of the same awful pain.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
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It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular; it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act. All he does is good and acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For such a man, living itself will be sacramental and the whole world a sanctuary. His entire life will be a priestly ministration. As he performs his never-so-simple task, he will hear the voice of the seraphim saying, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of the hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.
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A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
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One of the most troubling facts I have had to accept is that people are not all angel or all devil. They are both good and awful to varying degrees and in varying circumstances. On any given day, dependent upon the situation, you will be confronted by either the devil of a person or the angel of the same person or a curious mix of both. This means you can, and most likely will, love and hate the same individual alternately throughout your life. This truth I find painfully heartrending.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
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Everyone had an ulterior motive in his worldview. Everyone was self-serving and therefore a potential instrument of pain. The world was a lonely, awful, brutal, terrible place.
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Jeremy Dyson (The Haunted Book)
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It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything.
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A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
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Barone added that he’d spent the summer doing very little, and feeling awfully guilty about it. “In truth, I’ve always had ups and downs, periods of intense productivity and energy followed by periods of low motivation,” he wrote.
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Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels)
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the rich seem to believe that for the poor and struggling, only the prospects of continued poverty and struggle could possibly motivate them to hard work and success. If people are poor, then they must not be poor enough, on this rendering, for if they were, surely they would have gotten sufficiently motivated so as to not be poor any more. Make no mistake; this is the thinking of the sadist, akin to those who say we should make prisons as awful as possible so as to deter people from committing crime.
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Tim Wise (Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (City Lights Open Media))
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Fear is not something easily shrugged off; it hangs on its prey like a heavy cloak threatening to choke and weigh down the wearer. Despite fear’s awful hindering effects, we must dare to behave boldly in its presence. For boldness is one of the few weapons that can convince fear to loosen its grip.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
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Forgiveness comes when we’re able to recognize that the other person’s actions were more about them—their own motivations and context—than about us. (And that insight may or may not justify their behavior.) It’s not so much that we forgive to forget, but that we forgive in order to learn about others, learn about ourselves, and let go of resentments that hold us down.
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Kelsey Crowe (There Is No Good Card for This: What To Say and Do When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love)
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I asked my mother to repeat her stories so I could get them down for posterity. I also had another motive, to write a novel set in Holland in WW2. Since 1990, I’ve been on holiday with my family to the Veluwe, a beautiful national park where we love to cycle through magnificent woods and across expansive heaths. One year, we came across a World War 2 memorial deep in the woods. It had been designated in memory of a group of Jews who hid from the Germans by living in underground huts in a purpose built village. Several of these huts had been reconstructed and I found it hard to believe that whole families could have lived in these gloomy cramped spaces for years on end. The alternative, deportation to a concentration camp, was too awful to contemplate.
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Imogen Matthews (The Hidden Village (Wartime Holland, #1))
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Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on a shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one's own; a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute one's self in its awful place,—out of these, and other motives as miserable as these, comes your idea of duty!
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance)
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BULLIES ARE AWFUL,
FRIENDS ARE BETTER
There will be people who will betray you.
There will be people who will bully you.
There will be people who will try to devour you.
Find the people that bring you strength.
Find the people who will give you courage.
Find the people who will fill you with love.
Because, they matter more than all the bullies in the world.
You matter more.
Bullies are awful, friends are better.
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Trisha North (INK)
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The "layman" need never think of his humbler task as being inferior to that of his minister. Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.
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A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
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One day she woke up hating life, how dismal and anxious and unhappy the many long years had been. In that awful moment, a choice was made. Not to give up, no, never would she give away whatever small portion of power God had granted her. Instead, she reached deep down inside herself and gathered enough magic to paint a huge smile on the world. It was a bold and daring use of her powers. She has refused to see anything else ever since.
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
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We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--“Don’t ask any questions!” "No discussion!" “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.
So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.
Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century.
It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia--this fear and envy of a woman’s power.
And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men.
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Camille Paglia
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As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word 'responsibility'. And when Morgan suggested he was using the word almost in a religious sense Oppenheimer agreed it was a 'secular devise for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word 'ethical' here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now I don't know how to describe my life without using some word like responsibility to characterize it. A word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I'm not talking about knowledge but about being limited by what you can do. There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself but increased knowledge, increased wealth... leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable. After this soliloquy Morgan wrote "Oppenheimer turned his palms up, the long slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion 'You and I' he said 'Neither of us is rich but as far as responsibility goes both of us are in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.' This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica... that indifference to the sufferings one causes is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty. Far from being indifferent, Robert was acutely aware of the suffering he had caused others in his life and yet he would not allow himself to succumb to guilt. He would accept responsibility. He had never tried to deny his responsibility but since the security hearing he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the cruelty of indifference. and in that sense, Robby had been right- they achieved their goal, they killed him.
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Kai Bird (American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer)
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Where attempts have not been made to reconcile the two moralities, they may be described as follows:— All is good in the noble morality which proceeds from strength, power, health, well-constitutedness, happiness, and awfulness; for, the motive force behind the people practising it is “the struggle for power.” The antithesis “good and bad” to this first class means the same as “noble” and “despicable.” “Bad” in the master-morality must be applied to the coward, to all acts that spring from weakness, to the man with “an eye to the main chance,” who would forsake everything in order to live.
With the second, the slave-morality, the case is different. There, inasmuch as the community is an oppressed, suffering, unemancipated, and weary one, all that will be held to be good which alleviates the state of suffering. Pity, the obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, and humility—these are unquestionably the qualities we shall here find flooded with the light of approval and admiration; because they are the most useful qualities —; they make life endurable, they are of assistance in the “struggle for existence” which is the motive force behind the people practising this morality. To this class, all that is awful is bad, in fact it is the evil par excellence. Strength, health, superabundance of animal spirits and power, are regarded with hate, suspicion, and fear by the subordinate class.
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Anthony Mario Ludovici (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Genealogy of Morals, Birth of Tragedy, The Antichrist, The Twilight of the ... Idols, The Case of Wagner, Letters & Essays)
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Everyone hаѕ a fеw hаbitѕ they wish thеу соuld gеt rid оf, such аѕ ѕmоking, еxсеѕѕivе еаting, laziness, procrastination or lасk оf аѕѕеrtivеnеѕѕ. Tо оvеrсоmе thеѕе hаbitѕ оr аddiсtiоnѕ, оnе nееdѕ a сеrtаin degree оf willроwеr аnd self-discipline. Thеir роѕѕеѕѕiоn mаkеѕ a grеаt difference in еvеrуоnе'ѕ lifе, bringing to thе fоrе inner strength, self-confidence аnd dесiѕivеnеѕѕ. We аll hаvе drеаmѕ. But in оrdеr tо mаkе dreams соmе intо reality, it tаkеѕ an awful lоt оf determination, willpower, mоtivаtiоn self-discipline, аnd
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Kristina Dawn (Self-Discipline: Achieve Unbreakable Self-Discipline: How To Build Confidence, Willpower, Motivation & Habits That Stick: Self-discipline Guide, Stress Management, Self-Esteem)
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Love is such a pure bonding that changes the lives utterly. It’s the sensation that does not emerge simply by language, however comes mechanically for someone. Being smitten is that the most stunning part of the life. During this stage, we tend to bear several ups and downs. But, the love, care, emotions and also the respect for the person whom we tend to love unconditionally. There were awfully few lucky ones which get their loved ones and people that do not really in a very constant search to seek out love throughout their lives. However most frequently, several of the females lack to spot the person with whom she is concerned. A number of the foremost important signs your man shows ought to be recognized well, no matter what.
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I'm salmiah
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you have judged many throughout your life. You have judged the actions and even the motivations of others, as if you somehow knew what those were in truth. You have judged the color of skin and body language and body odor. You have judged history and relationships. You have even judged the value of a person’s life by the quality of your concept of beauty. By all accounts, you are quite well practiced in the activity.” Mack felt shame reddening his face. He had to admit he had done an awful lot of judging in his time. But he was no different from anyone else, was he? Who doesn’t jump to conclusions about others from the way they impact us? There it was again—his self-centered view of the world around him. He looked up and saw her peering intently at him and quickly looked down again.
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William Paul Young (The Shack)
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Kitty, I hope... I do hope you feel that you can trust me, like you would your father.” He circled his thumb along the top of her hand, undoing the stone wall she’d so carefully constructed to guard her heart. “We are true friends, are we not?” Friends. “Aye.” “Friends confide in one another, do they not?” A frown pulled down at her mouth, for surely he had a motive in asking such questions. But what? The gentleness in his eyes, though still present, moved aside to allow for deep earnest as the muscles in his jaw flexed. He asked again. “Do they not?” Kitty nodded, pretending she didn’t notice every nuance of his expression. “Aye.” He leaned forward, urgency coating his timbre. Gently holding tighter to her hand, he almost whispered. “I need to know what happened the night you were attacked.” “What?” she breathed. He could not be serious. “Kitty, I am done pretending I don’t know something is wrong. Who is doing this to you?” Squirming, Kitty fought to keep her breath relaxed. “Who is... who is doing what?” “Kitty.” He moved to the edge of the bed. “I only wish to help you, you must know that. I will protect you, I vow it—only you must trust me.” Tears welled, blurring the wound along his eye. She had been the cause of that and despite her desires to trust, his safety trumped all. “I cannot tell you.” Her voice was flat as the words hopped from her mouth before she could stop them. He stilled, his posture pulling back. “And why not?” She tugged her hand free from his, instantly aching from the vacancy that replaced the warmth of his touch. “Do not ask me.” “Why, Kitty?” His brow pinched and his mouth stayed open as if more protests prepared to be spoken. Her throat swelled until it nearly clogged off the air that reached down for her lungs. She swallowed a groan and turned away. “It is not for you to know.” “It is for me to know.” The compulsion to open her mouth and expel the awful truth she kept hidden was enough to make acid once again inch upward. She clenched her eyes shut, fear and hurt raging in her spirit like a tempest. “Please leave me.” “As you wish.” She shot her head in his direction. No, Nathaniel! I didn’t mean it! He strode toward the door, and stopped, his mouth hard but hazel eyes soft as leather. “If you cannot place your trust in me, Kitty, I pray you will find strength to place it in someone.” With
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Amber Lynn Perry (So True a Love (Daughters of His Kingdom #2))
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You have to get real about what you want, and decide if you’re actually motivated to change. Because sometimes we don’t want things to improve. We just want to wallow. We want to talk about how awful and difficult things are, and have others commiserate and admire us for all the hardship we manage to endure.
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Angela Watson (Fewer Things, Better: The Courage to Focus on What Matters Most)
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First, I am thrilled that paramedics are finally getting the respect they deserve for being the professionals they can be. The scope of practice is expanding, and patient care modalities are improving, seemingly by the minute. Patient outcomes are also improving as a result, and EMS is passing through puberty and forging into adulthood. On the other hand, autonomy in the hands of the “lesser-motivated,” can be a very dangerous thing. You know as well as I do that there are still plenty of providers who operate from a subjective, complacent, and downright lazy place. Combined with the ever-expanding autonomy, that provider just became more dangerous than he or she ever has been – to the patients and to you. Autonomy in patient care places more pressure for excellence on the provider charged with delivering it, and also on the partner and crew members on scene. Since the base hospital is not involved like it once was, they are likewise less responsible for the errors and omissions of the medics on the scene. Now more than ever, crew members are being held to answer for the mistakes and follies of their coworkers; now more than ever, EMS providers are working without a net. What’s next? I predict (and hope) emergency medical Darwinism is going to force some painful and necessary changes. First, increasing autonomy is going to result in the better and best providing superior patient care. More personal ownership of the results is going to manifest in outcomes such as increased cardiac arrest survival rates, faster and more complete stroke recovery, and significantly better outcomes for STEMI patients, all leading to the brass ring: EMS as a profession, not just a job. On the flip side of that coin, you will see consequences for the not-so-good and completely awful providers. There will be higher instances of licensure action, internal discipline, and wash-out. Unfortunately, all those things will stem from generally preventable negative patient outcomes. The danger for the better provider will be in the penumbra; the murky, gray area of time when providers are self-categorizing. Specifically, the better provider who is aware of the dangerously poor provider but does nothing to fix or flush him or her, is almost certain to be caught up in a bad situation caused by sloppy, complacent, or ultimately negligent patient care that should have been corrected or stopped. The answer is as simple as it is difficult. If you are reading this, it is more likely because you are one of the better, more committed, more professional providers. This transition is up to you. You must dig deep and find the strength necessary to face the issue and force the change; you have to demand more from yourself and from those around you. You must have the willingness to help those providers who want it – and respond to those who need it, but don’t want it – with tough love by showing them the door. In the end, EMS will only ever be as good as you make it. If you lay silent through its evolution, you forfeit the right to complain when it crumbles around you.
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David Givot (Sirens, Lights, and Lawyers: The Law & Other Really Important Stuff EMS Providers Never Learned in School)
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Not only does it feel awful to be hard on yourself, but research shows that when you’re tough on yourself, it has the opposite impact that you want it to have. It is not motivating and it does not encourage you to achieve. It just shuts you down. It makes you feel defeated and discouraged. It is the reason why you are stuck.
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Mel Robbins (The High 5 Habit: Take Control of Your Life with One Simple Habit)
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It feels awfully nice to be a little kinder to yourself and everybody else.
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Sarah Hays Coomer (The Habit Trip: A Fill-in-the-Blank Journey to a Life on Purpose)
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Finally, as we prepare to shift focus from ordinary low mood to mood disorders, it is worth asking why low mood feels so awful. Why doesn’t the system respond to failing efforts by assessing the alternatives objectively and shifting to the next best one at the right time, without self-doubt, rumination, and psychic pain? Multiple explanations contribute, but I think the main one is the same as the explanation for why physical pain hurts. The suffering that accompanies nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, fever, fatigue, pain, anxiety, and low mood motivates escape from a current bad situation and avoidance of future similar situations. Individuals who do not experience physical pain accumulate injuries and usually die by early adulthood. People who don’t feel bad when pursuing unreachable goals spend their lives in contented useless efforts.
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Randolph M. Nesse (Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry)
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I looked at the money in the still-open suitcase. Half a million dollars. It seemed like an awful lot. I had never really been motivated by money—after all, I had not gone to law school. Money to me had always been merely something the sheep used to show each other how wonderful they were.
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Jeff Lindsay (Dexter is Delicious (Dexter, #5))
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Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us Ephesians 3:20 Read it again. It clearly says He can do more than we can ask or imagine. I don’t know about you, but I can imagine an awful lot. And the Word says that God can blow that away. So make a list of the most absurd prayer requests you have on your heart and begin to pray incessantly about them. Remember to gauge your motives, as God certainly will.
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David Dusek (Rough Cut Men: A Man’s Battle Guide to Building Real Relationships with Each Other, and with Jesus)
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Despite the sincerity of their motives, one wonders more than a little to what extent the growing popularity of various forms of annihilationism and conditional immortality are a reflection of this age of pluralism. It is getting harder and harder to be faithful to the “hard” lines of Scripture. And in this way, evangelicalism itself may contribute to the gagging of God by silencing the severity of his warnings and by minimizing the awfulness of the punishment that justly awaits those untouched by his redeeming grace. Newbigin is right: “It is one of the weaknesses of a great deal of contemporary Christianity that we do not speak of the last judgement and of the possibility of being finally lost.”56
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D.A. Carson (The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism)
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Mr. Hazlit, won’t you please, please help me find my reticule? It is one of my dearest possessions. I feel horrid for having lost track of it, and I’m too embarrassed to prevail upon anybody else but you to aid me in my hour of need.” She turned her best swain-slaying gaze on him in the moonlight, the look Val had told her never to use on his friends. For good measure, she let a little sincerity into her eyes, because she’d spoken nothing but the truth. “God help me.” Hazlit scrubbed a hand over his face. “Stick to quoting the law with me, please. I might have a prayer of retaining my wits.” She dropped the pleading expression. “You’ll keep our bargain, then?” “I will make an attempt to find this little purse of yours, but there are no guarantees in my work, Miss Windham. Let’s put a limit on the investigation—say, four weeks. If I haven’t found the thing by then, I’ll refund half your money.” “You needn’t.” She rose, relieved to have her business concluded. “I can spare it, and this is important to me.” “Where are you going?” He rose, as well, as manners required. But Maggie had the sense he was also just too… primordial to let a woman go off on her own in the moonlight. “I’m going back to the ballroom. We’ve been out here quite long enough, unless you’re again trying to wiggle out of your obligations?” “No need to be nasty.” He came closer and winged his arm at her. “We’ve had our bit of air, but you’ve yet to tell me anything that would aid me in attaining your goal. What does this reticule look like? Who has seen you with it? Where did you acquire it? When did you last have it?” “All of that?” “That and more if it’s so precious to you,” he said, leading her back toward the more-traveled paths. “That is just a start. I will want to establish who had access to the thing, what valuables it contained, and who might have been motivated to steal it.” “Steal?” She went still, dropping his arm, for this possibility honestly hadn’t occurred to her. She realized, as he replaced her hand on his arm, that she’d held the thought of theft away from her awareness, an unacknowledged fear. “You think somebody would steal a little pin money? People are hung for stealing a few coins, Mr. Hazlit, and transported on those awful ships, and… you think it was a thief?” “You clearly do not.” She was going to let him know in no uncertain terms that no, she could not have been victimized by a thief. She was too careful, too smart. She’d hired only staff with the best references, she seldom had visitors, and such a thing was utterly… “I did not reach that conclusion. I don’t want to.” Voices
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Grace Burrowes (Lady Maggie's Secret Scandal (The Duke's Daughters, #2; Windham, #5))
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the cross itself, the very foundation of all of redemption, is first and foremost the result of the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father. The former guarantees that all will honor the Son; the latter guarantees that the Son perfectly obeys his heavenly Father. Jesus came to complete the work that his Father gave him to do (17:4). We so often think that the ultimate motivation behind the cross is God's love for us. I do not want to downplay the importance of that love; indeed, I shall return to it in a minute. But we must see that in John's Gospel the motivating power behind the entire plan of redemption was the Father's love for his Son and the Son's love for his Father. When Jesus found himself in an agony in Gethsemane, he did not finally resolve to go through with the plan of redemption by saying, "This is awful, but I love those sinners so much I'll go to the cross for them" (though in a sense he might have said that), but "Not my will but yours be done." In other words, the dominating motive that drove him onward to perfect obedience was his resolution, out of love for his Father, to be at one with the Father's will. Though we poor sinners are the unfathomably rich beneficiaries of God's plan of redemption, we are not at the center of everything. At the center was the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father.
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John Piper (The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World)
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March 7 Looking at the Inside The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.—1 Samuel 16:7b My husband just had an amazing medical test. The technology, which has only been available for three years, actually shows the inside of your body. The cardiologist described it as doing an autopsy while you are still alive. He has actual pictures of his heart, as well as other organs. The test is able to identify cholesterol, tumors, and other aberrations that might be present. However as great as that is, there is still no test that can read our minds and determine the motives of our hearts. Only God is able to do that. He knows what we are thinking. He knows what we are about to do, as well as what we are about to say before we say it. God still can identify a true believer, a pure heart, and a child of His. There will never be any technology to replace what only God can do. Wouldn’t it be awful if someone knew what you were thinking at times? What if someone were able to identify your motives? If we only looked deeper into our souls before we spoke, and thought more honestly about our motives before doing something, maybe we would reconsider. I am thankful others can’t do that; but I need to be more concerned about what my Jesus already knows about me. I should be more careful of the things I say and do, so I do not disappoint my Savior. Jesus, help me to be more sincere in all I do so that my life glorifies You in all ways.
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The writers of Encouraging.com (God Moments: A Year in the Word)
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Just because someone emailed you does not make it an invitation to add them to your email list. Show a greater respect to those connected with you to grow greater engaged numbers. And the excuse of 'they can just unsubscribe' is pretty petty & awfully unprofessional.
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Loren Weisman
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Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend. -Sarah Dessen (1970 -
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M. Prefontaine (The Big Book of Quotes: Funny, Inspirational and Motivational Quotes on Life, Love and Much Else (Quotes For Every Occasion 1))
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explains the problem with many today. They think they can enjoy the promises of God while still living in the evil land. Such is simply not the case. One thing we need to comprehend is that God saves us out of to bring us into. God saved Israel out of Egypt in order to bring them into the promised land. From my point of view, many gospel Christians today accept the importance of getting people saved out of Egypt. That is the real focus for them. And it is true—God saves us from our past sins, from our worst habits, and above all else, He is to save us from hell. Coming to Christ means that. And people think, Now I don’t have to worry about those things. I’m not going to hell when I die. I will go zooming off into heaven. Now I can just enjoy life because I know where I’m going when I die. However, almost nothing is said about what we are saved unto. Yes, we know what we are saved from, and we can glory in that, but that needs to be a temporary glory. We need to know what we have been saved unto. I want you to know that this is not automatic. Once we are out of Egypt, we do not pitch a tent and say, “Well, I have arrived.” No, the truth is effective only when we emphasize that we have been saved not only from something, but we have been saved unto something. Then the description of what we have been saved unto is important for us to be motivated to go in that direction. Christians will not seek to enter a land of which they have not heard. How can I go somewhere I’ve never heard about? What is it? How do I get there? The evidence is quite prominent. We have a decaying Christianity, rotten from head to foot, as Bible scholar William Reed Newell wrote in his commentary on Romans. I could not agree more. So what is this land of promise? What is it that God has set before us? How can we enter in with all of His blessings and receive all of His promises? The things in the land of promise are those chosen for us by God out of the goodness of His heart. This land of promise has been secured by God’s oath and covenant. All the infinite resources of God are behind the covenant. What God has promised He can deliver because He is God.
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A.W. Tozer (A Cloud by Day, a Fire by Night (DF Christian Bestsellers Book 2))
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Sometimes, back when I was a pot smoker, this awful thing would happen. I would be in a social situation, a party, dinner, or just hanging out with friends, and suddenly all of the embedded social dynamics would be exposed to me, like a sheet stripped off of a stained mattress. All the unspoken desires, motives, resentments, and insecurities of everyone in the room would be revealed, on their faces, in their movements and words, emanating from them like body heat. I would tell myself that I was just paranoid, but I wasn’t; I knew that what I was seeing was real and was always there, and it filled me with terrible sorrow. Everyone was so afraid, so needy.
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Melissa Febos (Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life)
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When everything gets awfully perfect I let my demons loose. Neither of us can't bear the thought of conforming with so little.
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Efrat Cybulkiewicz
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It is possible to be in the Way of Excellence and still lose. Think about this for a moment. Would you rather experience playing, competing and performing at your all-time best in the Zone and lose, or play awful, get lucky and win? When put in this perspective, the definition of winning and losing is not clear.
In other words, it is possible to lose and still perform like a winner,
just as it is possible to win and play like a loser.
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Tobe Hanson (Athlete's Way of Excellence: Ancient Chinese Wisdom Revealing the Secrets to Modern Day Athletic Peak Performance and How to Be in The Zone)
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Many can find themselves in an awful paradox: afraid of death yet afraid of living.
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Freequill
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Religious acts done out of low motives are twice evil, evil in themselves and evil because they are done in the name of God. This is equivalent to sinning in the name of the sinless One, lying in the name of the One who cannot lie and hating in the name of the One whose nature is love.
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A.W. Tozer (The Root of the Righteous)
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So here it is: A month of heartbreaking, gut-wrenching work that, if we do it right, leads to no definite conclusion. Eighteen-hour days and eighteen-hour nights. For you new members, this will feel like some kind of endurance race.
We’ve got one month to break down this awful script, rebuild it, learn every one of its variations, and then rehearse the result until you can do it in your sleep.
But even then we won’t be finished, because there’s a hostile crowd out there just dying to be the first ones to solve the mystery—which we will not let them do.
Let’s get to work.
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Vincent H. O'Neil (Death Troupe)
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In all of our souls, pray the awful parts call out for solace - the false and the faults, the fears and the flaws, the 'F's and the fouls, the fakes and the frauds - now facing facades, these aches will fall off; they'll break while they crawl: ailments from failures, preyed once and for all.
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Criss Jami
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The Internet is a funny place, because it’s a forum for so many awful ideas, body shaming, bullying, and the like. The negative side of social media is that everybody thinks they’re experts with the right to weigh in on.
Yet, at the same time, the Internet is a place where women can find solidarity, no matter who or where they are.
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Ashley Graham