Compendium Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Compendium. Here they are! All 100 of them:

An intellectual hatred is the worst.
W.B. Yeats (The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose)
You may flunk your exams in school and still make it in life, but if you flunk life's exams, you're sunk!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Until you prevail with God, you cannot prevail with men; your victory has to be spiritual first, before it is physical.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Describing yourself by your earthly nativity is carnality. Being born again, your nativity is of divinity.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Success is causing the world around you to aspire to your inspiration.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
There is nothing wrong with being poor; but there is everything wrong with remaining poor after you have discovered your riches in Christ.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Kings don't beg, they decree. They have only one destiny and that's to reign. God has made you king. Reign and rule, refuse to beg!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
P.D. James (Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights)
What you see with the eyes of faith is more real than what you see with your optical eyes.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Revelation without a relationship produces rebellion.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
God has never made a failure; that he gave birth to you means you are a success. Success is in your DNA.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
To become great, you have to be born great. If you are born again then you are the seed of Abraham. That means you have greatness in you!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
It's good to have an end in mind but in the end what counts is how you travel.
Orna Ross (Beyond The Law of Attraction: A Creativist Compendium)
The goal of the Christian is not to become like Jesus; because as He is, so are we in this world.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Begging in the Name of Jesus is an insult to His Name. Use His Name as a king, with boldness!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
As a child of God, you must realize that you are on the winning side of prophecy; until you win it is not over!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
You can have anything you want so long as you realise that you can't have everything you want.
Orna Ross (Beyond The Law of Attraction: A Creativist Compendium)
In brief, the Tree of Life is a compendium of science, psychology, philosophy and theology.
Dion Fortune (The Mystical Qabalah)
The devil has been defeated, stop trying to defeat him. What we have left is the fight of faith, and it's a good fight!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
A pastor can teach you on TV, but he can't pastor you on TV. There's so much to gain by belonging to a church.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Good things don't happen to the child of God; the child of God brings forth good things out of him.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Not all worth knowing can be found between the covers of compendiums, my boy. Let’s simply say that my academy was the thoroughfare, my primer experience, and my instructor the fickle finger of fate.
Amor Towles (The Lincoln Highway)
God sends you into a situation not so that He can show He is God; but rather for you to show who you are!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
But honestly... I just don't know what anyone's thinking. To me, that's scarier than any half-rotten ghoul trying to eat my flesh.
Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead: Compendium One)
... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.
E.A. Bucchianeri (A Compendium of Essays: Purcell, Hogarth and Handel, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy, and Andrew Lloyd Webber)
There is no such thing as a powerful prayer; we only have powerful people praying to a powerful God.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
We have to challenge ourselves and be innovative so as to change the world. Get to this level of thinking. No small dreams, do big things!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
God's idea is for us to become the Word of God, in such a way that men can read the Word by looking at our lives.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Every problem comes along with it's solution; the bigger the problem, the bigger the testimony. Cheer up!
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
When you got born again your past was not erased, it became non-existent.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Jesus gave us the victory with which He overcame Satan, and commissioned us to cast out devils in His Name.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
If at the age of thirty you don't know what God has called you to do; you may never know.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Christ is not only a person, Christ is a place. When you come into Christ, you don't come into a person; you come into a place.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
I have a mouth for kisses / No one to give or to take / I have a heart in my bosom / Beating for nobody's sake.
Lana Citron (A Compendium of Kisses)
She wouldn’t allow herself to become a human scar, a compendium of personal loss. She had the obligation to be more than the sum of her grievances with the world.
F.C. Yee (Avatar: The Shadow of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels, #2))
As a Christian, you ought to be less concerned about where God is bringing you out from, rather, focus on where He's taking you to.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
I work hard, but I work from a position of rest.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Journey through the Power of the Rainbow represents a condensed compendium of literary efforts from a life dedicated to transforming the themes of injustice, grief, and despair that we all encounter during some unavoidable point of our existence into a sustainable life-affirming poetics of passionate creativity, empowered spiritual vision, and inspired commitment.
Aberjhani (Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry)
And just look at these books!” said Hermione excitedly, running a finger along the spines of the large leather-bound tomes. “A Compendium of Common Curses and Their Counter-Actions . . . The Dark Arts Outsmarted . . . Self-Defensive Spellwork . . . wow . . .” She looked around at Harry, her face glowing, and he saw that the presence of hundreds of books had finally convinced Hermione that what they were doing was right.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
As the British Empire fell, the Afrikaner rose up to claim South Africa as his rightful inheritance. To maintain power in the face of the country’s rising and restless black majority, the government realized they needed a newer and more robust set of tools. They set up a formal commission to go out and study institutionalized racism all over the world. They went to Australia. They went to the Netherlands. They went to America. They saw what worked, what didn’t. Then they came back and published a report, and the government used that knowledge to build the most advanced system of racial oppression known to man. Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more than three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood)
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.
Henry James (The Complete Notebooks of Henry James: The Authoritative and Definitive Edition)
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.
Julian Baggini (The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods)
You are not a success until you start changing other lives permanently.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
Yenrieth wanted to lick her dry. Then lick her wet.
Larissa Ione (Apocalypse: The Lords of Deliverance Compendium (Lords of Deliverance, #2.5))
Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes.
Adam A. Watt (The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust)
For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years’ time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths.
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way)
She didn't have the right to lose herself in her rage and let it take her to oblivion. No matter what she'd been through. She wouldn't allow herself to become a human scar, a compendium of personal loss. She had the obligation to be more than the sum of her grievances with the world.
F.C. Yee
Your fellowship with God never came because of your righteousness. So how could your own righteousness maintain it?
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
It is wise to avoid militants of all plumage, to trust only the fanatically unfanatic
Frederick Franck (A Little Compendium on That Which Matters)
On the exoteric level the traditions are irreconcilable. On the esoteric, experiential level of the heart reigns an eloquent, reverential silence.
Frederick Franck (A Little Compendium on That Which Matters)
New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East
John Gregory Dunne
She seemed so often a compendium of all her past selves, none of whom Vanna could ever interrogate, young women at various forks, turning this way or that. There were swarms of her, and Vanna did not know a single one.
Omar El Akkad (What Strange Paradise)
Until you change a man's thinking, you cannot change his life, you cannot change his state and therefore cannot change his estate. The extent of your vision is the boundary of your blessing. How far your vision can go is how much you can possess.
Chris Oyakhilome (Rhapsody Of Realities Topical Compendium (Volume 1))
How the press, for example, loves to brag to its victims— its readers—about its freedom. Yes, the press may be free to lie and distort and suppress and deceive and malign, but is it free to tell the truth?
Willis Carto (An Appeal to Reason: a Compendium of the Writings of Willis A. Carto)
In books we have the compendium of all human experience. We may use them or neglect them as we will, but if we use them, we may share the courage and endurance of adventurers, the thoughts of sages, the visions of poets and the raptures of lovers, and - some few of us perhaps - the ecstasies of Saints.
Basil Blackwell
Fernanda was scandalized that she did not understand the relationship of Catholicism with life but only its relationship with death, as if it were not a religion but a compendium of funeral conventions.
Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.
Antonia Fraser (The Weaker Vessel)
Raw ingredients trump recipes every time; farmers and ranchers who coax the best from the earth can make any of us appear to be a great cook.
Judy Rodgers (The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant)
Remnants is an extraordinary gift…a kind of Rosetta Stone of the African American woman’s soul – all the ‘remnants,’ the bits and pieces Rosemarie carefully saved, remembered, nurtured, in her ancestors, relatives and self coming together in this extremely useful compendium of wisdom, of sureness and insight that we will be able to use for generations to come.
Alice Walker
Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instants recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On a deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman's mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward
Carl Bernstein (All the President’s Men)
Closely related are the entries in his bestiary, a compendium of short tales of animals and moral lessons based on their traits. Bestiaries were popular among the ancients and in the Middle Ages, and the spread of printing presses meant that many were reprinted in Italy beginning in the 1470s. Leonardo had a copy of the bestiary written by Pliny the Elder and three others by medieval compilers.
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo da Vinci)
The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.
Richard Holloway (Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity)
Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked in my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.
Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City)
A lot of guys write books that are nothing but a compendium of women they’ve had sex with. Those guys are vapid assholes. Yet there are times when getting laid can pull your ego and confidence up from the ashes, especially when you are young and honestly feel out of your league. It’s meaningless in the long run but at the time it works.
Doug Stanhope (Digging Up Mother: A Love Story)
It's hard to win a war with a front at your back.
Gregory S. Close (In Siege of Daylight (Compendium of Light, Dark & Shadow, #1))
The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.
Jeff VanderMeer (The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories)
There is nothing less scientific than to deny something because it cannot be explained.
Jean Valnet (The Practice of Aromatherapy: A Classic Compendium of Plant Medicines and Their Healing Properties)
Short Life Syndrome. Night watchmen in horror movies have a life expectancy of twelve seconds. SAM WAAs, Houston
Roger Ebert (Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary: A Greatly Expanded and Much Improved Compendium of Movie Clichés, Stereotypes, Obligatory Scenes, Hackneyed Formulas, ... Conventions, and Outdated Archetypes)
Siskel's Saw. "It's amazing how many movies are not as interesting as a documentary of the same actors sitting around talking over lunch." GENE SISKEL
Roger Ebert (Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary: A Greatly Expanded and Much Improved Compendium of Movie Clichés, Stereotypes, Obligatory Scenes, Hackneyed Formulas, ... Conventions, and Outdated Archetypes)
I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of some stupefying gastric juice.
Jeff VanderMeer (The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories)
One of the tenets of civility is the willingness to be publicly courteous with those with whom we disagree or dislike when inescapably we find ourselves in their company.
Frank Moorhouse (The inspector-general of Misconception: The Ultimate Compendium to Sorting Things Out)
The buying of a whole bottle does not require that you drink the whole bottle. Mother’s Rule of eating everything on your plate does not apply to alcohol.
Frank Moorhouse (The inspector-general of Misconception: The Ultimate Compendium to Sorting Things Out)
You’ll grow old one day too! You’re dressed in such flashy, glamorous clothes, and yet your heart is so rotten?!
Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou (Case File Compendium: Bing An Ben (Novel) Vol. 1)
To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say.
Michael Bassey Johnson
But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.
Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2))
If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.
Jeff VanderMeer (The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories)
VACILANDO v. Traveling when the experience itself is more important than the destination. The best laid plans are not usually conducive to spontaneous adventures. Not sure where to go? Great! Throw the map and the plans out the window, and follow your heart for a while instead. verb
Ella Frances Sanders (Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World)
Humans delude themselves that they are masters of the world, but when faced with the majority of predators on their terms, in their environments, the average human has just enough time to reconsider such thoughts before turning into a pile of entrails." - Vesemir, The World of The Witcher
Marcin Batylda (The World of the Witcher: Video Game Compendium)
I shall never go back, I said to myself. A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. I had left behind me – what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle. "I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses." I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.
Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)
laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories, because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.
Pope Francis (A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis)
During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity.
Jeff VanderMeer (The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories)
For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of doctors, even when we call in the best of them the chances are that we may be staking our hopes on some medical theory that will be proved false in a few years. So that to believe in medicine would be utter madness, were it not still a greater madness not to believe in it, for from this accumulation of errors a few valid theories have emerged in the long run.
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3))
Claiming that a person who views the Bible as nothing but a compendium of myths is thus denying the existence of a Creator is like claiming a person who rejects the junk science behind ‘man-made global warming’ is denying the existence of atmosphere.
Dave Champion
Some of the speed and secrecy of our victory, and its regularity, might perhaps be ascribed to this double endowment's offsetting and emphasizing the rare feature that from end to end of it there was nothing female in the Arab movement, but the camels.
T.E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom: With Maps, Photographs, Illustrations & Compendium Of Military Articles)
The Human Genome Project, the full sequence of the normal human genome, was completed in 2003. In its wake comes a far less publicized but vastly more complex project: fully sequencing the genomes of several human cancer cells. Once completed, this effort, called the Cancer Genome Atlas, will dwarf the Human Genome Project in its scope. The sequencing effort involves dozens of teams of researchers across the world. The initial list of cancers to be sequenced includes brain, lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer. The Human Genome Project will provide the normal genome, against which cancer’s abnormal genome can be juxtaposed and contrasted. The result, as Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project describes it, will be a “colossal atlas” of cancer—a compendium of every gene mutated in the most common forms of cancer: “When applied to the 50 most common types of cancer, this effort could ultimately prove to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Human Genome Projects in terms of the sheer volume of DNA to be sequenced.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn’t a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man’s anguished soul.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
WILD THYME (Activity) This herb grows in a dense matted pattern, making it the perfect camouflage for fairy abodes and for sleeping fairy queens. A patch of thyme was traditionally set aside in herb gardens for the fairies to live in, somewhat like birdhouses are placed in the garden today.
Carolyn Turgeon (The Faerie Handbook: An Enchanting Compendium of Literature, Lore, Art, Recipes, and Projects (The Enchanted Library))
Create a failure résumé. Most of us have a résumé—a written compendium of jobs, experiences, and credentials that demonstrate to prospective employers and clients how qualified, adept, and generally awesome we are. Tina Seelig, a professor of practice at Stanford University, says we also need a “failure résumé,” a detailed and thorough inventory of our flops. A failure résumé offers another method for addressing our regrets. The very act of creating one is a form of disclosure. And by eyeing your failure résumé not as its protagonist, but as an observer, you can learn from it without feeling diminished by your mistakes. A few years ago, I compiled a failure résumé, then tried to glean lessons from the many screwups I’d committed. (Disclosing these embarrassments to myself will be sufficient, thank you very much.) I realized I’d repeatedly made variations of the same two mistakes, and that knowledge has helped me avoid those mistakes again.
Daniel H. Pink (The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward)
Everyday reasonableness, sound human judgement, and science as a compendium of common sense, certainly help us over a good part of the road; yet they do not go beyond that frontier of human life which surrounds the commonplace and matter of-fact, the merely average and normal. They afford, after all, no answer to the question of spiritual suffering and its innermost meaning. A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not discovered what life means for him. But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from a state of mental suffering, and it is spiritual stagnation, psychic sterility, which causes this state.
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
Yet no-one can say that God has not a Word, for it would follow that God is most foolish.
Thomas Aquinas (Theologic Summ Compendium (Italian Edition))
He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone.
Jeff VanderMeer (The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories)
Working out whether or not the claims you make in your premises are true, while important, is simply not enough to ensure that you draw true conclusions. People make this mistake all the time. They forget that you can begin with a set of entirely true beliefs but reason so poorly as to end up with entirely false conclusions. The problem is that starting with truth doesn’t guarantee ending up with it.
Julian Baggini (The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods)
AKIHI n. Listening to directions and then walking off and promptly forgetting them means that you’ve gone “akihi.” When they explained how to get there, their directions all made perfect sense—you nodded and looked back with clear understanding. Then you parted ways, and now you can’t remember whether to take a left or a right. noun
Ella Frances Sanders (Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World)
In time, the witchers' steel swords earned the name of "swords for men." A foul moniker, though not one conjured out of thin air. A good steel blade is indeed our first line of defense against mankind's hatred, stupidity, or greed. The world is full of those who would happily kill a witcher - out of resentment toward our trade, for fame, or simply to profit by snatching up our hard-earned coin. So the witchers, fully aware of the situation, never hesitated to relieve this world of the burden of dolts who were so thick headed as to threaten their lives. For that reason, in my day we called our steel swords "swords for fools." Unfortunately, seeing as how mendacious the two-faced scoundrels of bitches seem to rule this world, a great many fools have been apparently spared this selection process.
Marcin Batylda (The World of the Witcher: Video Game Compendium)
I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, and it must have been Giarian who had added it to the Station’s collection, on his own authority, since Grastrom’s pamphlet was regarded more as a curiosity than a true contribution to Solarist literature
Stanisław Lem (Solaris)
The nationalist, however loves his own kind as the extension of his family, realizing that universal values are primitive values or no values at all; that men can be free and content only within their native cultural environment. This profound insight completely escapes the immature internationalists. The nationalist seeks peace— not the peace of the pacifist or the slave but the peace of the free and independent. He believes in nonaggression, nonintervention and neutrality whereas the internationalist sees every dispute anywhere in the world as an excuse for the raising of an army, the floating of a bond issue and the raising of taxes—letting the suckers, of course, do the fighting, the buying of bonds and the paying of taxes. Nationalism is the only sane approach to the problem of world peace in an increasingly crazy and dangerous world. It is the spirit of live and let live, the healthy ethic of self-respect, racial integrity and conscientious concern for the rights of others.
Willis Carto (An Appeal to Reason: a Compendium of the Writings of Willis A. Carto)
We also have knowledge of another superstition from that period: be­lief in what was termed the Book-Man. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect com­pendium of all other books, and some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone there are still vestiges of the sect that worshiped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of Him. For a hundred years, men beat every possible path­ and every path in vain. How was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered Him? Someone proposed searching by regression: To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to lo­ cate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity....It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and spent my years. I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man-even a single man, tens of centuries ago-has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enor­mous Library may find its justification.
Jorge Luis Borges (The Library of Babel)
Neo-Spenglerians who are attuned to the racial view of history (call them "racists" for convenience) hold that the "final" phase of a Culture—the imperialistic stage—is final only because the cultural organism destroys its body and kills its soul by this process. Obviously, if we are to draw analogies between cultures and organisms we must agree that the soul of the organism dies only because of the death of the body. The soul can sicken—the soul of the West is now diseased and perhaps mortally ill—but it cannot die unless the organism itself dies. And this, point out the racists, is precisely what has happened to all previous cultures; death of the organism being the natural result of the suicidal process of imperialism.
Willis Carto (An Appeal to Reason: a Compendium of the Writings of Willis A. Carto)
I don't know it is that I always feel that other people can create things but that I can't. I imagine it's simpler living in remote tribes or communities where one is obliged to have a go or else you have to do without. I suppose it is fear of failure in an age where political correctness is trying to erase the word 'failure' from the language. It's OK to fail isn't it, but only if you've tried? What is so bizarre is that when one does try, one rarely falls short. Obviously some people do things better than others but if it gives you pleasure, then so what? As my grandmother used to say, 'patience and perseverance made a bishop of his reverence!' So don't say you can't make candles or soap or that you can't spin or weave until you've tried it. As for mending, well, if you're not throwing everything away, then you have no option but to make do and mend. After all, the only way to get rid of shopping malls and supermarkets with their food miles is for people not to shop in those places and the way to cure this mercenary mercantile world is to make your own things.
Clarissa Dickson Wright (A Greener Life: A Modern Country Compendium)