Brand Yourself Quotes

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Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.
Shannon L. Alder
Loneliness is a strange sort of thing. It creeps on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes by your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can't breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out of every corner. It's a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you're struggling to stand up. You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin. You doubt you doubt you doubt. do I don't I should I why won't I And even when you're ready to let go. When you're ready to break free. When you're ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend stand beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough never enough never ever enough. Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. Sometimes it just won't let go.
Tahereh Mafi (Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2))
Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men. Become a criminal of purpose. Be put in jail, and extricate yourself by your own wisdom.
Miyamoto Musashi (The Book of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi)
It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.
Russell Brand
And second, I don't think there's much of a market for your particular brand of psychology." "So not true." "Butch, you and I just beat the crap out of each other." "You started it. And actually, it would be perfect for Spike TV. UFC meets Oprah. God, I'm brilliant." "Keep telling yourself that. -Butch and V
J.R. Ward (Lover Unbound (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #5))
Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.
Rashedur Ryan Rahman
If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.
Germany Kent
Think of yourself as a brand. You need to be remembered. What will they remember you for? What defines you? If you have it in you, do something that defines you. Invent something, develop a unique skill, get noticed for something — it creates a talking point.
Chris Arnold
Advice to my younger self: 1 Start where you are with what you have 2 Try not to hurt other people 3 Take more chances 4 If you fail, keep trying
Germany Kent
A Poem By Max White is the color of little bunnies with pink noses. White is the color of fluffy clouds fluffing their way across the sky. White is the color of angel's wings and Angel's wings. White is the color of brand-new ankle socks fresh out of the bag. White is the color of crisp sheets in schmancy hotels. White is the color of every last freaking, gol-danged thing you see for endless miles and miles if you happen to be in Antarctica trying to save the world, which now you aren't so sure you can do because you feel like if you see any more whiteness-Wonder Bread, someone's underwear, teeth-you will completely and totally lose your ever-lovin' mind and wind up pushing a grocery cart full of empty cans around New York City, muttering to yourself. That was my first poem ever. Okay, so it's not Shakespeare, but I liked it.
James Patterson (The Final Warning (Maximum Ride, #4))
Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth. Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.
Russell Brand (My Booky Wook)
Tomorrow morning. Brand new chance. The first day of whatever life you want to have for yourself." Rose called after me, "Wake up wisely.
Nicole Williams (Lost & Found (Lost & Found, #1))
No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.
Germany Kent
People can never get enough of something new and different.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Many times, the idea we come up with is not to fit for the current times but if launched at the right time can do wonders.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
A business becomes successful when it becomes mutually beneficial for you and your customers.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Online word-of-mouth is very powerful. These days customer service is one of the most important differentiation factors used by customers to pick one brand over others.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
If you want to keep your customers happy, start by keeping your employees happy.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
If you want to survive, you need to be different. You have to stand out of the crowd.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
A good ad is worth so much more than just a little ad spend.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
In the end, all we have to do is to be in the shoes of our audience and our product will hardly fail.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
The most important purpose of any product is to satisfy a customer’s need and not the entrepreneur’s need.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
The reason that online ads are 80% of the time ignored lies in the fact that we have started forgetting creativity when creativity is as important as data.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
You won’t develop a successful product if you don’t start with a clear vision.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
location matters more than you think when it comes to any kind of food business.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Your employees play an important role in writing the chapter on the success of your product.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
No business is just a one-man’s job. You need sales, you need operations, you need partnerships, you need even customer and brand loyalty.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Remember, a business is not just your product. It’s made up of many layers and all those other layers are also equally as important.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
A business will require you to wear many hats. You have to be a leader with a mission, vision, and direction.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
We have to start listening to what our ideal customers have to say about our product with an open mind.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
It’s bad for your business to refuse change when the technology is changing, but it’s worse for your business to fight the technology.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
When you promise but don’t deliver, you start competing against yourself, against the image that you have built of your brand for your customers.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Being stagnant in a business is the death of a business.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Once their trust grows stronger, reputation is built. And in the digital age, reputation is more expensive than anything.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
A successful business is not built just on your expertise, it needs mastering of all the business pieces and maintaining the interconnection among them in a profitable and fruitful way.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
When the customers, just like the business owner, fail to see why they should buy this and not that, a business will collapse.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
An effective ad brings long-term positive residual effects for your business.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Advertising is like a stock market for your business investment.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Just like selective listening, now we have selective ad viewing.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Digital trends have made it easy to run ads for each and every business type irrespective of the business size.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
If you want to have an effective ad, you need to work on communicating your message in the most effective way. Keep it clear, concise and non-confusing.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
An advertising strategy is based on proper research which guides you in this entire process of customer acquisition with the help of ads.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
You need a product that can make their lives easier; a product that they need and can relate to as well.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
When there is transparency, your employees are aware of how their work is contributing to the project which makes them become more committed to the project.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Business is more than selling.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
If you want to safeguard your business against your own self, you have to learn what can lead to business failure and why.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Sometimes, you have to take your eyes off that sun and look at the picture as a whole, from a distance and see how they all fit together on one canvas.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Everything including your branding has to reinforce your message about your product.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
If you can’t build a team that loves your company and your product the way you do, you’re going to face a hard time bringing your idea to life.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Unrealistic profit projections are not going to win you the trust of your investors.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
The difference between short-term benefits and long-term benefits are like building a nice office versus building a brand like Coca Cola.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Employees of a company need to be bound together with love and respect, and not by dissatisfaction and helplessness.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Loyalty development is tied to motivation, if you know what motivates an employee, you will be able to turn that into loyalty development.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Start paying more attention to your digital customer strategy. You don’t want any of your online actions to take a hit on your brand reputation.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
What we should never forget is that customers are our businesses. Customers and businesses are not two separate entities.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
You’re not in the business because you want to create value for yourselves.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Effective two-way communication is responsible for building the trust in a company and keeping the employees happy.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Transparency when things are going well and even when things are going bad, keeps all your employees in the chain which makes them feel connected to the project even more.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
This looks interesting," I say, but what I'm really thinking is, Wow, Aimee, science fiction? Really, could you try any harder to brand yourself with the mark of the nerd herd? What's next, anime?
Tim Tharp (The Spectacular Now)
When a value is communicated well, it gives your potential customers an option to choose you over others and to stick to your brand.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
If you want to go big in the business world, you need to have the right product at the right time.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Not just the organizational structure but the management style can also affect your business goals of success and growth.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Post-purchase dissonance is when the customers regret the product that they have just bought.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Your employees shouldn’t be scared of being let go but you should be scared of them leaving you.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
The first and the only rule of team building is employees being comfortable with each other.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Customers are becoming more and more concerned about the environment. They don’t want to associate themselves with any product or brand which is not working hard to protect the environment.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Personal branding is sales, because you’re selling an image of yourself, a mirage, and you are the product.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Your task should be to share the goals and some important instructions related to your brand image, rest how that project needs to be executed so that the goals are met is going to be your employees’ task now.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
We always talk about competition and how easily others enter your industry and become your competitors, but the biggest threat comes from how easily your customers can switch to another brand’s products.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
For getting those customers, you need to first let them know about your business, your product and how your product is exactly what they are looking for. And for that very purpose, you have to advertise your product.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself
Germany Kent
Sometimes the right business decision is to let it go - to let go of an underperforming employee, to let go of an unprofitable branch, to let go of a weak advertising campaign, and to let go of an idea that fails to create the hype you wanted it to be.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Everyone is a salesman, and the product is each person. Personal branding is being conscious to the continual nature of selling yourself.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Accepting favors from fiends was so against the rules. Like potato chips, you couldn't stop at just one, then you'd find yourself at Hell's front door trying to explain why your soul had a big brand on it that said “Property of Lucifer.
Jana Oliver (Forsaken (The Demon Trappers, #1))
I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of learning your child as well as you know yourself.
Jodi Picoult (Handle with Care)
In addition to building a strong team, you also have to motivate that team when their spirits are down, show your pride in them when they perform well, and be there when they make mistakes. You have to invest in their training and start treating them as partners in your business’ success.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
You need only allow gentle hope to enter your heart. Exhale and allow hope, and give yourself some time. This is a process of change that requires a good deal of self-compassion, which is neither stagnant nor permissive. We can just start by being a little kinder to ourselves and open to the possibility that life doesn’t have to be bloody awful.
Russell Brand (Recovery: Freedom from Our Addiction)
Though no one can backtrack and create a brand new start, Everyone is capable of taking their life in a brand new direction.
Germany Kent
Part of that change is forgiveness and the willingness to look at our lives and the world differently. Ask yourself ‘Do I really want to change or do I just want to justify staying the way that I am?
Russell Brand (Recovery: Freedom from Our Addiction)
What separates people who made their dreams come true is not setting goals to achieve a life the way they expect it to be, but how they expect to be, in order to achieve it.
Shannon L. Alder
If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you're thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.
Russell Brand
I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you can't be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.
Russell Brand
A single word can brighten the face of one who knows the value of words. Ripened in silence, a single word acquires a great energy for work. War is cut short by a word, and a word heals the wounds, and there’s a word that changes poison into butter and honey. Let a word mature inside yourself. Withhold the unripened thought. Come and understand the kind of word that reduces money and riches to dust. Know when to speak a word and when not to speak at all. A single word turns the universe of hell into eight paradises. Follow the Way. Don’t be fooled by what you already know. Be watchful. Reflect before you speak. A foolish mouth can brand your soul. Yunus, say one last thing about the power of words – Only the word “I” divides me from God.
Yunus Emre
Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.
Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)
A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, ‘How clever of you to find drugs. Well done, you found a way to keep yourself alive.’ This made me feel quite tearful. I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn’t judge me or tell me I was stupid or tubthumpingly declare that ‘drugs kill’. No, she told me that I had done well by finding something that made being me bearable… To be acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddled-up and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood. It is an example of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change.
Russell Brand (Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions)
Why do this to yourself? How does it make anything better?” “It does not make anything worse.” “It makes you worse. Why can’t you just … do good things with it?” Winter laughed against the strain of the delusion. “They all believe they are doing good.” Her head fell to the side and she watched Scarlet with her bleary eyes. “My stepmother is not only powerful because the people fear her, she is powerful because she can make them love her when she needs them to. We think that if we choose to do only good, then we are only good. We can make people happy. We can offer tranquility or contentment or love, and that must be good. We do not see the falsehood becoming its own brand of cruelty... who am I to presume what is good for others?
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago.
Eve Babitz (Black Swans: Stories)
Drag your past around if you like, an old dead decaying ox of what you think they might've thought, or what might've been if you'd done what you ought. That which needs to burn let it burn. If the idea doesn't serve you, let it go. If it separates you from the moment, from others, from yourself, let it go.
Russell Brand
Hey,maybe I could have a talk show, since you aren't going to be my June Cleaver anymore. I could call it the O'Neal Hour. Sounds important, doesn't it?" [Butch to Vishous] "First of all, you were going to be June Cleaver-" "Screw that. No way I'd bottom for you." "Whatever. And second, I don't think there's much of a market for your particular brand of psychology." "So not true." "Butch, you and I just beat the crap out of each other." "You started it. And actually, it would be perfect for Spike TV. UFC meets Oprah. God, I'm brilliant." "Keep telling yourself that.
J.R. Ward
No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with itshideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile. . . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. . . . Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully.When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days,listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals,of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism-- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.With your personality there is nothing you could not do.The world belongs to you for a season. . . . The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time.The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
I hear You saying to me: "I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way. "Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude. "Because of their enmity, you will soon be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you and reject you and you will be alone. "Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone. "Everything that can be desired will sear you, and brand you with a cautery, and you will fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you will die to all joy and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations. "You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved, and it will murder your heart and drive you into the desert. "You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them. "And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall being to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth. "Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it. "But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani: "That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.
Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain)
But you may feel differently. Maybe you’re one of those church members who get annoyed by the noise that comes with children or you get offended by the stains they leave behind in a perfectly clean church. If that’s you, I hope you’ll have the courage to reconsider. To start, maybe you’ll go to one of those marks on the wall or the stain on the brand-new carpeting and ask yourself this question: did Jesus die to save the carpet you’re standing on or the kid who made the stain?
Todd Burpo (Heaven Changes Everything: The Rest of Our Story)
Why do this to yourself? How does it make anything better?” “It does not make anything worse.” “It makes you worse. Why can’t you just … do good things with it?” Winter laughed against the strain of the delusion. “They all believe they are doing good.” Her head fell to the side and she watched Scarlet with her bleary eyes. “My stepmother is not only powerful because the people fear her, she is powerful because she can make them love her when she needs them to. We think that if we choose to do only good, then we are only good. We can make people happy. We can offer tranquility or contentment or love, and that must be good. We do not see the falsehood becoming its own brand of cruelty.
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you’ve done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you’ve inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you ‘you are nothing’. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are.
Russell Brand (Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions)
There comes a point when you realize that these things, these brands, aren't "enough." Having more or better or best doesn't provide you with a lasting sense of having more or being better or being best. It's a rather fleeting experience, this romantic attachment to brands, and I find that if I'm not careful, the search for having more or better or best is a precarious journey into the infinite. When you depend on finite objects-or brands-to provide you with a long-term sense of self or love or pride or achievement, you start yourself out on a path with no end. No object, no product, and no brand can provide you with ultimate, infinite satisfaction.
Debbie Millman (Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design)
Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression “it turns out” to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors “I read somewhere that...” or the craven “they say that...” because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I?
Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)
In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!
Kim Gordon
Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product, or another legal hassle to an already overworked legal counsel thinking more about her next stock-vesting date than your suit. Also, large companies have valuable public brands they must delicately preserve, and which can be assailed by even small companies such as yours, particularly in a tight-knit, appearances-conscious ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley. America still loves an underdog, and you’ll be surprised at how many allies come out of the woodwork when some obnoxious incumbent is challenged by a scrappy startup with a convincing story. So long as you maintain unit cohesion and a shared sense of purpose, and have the basic rudiments of living, you will outlast, outfight, and out-rage any company that sets out to destroy you. Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
[I]t's difficult to make people see that what you have been taught counts for nothing, and that the only things worth having are the things you find out for yourself. Also, that when so many brands of what Chesterton calls 'fancy souls' and theories of life are offered you, there is no sense in not looking pretty carefully to see what you are going in for. [...] It isn't a case of 'Here is the Christian religion, the one authoritative and respectable rule of life. Take it or leave it'. It's 'Here's a muddling kind of affair called Life, and here are nineteen or twenty different explanations of it, all supported by people whose opinions are not to be sneezed at. Among them is the Christian religion in which you happpen to have been brought up. Your friend so-and-so has been brought up in quite a different way of thinking; is a perfectly splendid person and thoroughly happy. What are you going to do about it?' -- I'm worrying it out quietly, and whatever I get hold of will be valuable, because I've got it for myself; but really, you know, the whole question is not as simple as it looks.
Dorothy L. Sayers (The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist)