β
Aaron Warner Anderson, chief commander and regent of Sector 45, son of the supreme commander of The Reestablishment.
He has a soft spot for fashion.
β
β
Tahereh Mafi (Ignite Me (Shatter Me, #3))
β
Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.
β
β
Madeline Miller (Circe)
β
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
β
β
Walter Scott
β
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson
β
The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.
β
β
Pablo Picasso
β
To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
β
β
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
β
Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.
β
β
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War)
β
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
β
β
Helen Keller
β
Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.
β
β
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
β
If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.
β
β
Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
β
The chief beauty about time
is that you cannot waste it in advance.
The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,
as perfect, as unspoiled,
as if you had never wasted or misapplied
a single moment in all your life.
You can turn over a new leaf every hour
if you choose.
β
β
Arnold Bennett
β
The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now
β
β
Zig Ziglar
β
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
β
β
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
β
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
β
β
Bertrand Russell (Why Men Fight)
β
My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here. --Bigwig
β
β
Richard Adams (Watership Down (Watership Down, #1))
β
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
β
β
Fyodor Dostoevsky
β
When someone stabs you it's not your fault that you feel pain.
β
β
Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
β
Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.
β
β
Kahlil Gibran
β
The chief element of happiness is this: to want to be what you are.
β
β
Erasmus (Praise of Folly)
β
In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.
β
β
Voltaire (Candide)
β
Iβll tell the Chief and heβll squash you like the little flea-ridden castrated cock you are.
β
β
A.G. Russo (The Cases Nobody Wanted (O'Shaughnessy Investigations Inc. Mystery Series Book 1))
β
Phil, we're the laughing stock of the nation,"
Β Β said Hobbs Creek mayor to police chief, "We
Β Β have a cop who faints at the sight of blood!
β
β
Kyle Keyes (Under the Bus)
β
The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.
β
β
William Booth
β
Don't worry, chief. We've got these Tualaghi surrounded - from the inside."
"Exactly," Erak replied dryly.
β
β
John Flanagan
β
Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It's as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. so when I'm observing that's what I'm watching for. The choices people make
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
β
My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.
β
β
Albert Camus
β
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
β
β
Alfred Adler
β
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to ruleβand both commonly succeed, and are right.
β
β
H.L. Mencken (Minority Report (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf))
β
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
β
β
Albert Einstein
β
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
β
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
β
We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.
β
β
Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
β
My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.
β
β
Chief Seattle (Chief Seattle's Speech (1854) (Books of American Wisdom))
β
I was tired of seeing the Graces always depicted as beautiful young things. I think wisdom comes with age and life and pain. And knowing what matters.
β
β
Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
β
Miranda's reward to herself, after a chief investigator dubbed her "the Eloise of four-year-old detectives," was to stretch her age.Β Sheβd now taken to informing people that she was four- and-a-half-and-three-quarters. She didn't seem to grasp the concept of almost-five.
β
β
Theasa Tuohy (Mademoiselle le Sleuth (Paris Backstage Murders))
β
It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.
β
β
Isaac Asimov (Foundation (Foundation, #1))
β
Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company.
β
β
Arthur Schopenhauer
β
The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.
β
β
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Sign of Four (Sherlock Holmes, #2))
β
The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them β the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.
β
β
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
β
Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course, but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they will say: "Yes, that's one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he, dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."
'It's saying a lot too much,' said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. 'Why, Sam,' he said, 'to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you've left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. "I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn't they put in more of his talk, dad? That's what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam, would he, dad?"'
'Now, Mr. Frodo,' said Sam, 'you shouldn't make fun. I was serious.'
'So was I,' said Frodo, 'and so I am.
β
β
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2))
β
Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.
β
β
Groucho Marx
β
In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
β
β
John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
β
When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.
β
β
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America: Volume 2)
β
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
β
While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life)
β
But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.
β
β
Louise Penny (A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #4))
β
And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.
β
β
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
β
Mmmm, Kate, the Chief of Security. Sexy. Who better to guard my body then the woman who owns it?"
"Curran, I will punch you.
β
β
Ilona Andrews (Magic Gifts (Kate Daniels, #5.6))
β
There are four things that lead to wisdom. You ready for them?'
She nodded, wondering when the police work would begin.
"They are four sentences we learn to say, and mean." Gamache held up his hand as a fist and raised a finger with each point. "I don't know. I need help. I'm sorry. I was wrong'.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
β
MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.
β
β
Ambrose Bierce (The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary)
β
You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.
β
β
Saul Bellow (Herzog)
β
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
β
β
Frederick Buechner
β
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... fear and surprise... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... Our four... no... Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise... I'll come in again.
β
β
Graham Chapman
β
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybodyβs face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
β
β
Jonathan Swift (The Battle of the Books and Other Short Pieces)
β
What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
β
Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a personβs bookcase and their grocery cart, sheβd pretty much know who they were.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
β
We're all blessed and we're all blighted, Chief Inspector," said Finney. "Everyday each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?
β
β
Louise Penny (A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #4))
β
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
β
β
Charles Kingsley
β
Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
β
I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1))
β
I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more.
β
β
Chief Joseph
β
Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.
β
β
G.K. Chesterton (Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)
β
Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
β
β
Jane Jacobs (Dark Age Ahead)
β
To live in peace as long as the waters run in the rivers and creeks, and as long as the stars and moon endure.
β
β
Tamanend (The Peace Treaty)
β
I've been treating you with courtesy and respect because that's the way I choose to treat everyone. But never, ever mistake kindness with weakness.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
β
Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, - the innocent sleep;
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
β
The chief purpose of life, for any of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.
β
β
J.R.R. Tolkien
β
Where there is love there is courage,
where there is courage there is peace,
where there is peace there is God.
And when you have God, you have everything.
β
β
Louise Penny (The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #5))
β
For those who are not frightened by the solitude, everything will have a different taste.
In solitude, they will discover the love that might otherwise arrive unnoticed.
In solitude, they will understand and respect the love that left them.
In solitude, they will be able to decide whether it is worth asking that lost love to come back or if they should simply let it go and set off along a new path.
In solitude, they will learn that saying βNoβ does not always show a lack of generosity and that saying βYesβ is not always a virtue.
And those who are alone at this moment, need never be frightened by the words of the devil: βYouβre wasting your time.β
Or by the chief demonβs even more potent words: βNo one cares about you.β
The Divine Energy is listening to us when we speak to other people, but also when we are still and silent and able to accept solitude as a blessing.
And when we achieve that harmony, we receive more than we asked for.
β
β
Paulo Coelho (Manuscript Found in Accra)
β
Your beliefs become your thoughts
Your thoughts become your words
Your words become your actions
Your actions become your destiny.
Mahatma Ghandi,β he said. βThereβs more, but I canβt remember it all.
β
β
Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
β
I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.
β
β
Aleister Crowley
β
Itβs all about the company you keep, isnβt it, Chief Inspector? Now Mr Trenton, who I know wouldnβt hurt a fly, has certainβ¦preferences, if you know what I mean.β He gave Merlin a meaningful look. βI donβt want to get anyone into trouble, of course.
β
β
Mark Ellis (Death of an Officer)
β
KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of the Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command-including yours. BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck.
-The Chief
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream)
β
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
β
β
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
β
All things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man. The air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
β
β
Chief Seattle
β
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.
β
β
Lewis Carroll
β
He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death. He had lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.
β
β
Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
β
Angry people want you to see how powerful they are... loving people want you to see how powerful You are.
β
β
Chief Red Eagle
β
Sam: I wonder if we'll ever be put into songs or tales. Frodo: [turns around] What? Sam: I wonder if people will ever say, 'Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring.' And they'll say 'Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was really courageous, wasn't he, Dad?' 'Yes, my boy, the most famousest of hobbits. And that's saying a lot.' Frodo: [continue walking] You've left out one of the chief characters - Samwise the Brave. I want to hear more about Sam. [stops and turns to Sam] Frodo: Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam. Sam: Now Mr. Frodo, you shouldn't make fun; I was being serious. Frodo: So was I. [they continue to walk] Sam: Samwise the Brave...
β
β
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2))
β
Don't worry chief,"said foaly,"It's like riding a unicorn,you never forget.
β
β
Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl, #1))
β
Of all needs a book has,
the chief need is to be readable.
β
β
Anthony Trollope
β
We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
β
β
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
β
The capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged is the chief asset of every person who attains outstanding success in any calling.
β
β
Napoleon Hill (Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success)
β
Things are strongest where they're broken.
β
β
Louise Penny (Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #6))
β
Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
β
β
Peter Singer (Animal Liberation)
β
There is not a day or night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit's. Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not. But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.
β
β
Richard Adams (Watership Down (Watership Down, #1))
β
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
β
β
Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams)
β
The chief danger of the 20th century will be religion without the Holy Spirit, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.
β
β
William Booth
β
It does not require many words to speak the truth.
β
β
Chief Joseph
β
Even the demons are encouraged when their chief is "not lost in loss itself.
β
β
John Milton (Paradise Lost)
β
My chief desire in all my writings, is to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and make Him beautiful and glorious in the eyes of people; and to promote the increase of repentance, faith, and holiness upon earth.
β
β
J.C. Ryle
β
How many kings are governed by their ministers, how many ministers by their secretaries? Who, in such cases, is really the chief?
β
β
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
β
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
β
...the chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.
β
β
Pentti Linkola (Can Life Prevail?)
β
We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.
β
β
Anton Chekhov
β
The home is the chief school of human virtues.
β
β
William Ellery Channing
β
Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?
β
β
Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
β
Who hurt you, once,
so far beyond repair
that you would meet each overture
with curling lip?
While we, who knew you well,
your friends, (the focus of your scorn)
could see your courage in the face of fear,
your wit, and thoughtfulness,
and will remember you
with something close to love.
β
β
Louise Penny (Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #6))
β
When the green hills are covered with talking wires and the wolves no longer sing, what good will the money you paid for our land be then
β
β
Chief Seattle
β
And if the Pack Council produces any kittens, weβll give them to Jim to raise. He needs to mellow out anyway.β I looked at him. He took his hands off the wheel and held them apart about six inches. βCute fluffy kittens. Just sitting on Jimβs lap.β I pictured Jim with his badass-chief-of-security expression covered in small fluffy kittens. It was too much. The numbness inside me broke, like a dam. I giggled and laughed. Curran laughed, too.
β
β
Ilona Andrews (Magic Breaks (Kate Daniels, #7))
β
Hooray!" said the Chief of the Army. "Let's blow everyone up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!
β
β
Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (Charlie Bucket, #2))
β
Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one's aim.
β
β
John D. Rockefeller
β
Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare.
β
β
Lance Morrow (The Chief: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons)
β
I often think we should have tattooed on the back of whatever hand we use to shoot or write, 'I might be wrong.
β
β
Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
β
MRS ALLONBY Is she such a mystery?
LORD ILLINGWORTH She is more than a mystery - she is a mood.
MRS ALLONBY Moods don't last.
LORD ILLINGWORTH It is their chief charm.
β
β
Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)
β
MAN, n.
An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
β
β
Ambrose Bierce (The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary)
β
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does
to the web, he does to himself.
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Chief Seattle
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And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, thatβs the chief thing, and thatβs everything; nothing else is wanted β you will find out at once how to arrange it all.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man)
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Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson."
"Lake and Palmer?"
"Ralph and Waldo.
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Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
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Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American chief who pointed out to him that in his perception most white people have tense faces, staring eyes, and a cruel demeanor. He said: βThey are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We donβt know what they want. We think they are mad.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
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Donβt believe everything you think.
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Louise Penny (A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12))
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The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
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George Washington (George Washington's Farewell Address (Books of American Wisdom))
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When the Earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear, when that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them.
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Chief Seattle
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I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . The Scotch catechism says that manβs chief end is βto glorify God and enjoy Him forever.β But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
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C.S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms)
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The journey homewards. Coming home. That's what it's all about. The journey to the coming of the Kingdom. That's probably the chief difference between the Christian and the secular artist--the purpose of the work, be it story or music or painting, is to further the coming of the kingdom, to make us aware of our status as children of God, and to turn our feet toward home.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art)
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Peter swept aside Yogi Tea and Harmony Herbal Blend, though he hesitated a second over the chamomile. .... But no. Violent death demanded Earl Grey.
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Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
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Don't mistake dramatics for a conscience.
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Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
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Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.
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C.S. Lewis (The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 2: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949)
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I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom.
Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
β
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Calvin Coolidge
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Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.
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Chief Seattle
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The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.
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Louise Penny (The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #5))
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Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead "still" lives, waiting.
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Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
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But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
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Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
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Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. [...] I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.
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Madeline Miller (Circe)
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...my object is to show that the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses...
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Charlotte M. Mason
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I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.
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Madeleine L'Engle (A Wind in the Door (Time Quintet, #2))
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Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
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Chief Seattle
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At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
β
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C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
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Former police chief of Houston once said of me: βFrank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it βU.R. Hookedβ and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driverβs license for identification.
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Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
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What are you afraid of?
I'm afraid of not recognizing Paradise.
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Louise Penny (The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #5))
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Well, it doesn't sound particularly noble and knightly to say you've rescued the Chief Cook and Librarian, does it? And it has cut down on the number of interruptions. I used to get two or three knights a day, and now there's only about one a week. And the ones who do come are at least smart enough to figure out that I'm still a princess even if the dragons call me Chief Cook
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Patricia C. Wrede (Searching for Dragons (Enchanted Forest Chronicles, #2))
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Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.
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Louise Penny (Glass Houses (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #13))
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It's a blessing Madame Gamache and I had at our wedding. It was read at the end of the ceremony.
Now you will feel no rain
For each of you will be shelter for the other
Now you will feel no cold
For each of you will be warmth for the other
Now there is no loneliness for you
Now there is no more loneliness.
Now you are two persons, but there is one life before you.
Go now to your dwelling place
To enter into the days of your togetherness.
And may your days be good and long upon this earth.
(Apache Blessing)
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Louise Penny (Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #6))
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Joy doesn't ever leave, you know. It's always with you. And one day you'll find it again.
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Louise Penny (Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #6))
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Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.β βAnd between the two is the lump in the throat,
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Louise Penny (The Long Way Home (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #10))
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No, Iβm fine. And yes, I mean that sort of FINE,β said Reine-Marie, making reference to the title of one of Ruthβs poetry books, where FINE stood for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.
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Louise Penny (The Nature of the Beast (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #11))
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Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
β
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Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
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The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
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Founding Fathers (The United States Constitution)
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Where there is love, there is courage
Where there is courage, there is peace
Where there is peace, there is God
And when you have God, you have everything.
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Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2))
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Love wants the best for others. Attachment takes hostages.
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Louise Penny (The Cruelest Month (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #3))
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A Poem by Tecumseh
βSo live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none.
When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.
When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.β
~ Chief Tecumseh
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~ Chief Tecumseh
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What did falling in love do for you? Can you ever really explain it? It filled empty spaces I never knew were empty. It cured a loneliness I never knew I had. It gave me joy. And freedom. I think that was the most amazing part. I suddenly felt both embraced and freed at the same time.
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Louise Penny (The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #8))
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They waited for life to happen to them. They waited for someone to save them. Or heal them. They did nothing for themselves.
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Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
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The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own...
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Epictetus
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Tell me, Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay! Truly Elrond spoke, saying that we could not foresee what we might meet upon our road. Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would have never come, had I known the danger of light and joy.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3))
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Anybody who thinks that 'it doesn't matter who's President' has never been Drafted and sent off to fight and die in a vicious, stupid war on the other side of the world--or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on public property--or been hounded by the IRS for purely political reasons--or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts wanting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.
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Hunter S. Thompson
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Feminism β¦ I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, 'Free to be You and Me.' Free to be, if you were a girlβdoctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if youβre a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, thatβs OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriersβmanmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg (My Own Words)
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The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.
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Chief Joseph
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I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.
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C.S. Lewis
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Gribbleβs journey was in many ways different from others around him. He was often looked after and fed by local village chiefs where news was exchanged and advice given on both sides. He was concerned that the lives of the Kachin and Naga people were being turned upside down by the thousands of refugees. Later he was overwhelmed with worries about his own survival, but even at that final stage he had contact with local guides.
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Elizabeth Tebby Germaine (EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942)
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The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Romeβnot by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
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Thomas Henry Huxley (Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays (Great Minds))
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Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and Iβll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might selectβdoctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. (1930)
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John B. Watson (Behaviorism)
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Yamamoto sensed a feeling of culmination about the huge success of the first strike, and the same incisive intuition that guided his brilliant moves at the gaming tables told him what the next move on the bridge ofΒ AkagiΒ would be. In (Vice Admiral) Nagumo he knew his man. Nagumo had never been committed to the Pearl Harbor mission. He had not been Yamamotoβs choice to command the Striking Force; his assignment was the decision of the Navy Ministry in Tokyo, based on seniority. While the exultation of the officers and sailors on his staff swirled around him, Yamamoto sat quietly. Finally, he fixed a steely gaze on his chief of staff, and in a low, intense voice: βAdmiral Nagumo is going to withdraw.
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Dale A. Jenkins (Diplomats & Admirals: From Failed Negotiations and Tragic Misjudgments to Powerful Leaders and Heroic Deeds, the Untold Story of the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Midway)
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For studying courage in textbooks doesnβt make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professorβand the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
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Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.
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Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)
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Why, Sam,β he said, βto hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the
story was already written. But youβve left out one of the chief characters; Samwise the stout hearted. βI want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didnβt they put in more of his talk, dad? Thatβs what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldnβt have got far without Sam, would he, dad?β β
βNow, Mr. Frodo,β said Sam, βyou shouldnβt make fun. I was serious.β
βSo was I,β said Frodo, βand so I am. Weβre going on a bit too fast. You and
I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point βShut the book now, dad; we donβt want to read any moreβ.β
βMaybe,β said Sam, βbut I wouldnβt be one to say that. Things done and
over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks heβs the hero or the villain?β
βGollum!β he called. βWould you like to be the hero, now whereβs he got to
again?
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3))
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One of the elders told him that when he was a boy his grandfather came to him one day and said he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was gray, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy, and he thought about it for a few days then returned to his grandfather. He asked, 'Grandfather, which of the wolves will win?'
The abbot smiled slightly and examined the Chief Inspector. 'Do you know what his grandfather said?'
Gamache shook his head. . . .
'The one I feed,' said Dom Philippe.
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Louise Penny (The Beautiful Mystery (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #8))
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The chief means of resisting manipulation is humility β knowing who we really are and facing it. You can only serve by love. You can only love by choice. True love cannot be the result of decree, force or manipulation. Jesus always kept his strength to make loving choices. He calls us to make loving choices necessary to be the servant of all." "Humility permits me to own my feelings β and to admit them. Now I'm free to say, βI'm angryβ. I'm free to admit what I am reacting to. I am free to ask if anger is what the person wanted to produce in me, and to ask for help in changing if my reaction is inappropriate.
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Gayle D. Erwin (The Jesus Style)
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A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
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Chief Crowfoot
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How much more courage it took to be kind than to be cruel.
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Louise Penny (How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #9))
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Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to the white man is an 'unbroken wilderness.'
But for us there was no wilderness, nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly. Our faith sought the harmony of man with his surroundings; the other sought the dominance of surroundings.
For us, the world was full of beauty; for the other, it was a place to be endured until he went to another world.
But we were wise. We knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard.
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Luther Standing Bear
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But there was no hiding from Conscience. Not in new homes and new cars. In travel. In meditation or frantic activity. In children, in good works. On tiptoes or bended knee. In a big career. Or a small cabin. It would find you. The past always did. Which was why... it was vital to be aware of actions in the present. Because the present became the past, and the past grew. And got up, and followed you. And found you... Who wouldn't be afraid of this?
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Louise Penny (The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #5))
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A significant number of people believe tribal people still live and dress as they did 300 years ago. During my tenure as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, national news agencies requesting interviews sometimes asked if they could film a tribal dance or if I would wear traditional tribal clothing for the interview. I doubt they asked the president of the United States to dress like a pilgrim for an interview.
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Wilma Mankiller
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Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?'
'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.
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Anne BrontΓ« (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
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Aid workers, when handing out food to starving people, quickly learn that the people fighting for it at the front are the people who need it least. It's the people sitting quietly at the back, too weak to fight, who need it the most. And so too with tragedy.
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Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
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Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway stationβthe Gare D'Orsayβand see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elyseesβnearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?
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Margaret Anderson
β
Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
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Aristotle (Metaphysics)
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The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.
Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children.
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Extract from Chief Seattle.
β
There was a dragon who had a long-standing obsession with a queen's breasts," she said, growing breathless. "The dragon knew the penalty to touch her would mean death, yet he revealed his secret desire to the king's chief doctor. This man promised he could arrange for the dragon to satisfy his desire, but it would cost him one thousand gold coins." She spread her soapy hands over his nipples, then down his arms. "Though he didn't have the money, the dragon readily agreed to the scheme."
Grace," Darius moaned, his erection straining against her stomach.
She hid her smile, loving that she had this much power over such a strong man. That she, Grace Carlyle, made him ache with longing. "The next day the physician made a batch of itching powder and poured some into the queen's bra⦠uh, you might call it a brassiere⦠while she bathed. After she dressed, she began itching and itching and itching. The physician was summoned to the Royal Chambers, and he informed the king and queen that only a special saliva, if applied for several hours, would cure this type of itch. And only a dragon possessed this special saliva." Out of breath, she paused.
Continue," Darius said. His arms wound around her so tightly she could barely breathe. His skin blazed hot against hers, hotter than even the steamy water.
Are you sure?"
Continue." Taut lines bracketed his mouth.
Well, the king summoned the dragon. Meanwhile, the physician slipped him the antidote for the itching powder, which the dragon put into his mouth, and for the next few hours, the dragon worked passionately on the queen's breasts.
Anyway," she said, reaching around him and lathering the muscled mounds of his butt, "the queen's itching was eventually relieved, and the dragon left satisfied and touted as a hero."
This does not sound like a joke," Darius said.
I'm getting to the punch line. Hang on. When the physician demanded his payment, the now satisfied dragon refused. He knew that the physician could never report what really happened to the king. So the next day, the physician slipped a massive dose of the same itching powder into the king's loincloth. And the king immediately summoned the dragon."
-Heart of the Dragon
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Gena Showalter
β
Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun.
When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.
Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year.
Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.
But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded
as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and
Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and
Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons.
The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests,
bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake.
Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence.
What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:
Resheph
Anath
Ashtoreth
El
Nergal
Nebo
Ninib
Melek
Ahijah
Isis
Ptah
Anubis
Baal
Astarte
Hadad
Addu
Shalem
Dagon
Sharaab
Yau
Amon-Re
Osiris
Sebek
Molech?
All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:
BilΓ©
Ler
Arianrhod
Morrigu
Govannon
Gunfled
Sokk-mimi
Nemetona
Dagda
Robigus
Pluto
Ops
Meditrina
Vesta
You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.
And all are dead.
β
β
H.L. Mencken (A Mencken Chrestomathy)
β
What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning, the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico, but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting. I tell Tiffany to meet me by the Trocadero in Paris. She's been waiting for me all these years. She's never taken another lover. I don't care. I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier.
β
β
Dwight Schrute
β
What haunted people even, perhaps especially, on their deathbed? What chased them, tortured them and brought some of them to their knees? And [he] thought he had the answer. Regret. Regret for things said, things done, and things not done. Regret for the people they might have been. And failed to be.
β
β
Louise Penny (The Brutal Telling (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #5))
β
If you have ever seen the play Peter Pan you will remember how the pirate chief was always making his dying speech because he was afraid that possibly when the time came for him to die he might not have time to get it off his chest. It is much the same with me, and so, although I am not at this moment dying, I shall be doing so one of these days and I want to send you a parting word of goodbye.
Remember, it is the last you will ever hear from me, so think it over.
I have had a most happy life and I want each one of you to have as happy a life too.
I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life. Happiness doesn't come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy, so that you can be useful and so can enjoy life when you are a man.
Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one.
But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn come to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best. "Be Prepared" in this way, to live happy and to die happyβstick to your Scout promise alwaysβeven after you have ceased to be a boyβand God help you do it.
β
β
Robert Baden-Powell
β
Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
β
β
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
β
The fault lies with us, and only us. Itβs not fate, not genetics, not bad luck, and itβs definitely not Mom and Dad. Ultimately itβs us and our choices. But, butβ β now her eyes shone and she almost vibrated with excitement β βthe most powerful, spectacular thing is that the solution rests with us as well. Weβre the only ones who can change our lives, turn them around. So all those years waiting for someone else to do it are wasted.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1))
β
Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.
β
β
Luther Standing Bear
β
Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].
β
β
Karl Marx
β
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion;respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,even a stranger, when in a lonely place.Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weepand pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
β
β
Tecumseh
β
All my life I've always come back to one thing,
my need to feel free and the need to feel the breeze,
the ride provides a freedom this gypsy needs,
where every road is another blessed memory,
a new experience to carry inside my journey,
a sense of belonging to a familiar tribe,
a brotherhood that goes beyond a bloodline.
β
β
Jess "Chief" Brynjulson (Highway Writings)
β
Three Pines wasnβt on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village should have been hiding in this valley all along. Anyone fortunate enough to find it once usually found their way back.
β
β
Louise Penny (Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1))
β
Give thy thoughts no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar; Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel, But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, Bearβt that thβopposΓ¨d may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each manβs censure, but reserve thy judgement. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are most select and generous, chief in that. Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
β
The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.
β
β
Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
β
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing β
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
β
β
Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins)
β
So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right?
[Will nods]
Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
β
β
Robin Williams
β
He slumped down into the pen, and the puppies immediately leapt on him. "Perhaps I'll see you later tonight."
"If you're lucky," Celaena purred, and walked away. She smiled to herself as they strode through the castle.
Eventully Nehemia turned to her. "Do you like him?"
Celaena made a face. "Of course not. Why would I?"
You converse easily. It seems as if you have...a connection."
"A connection?" Celaena choked on the word. "I just enjoy teasing him."
"It's not a crime if you consider him handsome. I'll admit I judged him wrong; I thought him to be a pompous, selfish idiot, but he's not so bad."
"He's a Havilliard."
"My mother was the daughter of a chief who sought to overthrow my grandfather."
"We're both silly. It's nothing."
"He seems to take great interest in you."
Celaena's head whipped around, her eyes full of long-forgotten fury that made her belly ache and twist. "I would sooner cut out my own heart than love a Havilliard," she snarled.
They completed their walk in silence, and when they parted ways, Celaena quickly wished Nehemia a pleasant evening before striding to her part of the castle.
β
β
Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1))
β
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide
β
β
Tecumseh
β
Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldnβt it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment He had come down in power and glory? Why didnβt He do it? Why hasnβt He done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?
I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didnβt, He hasnβt, because from the moment He did, He would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be His slaves. Even those who hated Him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in Him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to Him and He to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.
And so, I thought, He must forebear to reveal His power and glory by presenting Himself as Himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of His creatures. Those who wish to see Him must see Him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.
β
β
Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)
β
So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work. Many a year I have thought and pondered, lost myself in speculations and theories, considering man as a mass moved by a force, viewing his inexplicable movement in the light of a mechanical one, and applying the simple principles of mechanics to the analysis of the same until I arrived at these solutions, only to realize that they were taught to me in my early childhood. These three words sound the key-notes of the Christian religion. Their scientific meaning and purpose now clear to me: food to increase the mass, peace to diminish the retarding force, and work to increase the force accelerating human movement. These are the only three solutions which are possible of that great problem, and all of them have one object, one end, namely, to increase human energy. When we recognize this, we cannot help wondering how profoundly wise and scientific and how immensely practical the Christian religion is, and in what a marked contrast it stands in this respect to other religions. It is unmistakably the result of practical experiment and scientific observation which have extended through the ages, while other religions seem to be the outcome of merely abstract reasoning. Work, untiring effort, useful and accumulative, with periods of rest and recuperation aiming at higher efficiency, is its chief and ever-recurring command. Thus we are inspired both by Christianity and Science to do our utmost toward increasing the performance of mankind. This most important of human problems I shall now specifically consider.
β
β
Nikola Tesla
β
It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. β¦ You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. β¦ Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.
β
β
Wilhelm Reich (Listen, Little Man!)
β
According to the biblical tradition the absence of work -- idleness -- was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men -- the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will.
β
β
Leo Tolstoy (ΠΠΎΠΉΠ½Π° ΠΈ ΠΌΠΈΡ)
β
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental β men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre β the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
β
β
H.L. Mencken
β
Live or die, but don't poison everything...
Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!
Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.
Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.
O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
β
β
Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems)
β
And it shall come to pass that what man made shall be shattered, and the Shadow shall lie across the Pattern of Age, and the Dark One shall once more lay his hand upon the world of man. Women shall weep and men quail as the nations of the earth are rent like rotting cloth. Neither shall anything stand nor abide...
Yet one shall be born to face the Shadow, born once more as he was born before and shall be born again, time without end. The Dragon shall be Reborn, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth at his rebirth. In sackcloth and ashes shall he clothe the people, and he shall break the world again by his coming, tearing apart all ties that bind. Like the unfettered dawn shall he blind us, and burns us, yet shall the Dragon Reborn confront the Shadow at the Last battle, and his blood shall give us the Light. Let tears flow, O ye people of the world. Weep for your salvation.
-from The Karaethon Cycle: The Prophecies of the Dragon, as translated by Ellaine Marise'idin Alshinn, Chief Librarian at the Court of Arafel, in the Year of Grace 231 of the New Era, the Third Age
β
β
Robert Jordan (The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, #2))
β
One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing . . . the relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God's love have been removed or overcome. One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for usβ whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the "one thing necessary" may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.
β
β
Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
β
I like how you call homosexuality an abomination."
"I don't say homosexuality's an abomination, Mr. President, the bible does."
"Yes it does. Leviticus-"
"18:22"
"Chapter in verse. I wanted to ask you a couple questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that can I ask another? My chief of staff, Leo Mcgary,insists on working on the sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it ok to call the police? Here's one that's really important, cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Red Skins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?
β
β
Aaron Sorkin
β
there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of developmentβfor example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.
β
β
Albert Einstein (Religion and Science)
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A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
1492
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:
[image]
Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
Color was everything.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
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To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place... It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses, whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now, there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewel was beaten - savagely, by someone who led exclusively with his left. And Tom Robinson now sits before you having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses... his RIGHT. I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime - she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did. Now, what did she do? She tempted a *****. She was white, and she tempted a *****. She did something that, in our society, is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young ***** man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards. The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption... the evil assumption that all Negroes lie, all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all ***** men are not to be trusted around our women. An assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is, in itself, gentlemen, a lie, which I do not need to point out to you. And so, a quiet, humble, respectable *****, who has had the unmitigated TEMERITY to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against TWO white people's! The defendant is not guilty - but somebody in this courtroom is. Now, gentlemen, in this country, our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system - that's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality! Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision and restore this man to his family. In the name of GOD, do your duty. In the name of God, believe... Tom Robinson
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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In 1924, Nikola Tesla was asked why he never married?
His answer was this:
"I had always thought of woman as possessing those delicate qualities of mind and soul that made her in her respects far superior to man. I had put her on a lofty pedestal, figuratively speaking, and ranked her in certain important attributes considerably higher than man. I worshipped at the feet of the creature I had raised to this height, and, like every true worshiper, I felt myself unworthy of the object of my worship.
But all this was in the past. Now the soft voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished. In her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies on making herself as much as possible like man - in dress, voice, and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind. The world has experience many tragedies, but to my mind the greatest tragedy of all is the present economic condition wherein women strive against men, and in many cases actually succeed in usurping their places in the professions and in industry. This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization.
Practically all the great achievements of man until now have been inspired by his love and devotion to woman. Man has aspired to great things because some woman believed in him, because he wished to command her admiration and respect. For these reasons he has fought for her and risked his life and his all for her time and time again.
Perhaps the male in society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it - and there is striking evidence at hand that they do - then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history.
Our civilization will sink to a state like that which is found among the bees, ants, and other insects - a state wherein the male is ruthlessly killed off. In this matriarchal empire which will be established, the female rules. As the female predominates, the males are at her mercy. The male is considered important only as a factor in the general scheme of the continuity of life.
The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me."
Galveston Daily News, Galveston, Texas, page 23. August 10, 1924.
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Nikola Tesla
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Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation
Delivered on December 8, 1941
Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives:
Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt