Capacity Patience Quotes

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It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
Elizabeth Taylor (A Wreath of Roses)
The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.
John Piper (Battling Unbelief: Defeating Sin with Superior Pleasure)
Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.
Parker J. Palmer (The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life)
Socialism lost its way largely when it became decoupled from the processes of democracy. My vision of a socially just society is one that is deeply democratic, that allows people’s voices to be heard, where people actually govern. C.L.R James sometimes used the slogan “every cook can govern” to speak to the concept that there should be no hierarchies of power between those who lead and their constituencies. This idea is related to Antonio Gramsci’s argument that the goal of the revolutionary party is for every member to be an intellectual. That is, everyone has the capacity, has the ability to articulate a vision of reality and to fight for the realization of their values and goals in society. Gramsci is pointing toward the development of a strategy that is deeply democratic, one where we don’t have elitist, vanguardist notions of what society should look like, but have humility and the patience to listen to and learn from working class and poor people, who really are at the center of what any society is.
Manning Marable
Mastery of creative tension brings out the capacity for perseverance and patience. Time is an ally.
Peter M. Senge
Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind. "Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed -- incidentally, deliberately -- imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.'
Robert Macfarlane (The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot)
Active Hope is not wishful thinking. Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued . . . . by some savior. Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world. The web of life is calling us forth at this time. We’ve come a long way and are here to play our part. With Active Hope we realize that there are adventures in store, strengths to discover, and comrades to link arms with. Active Hope is a readiness to discover the strengths in ourselves and in others; a readiness to discover the reasons for hope and the occasions for love. A readiness to discover the size and strength of our hearts, our quickness of mind, our steadiness of purpose, our own authority, our love for life, the liveliness of our curiosity, the unsuspected deep well of patience and diligence, the keenness of our senses, and our capacity to lead. None of these can be discovered in an armchair or without risk.
Joanna Macy
If a man works without any selfish motive in view, does he not gain anything? Yes, he gains the highest. Unselfishness is more paying, only people have not the patience to practice it. It is more paying from the point of view of health also. Love, truth, and unselfishness are not merely moral figures of speech, but they form our highest ideal, because in them lies such a manifestation of power. In the first place, a man who can work for five days, or even for five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant. It is hard to do it, but in the heart of our hearts we know its value, and the good it brings. It is the greatest manifestation of power — this tremendous restraint; self-restraint is a manifestation of greater power than all outgoing action.
Swami Vivekananda (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours
John Piper
When life hits hard, you have to patiently endure. Endurance builds capacity; with patience, character is developed. You can make a come back with good character.
Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu
It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community? It doesn't mean it's easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because you're not going to go away. It also means commitment to bear witness, and engaging in 'casserole diplomacy' by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitment are real. They are tangible. They are not esoteric or idealistic, but rooted in the bedrock existence of where we choose to maintain our lives. That way we begin to know the predictability of a place. We anticipate a species long before we see them. We can chart the changes, because we have a memory of cycles and seasons; we gain a capacity for both pleasure and pain, and we find the strength within ourselves and each other to hold these lines. That's my definition of family. And that's my definition of love.
Terry Tempest Williams
I think about Rilke, who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer I believe it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity. Pico Iyer describes his writing as "intimate letters to a stranger," and I think that is what the writing process is. It begins with a question, and then you follow this path of exploration. ... I write out of my questions. Hopefully, if we write out of our humanity, our vulnerable nature, then some chord is struck with a reader and we touch on the page. I know that is why I read, to find those parts of myself in a story that I cannot turn away from. The writers who move me are the ones who create beauty and truth out of their sufferings, their yearnings, their discoveries. It is what I call the patience of words born out of the search. ... Perhaps as writers we are really storytellers, finding that golden thread that connects us to the past, present, and future at once. I love language and landscape. For me, writing is the correspondence between these two passions. It is difficult to ever see yourself. I don't know how I've developed or grown as a writer. I hope I am continuing to take risks on the page. I hope I am continuing to ask the hard questions of myself. If we are attentive to the world and to those around us, I believe we will be attentive on the page. Writing is about presence. I want to be fully present wherever I am, alive to the pulse just beneath the skin. I want to dare to speak "the language women speak when there's no one around to correct them".
Terry Tempest Williams
What offends a great intellect in society is the equality of rights, leading to equality of pretensions, which everyone enjoys; while at the same time, inequality of capacity means a corresponding disparity of social power. So-called good society recognizes every kind of claim but that of intellect, which is a contraband article; and people are expected to exhibit an unlimited amount of patience towards every form of folly and stupidity, perversity and dullness; whilst personal merit has to beg pardon, as it were, for being present, or else conceal itself altogether. Intellectual superiority offends by its very existence, without any desire to do so. The
Arthur Schopenhauer (The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Counsels and Maxims)
More important and more relevant to the death of expertise, however, is that conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations. Such theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there are people who would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters)
I believe that spiritual resistance -- the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede, that our capacity to face the harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is the best retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.
Terry Tempest Williams (Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert)
Work and boredom.- Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards. if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men all kinds belong· to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure. and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise. their idleness is resolute. even if it speIls impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
Hardship, in forcing us to exercise greater patience and forbearance in daily life, actually makes us stronger and more robust. From the daily experience of hardship comes a greater capacity to accept difficulties without losing our sense of inner calm. Of course, I do not advocate seeking out hardship as a way of life, but merely wish to suggest that, if you relate to it constructively, it can bring greater inner strength and fortitude.[15] ―The Dalai Lama
John D'Amico (The Walls Talked But Nobody Listened)
If intellectual capacity is a sniper’s foremost qualification, the number two trait is patience. We will take out any enemy we have to when the situation calls for it, whether that means using a rifle, a handgun, a knife, or our bare hands. Yet the sniper’s fundamental craft is not killing a person, but being able to get close enough to do so. Osman and I were on a classic sniper stalking mission: track, sneak up, observe, and disappear again, leaving no trace behind.
Brandon Webb (The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen)
By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream.
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
If you had the capacity to shove love into a princess or fury into a winged monster, you had the capacity to generate passion or mirth or humility or patience in yourself. It wasn't just pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard. It was through your own generosity of imagination that you made yourself good.
Rakesh Satyal (No One Can Pronounce My Name)
Despite fiery disagreements about who or what God is and how to make contact, all these religions agree that patience is the essence of spirituality and thus grants great strength. Judaism says, “A patient man is better than a warrior.” In Buddhism, bodhisattvas train in this practice to become enlightened. Christianity and Islam deem it a sacred virtue. Patience endows you with faith in yourself and your destiny, an illuminated capacity to deal with frustration and disappointments.
Judith Orloff (Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life)
I hope this doesn’t sound racist—these days I never know what will give offense—but black people seem terribly good at waiting, as if they inherited the gene for patience along with the one for sickle-cell. I noticed that in Africa as well: dozens of Africans sitting or standing by the side of the road, waiting for the bus or, even harder, waiting for nothing in particular, and they never appeared restive or annoyed. They didn’t pull grass and chew the tender ends with their front teeth; they didn’t draw aimless pictures with the toes of their plastic sandals in the dry red clay. They were still, and present. The capacity is existential, that ability to just be, with a profundity that I have seen elude some very well educated people.
Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
This is what I have learned in these short weeks in the refuge: You cannot afford to make careless mistakes, like meditating in the presence of wolves, or topping your boots in the river, or losing a glove, or not securing your tent down properly. Death is a daily occurrence in the wild, not noticed, not respected, not mourned. In the Arctic, I've learned that ego is as useless as money. Choose one's travel companions well. Physical strength and prudence are necessary. Imagination and ingenuity are our finest traits. Expect anything. You can change your mind like the weather. Patience is more powerful than anger. Humor is attractive than fear. Pay attention. Listen. We are most alive when we are discovering. Humility is the capacity to see. We are meant to live simply. We are meant to live joyfully. Life continues with and without us. Beauty is another word for God.
Terry Tempest Williams (The Open Space of Democracy)
Women have always desired equality and respect, but our current culture isn’t seeking it through the grace of Mary; rather, the culture seeks this equality and respect through the vices of Machiavelli: rage, intimidation, tantrums, bullying, raw emotion, and absence of logic. It is this aggressive impulse—this toxic femininity—that finds pride in calling oneself “nasty,” feels empowered by dressing as a vagina, belittles men, and sees the (tragically ironic) need to drop civility so that civility can somehow return again. The devil knows that all these marks of the anti-Mary—rage, indignation, vulgarity, and pride—short-circuit a woman’s greatest gifts: wisdom, prudence, patience, unflappable peace, intuition, her ability to weave together the fabric of society, and her capacity for a deep and fulfilling relationship with God. Instead, the father of lies promises power, fame, fortune, and sterile, fleeting pleasures.
Carrie Gress (The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity)
Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm... a one; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure..." Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insights endurance, and our capacity or attention. In difficult beauty, one often encourages intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness - the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle - that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.
Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty)
There is really only one question you ever need to direct at someone to work out whether or not they are a good person, and that is, with deliberate simplicity: Do you think you are a good person? And to this there is only one acceptable answer. People who are genuinely good, people who know about kindness, patience, forgiveness, compromise, apology and gentleness always, always answer: no. One cannot both be a good person and at the same time feel totally blameless and pure inside. Goodness is, one might say, the unique consequence of a keen awareness of one’s capacity to be bad: that is, to be thoughtless, cruel and self-righteous. The price of being genuinely good has to be a constant suspicion that one might be a monster – combined with a fundamental hesitation about labelling anyone else monstrous. Only properly bad people don’t lie awake at night worrying about their characters. It has generally never occurred to the most difficult or dangerous people on the planet that they might be awful. It is a grim paradox that the worst deeds that humans have ever been guilty of have been carried out by people with an easy conscience, people who felt they were definitely on the side of angels. The melancholy have advanced knowledge of their impurity, and are experts in their own sinfulness. They can’t forget how silly they have been at many moments and with what lack of thought they have treated others. This self-knowledge isn’t fun, but it keeps them very honest.
The School of Life (Varieties of Melancholy: A Hopeful Guide to Our Sombre Moods)
When discussing the topic of substance abuse with kids, I explain that doing drugs in order to be high and happy means that people try to support being by doing. However, being is “bigger” than doing. I validate that people who use substances know on some level that they need to take care of their being but they have the order reversed because doing can never support being simply because the “smaller” thing can never support the “bigger” thing. It is as absurd as trying to support silence by increasing the noise. The right order of things is that being supports doing and doing needs to serve being. In chess, without the King, the other pieces would all be “dead”, so their existence is supported by the King, but they need to serve the King with their capacity for action in order to have a good game. But how do we begin to honor being if we are emotionally distressed or chemically dependent? We need to accept whatever facet of being we are going through—if we are sad, we need to experience our sadness and not run from it; if we are angry, we need to go through it without acting heedlessly; if we are scared, we have to pay attention to our fear and the reasons for it. Everything we go through is a message of being, and we need to decipher the message rather than run from it. I need to stress here the importance of learning to endure distress and let our emotions run their course without making a bad situation worse. The addicted brain needs to endure strong cravings for several years until the chemically reinforced neural pathways gradually subside in the absence of continued reinforcement. Here the words of the great poet and spiritual teacher Rumi come to mind: “Of all the cures God has provided, patience is the best.
Roumen Bezergianov (Character Education with Chess)
Patience is not the capacity to wait, but the skill to maintain self-control while waiting. Keep faith and know that one step at a time. He has the whole world in his arms and he will make all things beautiful in His Own time
David Gyimah Boadi
The sea, especially in its moments of fury, demands first your attention, then your endurance, and finally your patience and acceptance. If you lack this capacity, the sea will soon find you out and make it known to you that the shore is where you should make your home. Each
James Baldwin (Across Islands and Oceans)
He was deficient in such qualities as patience, even temper, cooperativeness, and the capacity to subordinate oneself, in small ways and large, to the needs of an institution.
Robert C. Tucker (Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929)
Is my partner taking care of my emotions?” We can hardly keep from jumping there. But in the process, we can lose track of a prior step: the need to engage our caretaking capacities on our own behalf. We need to use our developed capacities for thought, sustained attention, patience, sensitivity, and tact in the service of expressing our own deep, tender, and body-based emotions. It’s both staying in touch with our vulnerable emotions and acting as a caretaker and communicator of these emotions that I consider to be the hallmark of emotional maturity.
Daphne de Marneffe (The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together)
It’s easy to slip into a pattern where you don’t really take care of your relationships. Investing in someone’s life is not the same as investigating someone’s life. One requires patience, capacity, and continuing to be there when the door looks so enticing. We cannot be people who accept a check-in text or a comment on a photo as enough to say we are truly living in community.
Hannah Brencher (Come Matter Here: Your Invitation to Be Here in a Getting There World)
Paperwork management was provisional and makeshift. Rochefort and his principal analysts knew they ought to devise a proper filing system, with cross-indexing of archived messages, but they never found the time for that. Somehow, through the blizzard of decrypts and IBM cards, order prevailed over chaos. “This is one reason why these people are mostly crazy,” Rochefort later recalled. “We’d have no problem at all.” You’d mention something and you’d say, “Now wait a minute. Back here when they were around Halmahera on their way down to a landing at Port Something-or-other, there was a message like this. Let’s have it.” And they’d look in this pile of junk and they were able to locate it. . . . And then of course, you’d get a new one here and this leads to another thing over here and this leads to another thing and this is how you fill the whole works up. One letter leads to another and that leads to a third one and so on. Then that’s when your memory comes in very handy. Holmes added that a cryptanalyst “needs only time, patience, an infinite capacity for work, a mind that can focus on one problem to the exclusion of everything else, a photographic memory, the inability to drop an unsolved problem, and a large volume of traffic.
Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
Maturity is the ability to control your anger and settle your differences without violence or resentment. Maturity is patience; it’s the willingness to pass up short-term pleasure for long-term gain. It’s the ability to “sweat it out” in spite of heavy opposition or discouraging setbacks. It’s the capacity to face unpleasantness and frustration without complaining or collapsing. Maturity is humility. It’s being big enough to say, “I was wrong,” and when you are right, never needing to say, “I told you so.” Maturity is the ability to make a decision and follow through with it instead of exploring endless possibilities and doing nothing about any of them. Maturity means dependability, keeping your word, and coming through in a crisis. The immature are masters of alibi; they’re the confused and the disorganised. Their lives are a maze of broken promises, former friends, unfinished business, and good intentions. Maturity is the art of being at peace with what you can’t change, having the courage to change what you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Ann Landers
But as society accelerates, something shifts. In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry - to allow things to take the time they take - is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
Editing a dictionary isn’t like editing any other book or magazine,” the professor pointed out. “It’s a peculiar world. You need extreme patience, a capacity for endless minutiae, a love of words bordering on obsession, and a broad enough outlook to stay sane.
Shion Miura (The Great Passage)
The long and short of it was, though Ingrid’s patience for romance was thin on the best of days, she knew her capacity for it was not limited by gender. She’d thought it didn’t matter. She was with Linden. There was no reason to ever acknowledge or indulge that part of herself. But now, as the realization of Gwendolyn Meyers’s identity washed over her, she knew how very neglected she’d left it. No matter who she was with or what gender they were, it was still part of her.
Rosiee Thor (Fire Becomes Her)
We can also learn to develop a new capacity for seeing the nervous water of an emotional process (a coach or a guide like Kenny is helpful). It requires some new categories for thinking; it means practicing some new disciplines and skills. It entails change in how we relate to others, and it demands time and patience. But leadership in the kingdom of God is worth the effort.
Jim Herrington (The Leader's Journey: Accepting the Call to Personal and Congregational Transformation)
Patience involves the capacity to bear with annoyances and to endure delays to our timetable.
Bruce A. Demarest (The Cross and Salvation)
capacity for delayed gratification is a reliable indicator of future career success. Patience is indeed a virtue.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making)
It takes double the capacity, ingenuity, patience and experience to teach a child five years old that it does one of ten.” ––Mr. Slade, Quincey Board of Education speaking at the California State Teacher's Association, San Francisco Chronicle, 1880
M. Louisa Locke (Uneasy Spirits (A Victorian San Francisco Mystery #2))
And so now that we have made waiting technologically obsolete,” added Wieseltier, “their attitude is: ‘Who needs patience anymore?’ But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience … Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.” And it is not just knowledge that is improved by pausing. So, too, is the ability to build trust, “to form deeper and better connections, not just fast ones, with other human beings,” adds Seidman. “Our ability to forge deep relationships—to love, to care, to hope, to trust, and to build voluntary communities based on shared values—is one of the most uniquely human capacities we have.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
Patience means self-mastery: the capacity to hold on and remain loving in a difficult situation when every atom of your being wants to turn and run. ✳ Perversely, the more we try to run from occasions that might cause us grief, the more we add to our burden of it.
Eknath Easwaran (Original Goodness: A Commentary on the Beatitudes (Classics of Christian Inspiration Book 3))
In more and more contexts, patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
If you keep doing the right thing, one day you will wake up and hear the words,   at the right time, you have come out, at the right time, you have built your capacity, at the right time, you can now see the results, at the right time, you have overcome adversity, at the right time - yes at the right time.
Elkanah Nyauma Ondieki
If you keep doing the right thing, one day you will wake up and hear the words, at the right time, you have come out, at the right time, you have built your capacity, at the right time, you can now see the results, at the right time, you have overcome adversity, at the right time - yes at the right time.
Elkanah Nyauma Ondieki
Did you know when the Bible commands us to love each other that we don’t possess that ability? We only have the ability to love when we rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to fill us. Human love is weak and frail. It comes and goes on a whim and is completely undependable. But God’s love is the most powerful force on earth. With it comes supernatural joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The Holy Spirit is the oil the engine of our emotions is designed to run on. With a daily, dependent relationship with the Holy Spirit to empower us to love our spouses, we have the capacity for true love and can overcome any obstacle in our paths.
Jimmy Evans (The Four Laws of Love: Guaranteed Success for Every Married Couple)
Our society fails to appreciate the woman who quietly responds to life with intense interest and with love for people, ideas, and things. Yet these characteristics are as deeply and truly creative as are the characteristics of those who seek to lead, to act, and to achieve. We have a bias against feminine values. Not only are we too busy to adequately nurture our children, but we are also unable to truly nourish our own creativity, our personhood, our ability to take a stand for life, and our capacities to love and live from the heart. The feminine qualities of receptivity, nurturing in silence, relatedness, patience, and secrecy (whether in a man or in a woman) are absolutely necessary to offset our society’s increasing institutionalization and pressures that leave us too busy to live. We cannot be good enough parents to our children, ourselves, or to the matters of our own heart until we confront the Death Mother’s power in ourselves and in our culture. Determination makes the difference. We must be determined to get over our culture’s impatient, quick fix, and get-on-with-it attitude that feeds the Death Mother. We must never give up and never let so-called reasons—Death Mother excuses such as time, money, health, an overpacked schedule, too many obligations, fears about hurting others or being selfish—stop us.
Massimilla Harris (Into the Heart of the Feminine: Facing the Death Mother Archetype to Reclaim Love, Strength, and Vitality)
Maturation in the psychological realm involves the differentiation of the elements of consciousness — thoughts, feelings, impulses, values, opinions, preferences, interests, intentions, aspirations. Differentiation needs to happen before these elements of consciousness can be mixed to produce tempered experience and expression. It is the same in the realm of relationships: maturation requires that the child first becomes unique and separate from other individuals. The better differentiated she becomes, the more she is able to mix with others without losing her sense of self. More fundamentally, a sense of self first needs to separate from inner experience, a capacity entirely absent in the young child. The child has to be able to know that she is not identical with whatever feeling happens to be active in her at any particular moment. She can feel something without her actions being necessarily dominated by that feeling. She can be aware of other, conflicting feelings, or of thoughts, values, commitments that might run counter to the feeling of the moment. She can choose. Both Peter and Sarah lacked a relationship with themselves because this prerequisite division had not yet occurred. They were not given to reflecting on their inner experience, agreeing or disagreeing with themselves, approving or disapproving of what they saw within. Because their feelings and thoughts were not differentiated enough to withstand mixing, they were capable of only one feeling or impulse at a time. Neither of them was given to statements like “Part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way.” Neither of them had “on the other hand” kind of experiences, nor felt ambivalent about erupting in frustration or about avoiding things. Without the capacity for reflection, they were defined by the inner experience of the moment. They immediately acted out whatever emotions arose in them. They could be their inner experience but they could not see it. This inability made them impulsive, egocentric, reactive, and impatient. Because frustration did not mix with caring, they had no patience. Because anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. Because frustration did not mix with either fear or affection, they lost their tempers. In short, they lacked maturity.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
True grief never goes away. We learn to live with it. After a while our friends stop asking and we stop discussing our sorrows. It doesn't help us that much and we realize that almost everyone who we have confided in carries grief deep in their hearts too. We often decide that once again, our job is to cheer others up. Grief isn't just something to endure; it is also a reflection of our capacity to love. It allows us to understand the most profound human experience at the most intimate level. Facing our grief requires openness and courage. We must explore it with curiosity and patience and we must allow it to stay in our hearts until it is ready to leave. Over time, by simply abiding with our sorrows, they will lessen. Yet as poet Linda Pastan wrote, "Grief is a circular staircase," We feelin better and then we feel worse. Holidays...trigger grief reactions. we may have a rather good Year Two and then be felled by Year Three. With intention and skills, we move forward on our journey, but not without spiraling in the waters.
Mary Pipher (Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age)
True grief never goes away. We learn to live with it. After a while our friends stop asking and we stop discussing our sorrows. It doesn't help us that much and we realize that almost everyone who we have confided in carries grief deep in their hearts too. We often decide that once again, our job is to cheer others up. Grief isn't just something to endure; it is also a reflection of our capacity to love. It allows us to understand the most profound human experience at the most intimate level. Facing our grief requires openness and courage. We must explore it with curiosity and patience and we must allow it to stay in our hearts until it is ready to leave. Over time, by simply abiding with our sorrows, they will lessen. Yet as poet Linda Pastan wrote, "Grief is a circular staircase," We feel better and then we feel worse. Holidays...trigger grief reactions. we may have a rather good Year Two and then be felled by Year Three. With intention and skills, we move forward on our journey, but not without spiraling in the waters.
Mary Pipher (Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age)
Leah had ignored Zidane's needs completely as she'd fulfilled her own albeit in a totally fictitious capacity and even though his dedication, patience and loyalty had not yet wavered, it was just a matter of time before the sands of his commitment finally ran out
Jill Thrussell (Spectrum: Detour of Wrong (Glitches #5))
God is unwearied Patience, a Meekness that cannot be provoked; he is an ever-enduring Mercifulness; he is unmixed Goodness, impartial, universal Love; his Delight is in the Communication of himself, his own Happiness, to every thing, according to its Capacity. He does every thing that is good, righteous and lovely, for its own sake, because it is good, righteous, and lovely. He is the Good from which nothing but Good cometh, and resisteth all Evil, only with Goodness.
William Law (The Complete Works of William Law (17-in-1))
If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience, and understanding. By developing greater tolerance and patience, it will be easier for you to develop your capacity for compassion and, through that, altruism. So even for the practice of your own spiritual path, the presence of an enemy is crucial. The analogy drawn in the Gospel as to how “the sun makes no discrimination where it shines” is very significant. The sun shines for all and makes no discrimination. This is a wonderful metaphor for compassion. It gives you the sense of its impartiality and all-embracing nature.
Dalai Lama XIV (The Good Heart: His Holiness the Dalai Lama)