Designer Inspiration Quotes

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You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Steve Jobs
In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.
Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad)
It's funny how, in this journey of life, even though we may begin at different times and places, our paths cross with others so that we may share our love, compassion, observations, and hope. This is a design of God that I appreciate and cherish.
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.
Stephen W. Hawking
Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.
Joseph Smith Jr.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change - and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others' opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.
Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry)
Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbol means nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not. As I wrote that farewell column to Marley, I realized it was all right there in front of us, if only we opened our eyes. Sometimes it took a dog with bad breath, worse manners, and pure intentions to help us see.
John Grogan
The life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.
Massimo Vignelli
Think of yourself as a brand. You need to be remembered. What will they remember you for? What defines you? If you have it in you, do something that defines you. Invent something, develop a unique skill, get noticed for something — it creates a talking point.
Chris Arnold
The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"-namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love.
Elizabeth Gilbert (The Signature of All Things)
Whether we write lyrics or craft legislation, sell homes or teach classes, design spaces or open franchises, prayer is a critical part of the creative process. Don’t just brainstorm; praystorm.
Mark Batterson (Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge)
Take care of your costume and your confidence will take care of itself.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.
Alistair Cooke
I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?
Blake Crouch (Dark Matter)
Eventually everything connects — people, ideas, objects...the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se...I don't believe in this 'gifted few' concept, just in people doing things they are really interested in doing. They have a way of getting good at whatever it is.
Charles Eames
So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time.
Paul Rand
All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means "feeling". In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity", connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.
E.B. White
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
Freeman Dyson
Whatever you are physically, male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy – all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.
Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra)
So the next time you see a person with a compose face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
God always has a plan. This isn't his fault. This is a test, something designed to help you grow closer to God. And. I know, somehow, God will use it.
C.B. Cook (Paralyzed Dreams)
Don’t waste energy living a life someone else designed for you. Life is one per customer. Let them do theirs. You do yours.
Paris Hilton (Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers)
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everyhing else we ove--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
Note to Self – Thoughts design my energy! My thoughts WILL design the energy that moves me!
Allan Rufus
Ladies, most of you have no idea how beautiful you are. Don't let mean words from an insecure soul blind you from the truth of your beauty. You are beautiful by design... just the way you are.
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
We must design for the way people behave, not for how we would wish them to behave.
Donald A. Norman (Living With Complexity)
Think of the self that God has given as an acorn. It is a marvelous little thing, a perfect shape, perfectly designed for its purpose, perfectly functional. Think of the grand glory of an oak tree. God’s intention when He made the acorn was the oak tree. His intention for us is ‘… the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ Many deaths must go into our reaching that measure, many letting-goes. When you look at the oak tree, you don’t feel that the loss’ of the acorn is a very great loss. The more you perceive God’s purpose in your life, the less terrible the losses seem.
Elisabeth Elliot
Fear has the role we give it. We are able to empower or poison ourselves to whatever degree we want. This is the beauty of our design.
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
Tell your heart to keep beating and stand strong, and eventually you will bounce back to see colour in the world.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Living coherently doesn't mean everything is in perfect order all the time. It means you are living in alignment with your values and have not sacrificed your integrity along the way.
Bill Burnett (Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You)
Love does not self-destruct; we congest it with hostile disputes and erode it with hollow assurances.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Just as life has no quick fix; transformation lacks a flick-switch approach as well. Investing in a better version of yourself will take time but pay you rich dividends as well.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.
Jason Fried (Rework)
You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.
Ayrton Senna
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. - Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993
Toni Morrison (The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993)
I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.
Mies Van de Rohe
Surround yourself with people who make you happy, folks who reliably care about you. They are the ones that are worthy of custody in your life.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Given that we all have a finite time on earth, we need to make our metaphoric transition from caterpillar to butterfly sooner rather than later.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
You cannot restore and heal in the same environment that made you ill.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Likewise, imagine when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet.
Jeremy Griffith
With right fashion, every female would be a flame.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
The greatest witness we can give another is grace. Showing mercy and grace is a privilege. Do you have the capacity to exhibit this?
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.
C. JoyBell C.
Society is collapsing, and people are starting to recognize that the reason they feel like they’re mentally ill is that they’re living in a system that’s not designed to suit the human spirit.
Russell Brand
Poetry is designed to inspire love, and islam is about falling in love with the creator of the universe.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed (Love in a Headscarf)
We master our lives by mastering our perception. Life is not what happens to us but how we manage what happens.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
I am God's creation ,designed according to His plan for me :)))
Nick Vujicic (Life Without Limits: Inspiration for a Ridiculously Good Life)
The universe has her hands busy in my mind, knitting words together to blanket your wailing heart with something intricately designed.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
Struggles are necessary to create a strident character.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Fashion doesn't make you perfect, but it makes you pretty.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. He ordered them to bring five different options and he would pick the one he liked.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
It's time to shop high heels if your fiance kisses you on the forehead.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful"- 1834
William Morris
Sarasa, even if you feel that destiny is toying with you, destiny is something you design with your own hands.
Yumi Tamura (Basara, Vol. 3)
It is not about getting on track but instead about creating or finding the next path that brings joy, contentment, and peace.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Feel what you want to but never be consumed by it.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Gender norms are disgusting. Why aren't boys allowed to fucking cry or show any emotion other than anger and possessiveness? It's almost like our society is designed to create sociopaths so they can oppress anyone who tries to say anything they don't agree with. Oh wait. And obviously women are supposed to be pretty but not overdone, and smart but not nerdy or unattractively intelligent, and good at chores but not a slave, and strong but not overbearing, and flirty without being a tease, and sexy without being a slut, and pure enough so that their man doesn't think they're a whore. Because obviously all girls want a man.
Firelily
You need nothing more than the experience you are having right now. It is enough. It is plenty. It is perfect just as it is. It was designed for you, given to you for your experience. All you have to do, and all you have ever had to do is accept this gift. Take it and let it in. Let yourself experience the present moment just as it is. It doesn't get any better than this. This is the simple truth the ego refuses to accept, and it will suffer as long as that is the case.
Gina Lake (What About Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment)
Optimism requires confidence, and confidence is built on trust. And trust, as we know, flows in both directions.
Tim Brown (Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation)
At IDEO we have dedicated rooms for our brainstorming sessions, and the rules are literally written on the walls: Defer judgment. Encourage wild ideas. Stay focused on the topic. The most important of them, I would argue, is "Build on the ideas of others.
Tim Brown (Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation)
Every invention begins with an original thought. You are God’s original thought. You are his initiative, the fruit of his creative inspiration, his intimate design and love-dream.
François Du Toit (The Mirror Bible)
Any girl with a grin never looks grim.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Even the softest and sweetest heart was made by design for extreme battle.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
God has the most incredible, unimaginable, inconceivable, and indescribable intention and design for your life.
Pedro Okoro (Crushing the Devil: Your Guide to Spiritual Warfare and Victory In Christ)
Time moves with a vengeance, so the personal vendetta is yours – feel anything but deprived when your time ends.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Trust your scars to find who they need to heal. Understand that people will leave your life and make allowance for it, no matter how unwilling you are to let them go.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Healing does not equate to overlooking the pain but rather to reframing your experience to add worth to your growth in life.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved.” The
Matt Chandler (The Mingling of Souls: God's Design for Love, Marriage, Sex, and Redemption)
The most important parts of your life will be marked by pain.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
Nothing ever goes back to the way things used to be, so consciously cherish the time you have with people who give you the opportunity to love and create memories.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savor of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach
Niccolò Machiavelli
If a mere mortal like me can turn every predicament of life into a testimony of courage; then you can tap into the same power. All you have to do is find that flame and fan it to burn brighter than the force that tries to smother it.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Hero' is not an official status or designation, but if the world recognize you as a hero, it is the highest honor you will ever receive.
Amit Kalantri
Refrain from feeling sorry for the abuser as this is not love. Love is a verb. Love acts as love is.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Be determined to embrace all that comes into your life. Learn the lessons required in every situation and search for blessings too.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Don't criticize unless you can do better. Try to understand how the faulty design might have occurred: try to determine how it could have been done otherwise.
Don Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
We are designed with a dreaming brain and a hopeful spirit; it is our nature to envision the life of our dreams. And while dreaming comes easy to us, we must never forget that it takes strength, dedication, and courageous action to bring that dream to life
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
Everyone wants to be a God. We manufacture our own worlds, duping ourselves with things to escape the reality we call our lives. Drugs, alcohol, sex, work, school. Bigger houses, newer cars and designer clothes are the universes we invent to exert our god-like rule. We can't control the weather, but it's always a perfect seventy-two degrees in our central-air controlled worlds.
Brian Krans
Trauma changes us forever, so be kind and accepting of yourself; deliberate and plan all your healing. Prioritise your boundaries and implement your vision map to be the person you want to be.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
The same wind blows on us all, winds of disaster, opportunity, change and zeal. However, it is not the blowing wind that determines our direction in life but the fundamental task of setting our sails.
Kelly Markey (Don't Just Fly, SOAR: The Inspiration and tools you need to rise above adversity and create a life by design)
Now the uncle spoke up. 'This cannot be,' he said. 'The human being is designed for many things. Loneliness is not one of them.' ... Mrs. Ramani leaned into me, and said, as a statement of fact. 'We are not meant to go through this life alone.
Liz Tuccillo (How to Be Single)
Birdwatching, at first glance, seems like a pursuit designed specifically for people who find stamp collecting too stimulating. But oh, how wrong they would be. Behind the courteous nods, the gentle lift of binoculars and the soft pitter-patter of birder footsteps on dew-dappled gum leaves lies a world of unexpected drama – a scandalous underbelly of rivalry, controversy and intrigue. Indeed, what appears to be a peaceful communion with nature masks a tempest of Shakespearean passion.
Natalie Kyriacou (Nature's Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction)
Design is a fundamental human activity, relevant and useful to everyone. Anything humans create—be it product, communication or system—is a result of the process of making inspiration real. I believe in doing what works as circumstances change: quirky or unusual solutions are often good ones. Nature bends and so should we as appropriate. Nature is always right outside our door as a reference and touch point. We should use it far more than we do.
Maggie Macnab (Design by Nature: Using Universal Forms and Principles in Design (Voices That Matter))
There is a journey that’s waiting for you, you will make great discoveries, you will find treasures and hidden powers, it’s a journey divinely design just for you, Today be brave in self-love and start the journey within yourself, There God is waiting to show you his masterpiece of love.
Micheline Jean Louis
Blindly inheriting idols reflected how polytheism froze critical thinking. A stone statue might be designed to appear awe-inspiring, but its inherent lack of physical dynamism signified a stagnant worldview. The Qur’an repeatedly invokes the Arabic term for idol—sanam—literally, “frozen in time.
Mohamad Jebara (The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy)
There is no music in a rest, but there is the making of music in it. In our whole life-melody the music is broken off here and there by "rests," and we foolishly think we have come to the end of the tune. God sends a time of forced leisure, sickness, disappointed plans, frustrated efforts, and makes a sudden pause in the choral hymn of our lives, and we lament that our voices must be silent, and our part missing in the music which ever goes up to the ear of the Creator. How does the musician read the rest? See him beat the time with unvarying count, and catch up the next note true and steady, as if no breaking place had come between. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. But be it ours to learn the tune, and not be dismayed at the "rests." They are not to be slurred over nor to be omitted, nor to destroy the melody, nor to change the keynote. If we look up, God Himself will beat the time for us. With the eye on Him, we shall strike the next note full and clear.
John Ruskin
Transcendence is more about the personal act of not engaging the enemy, finding a way out of the cage that is being designed for you at a particular moment by others, circumstance, or your own bad habits and ignorance.
Darrell Calkins (Re:)
Sensuality is not about perfection, it’s about inspiration and expression.
Lebo Grand
YOU have to design your own Price tag for the world.
Abhysheq Shukla (KISS Life "Life is what you make it")
You cannot choose your face but you can choose your dress.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Dresses don't look beautiful on hangers.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.
Jeanne Gang
Life is not about our personal missions through God, it's about God's mission through our designed purpose.
Wayne Chirisa
In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer’s power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.
Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine)
When you know what you want you will be excited about it and give every ounce of effort to making it come true. No excuse or fear will get in your way because peace is found in focus.
Shannon L. Alder
A wall is happy when it is well designed, when it rests firmly on its foundation, when its symmetry balances its part and produces no unpleasant stresses. Good design can be worked out on the mathematical principles of mechanics.
Isaac Asimov (Foundation's Edge (Foundation, #4))
Living authentically in a world that takes every opportunity to squeeze you uncomfortably into a box of someone else's design...that is the most radical act of self love. Blossoming in an environment where the odds are stacked immeasurably against you is a beautiful act of defiance.
Theo Parish (Homebody: A Graphic Memoir of Gender Identity Exploration)
Often, people build stories in their mind which have no basis in the contours of reality. Those which build these images, are building such images which are based on their relatively limited sense of understanding about the particular subject or person. This is a "fill in the blank" reality, which often manifests itself into the hearts and the minds of those who have a "fill in the blank" mindset, not the person with the here said reality. The universe is designed in a way that reflects itself, just like a mirror, showing you exactly who you are to yourself, not who others are. Your largest and most concealed insecurities have their way of presenting themselves to you in a fashion that is relative to your self designed way of communication. This short writing is a reminder that your preconceived notions on a particular subject or person, are a construct of your inner mind and emotional-relational well being and not of others. This is one of the largest fundamental truths in which you must have large insight to carefully watch who and what you massacre with your personal thoughts. Having a keen sense of control on this subject will lead you to enlightenment in many platforms of life.
Will Barnes (The Expansion of The Soul)
The place had enormous possibilities. He realized that at once. The stream, of course, was perfect for sailing toy boats, for skipping stones, and, in the event of failing inspiration, for falling into. Several of the trees appeared to have been specifically designed for climbing, and one huge, white old birch overhanging the stream promised the exhilarating combination of climbing a tree and falling into the water, all at one time.
David Eddings (Guardians of the West (The Malloreon, #1))
If you’re alive, you’re a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descended from tens of thousands of years of makers. Decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers, drummers, builders, growers, problem-solvers, and embellishers—these are our common ancestors. The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design. Even if you grew up watching cartoons in a sugar stupor from dawn to dusk, creativity still lurks within you. Your creativity is way older than you are, way older than any of us. Your very body and your very being are perfectly designed to live in collaboration with inspiration, and inspiration is still trying to find you—the same way it hunted down your ancestors.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature. There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds. Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe. To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.
Alfred de Musset (The Confession of a Child of the Century)
Truth changes with the season of our emotions. It is the shadow that moves with the phases of our inner sun. When the nights falls, only our perception can guess where it hides in the dark. Within every solar system of the soul lies a plan of what truth is--- the design God has created, in our own unique story. This is as varying as the constellations, and as turning as the tide. It is not one truth we live to, but many. If we ever hope to determine if there is such a thing as truth, apart from cultural and personal preferences, we must acknowledge that we are then aiming to discover something greater than ourselves, something that transcends culture and individual inclinations. Some say that we must look beyond ourselves and outside of ourselves. However, we don’t need to look farther than what is already in each other. If there was any great plan from a higher power it is a simplistic, repetitious theme found in all religions; the basic core importance to unity comes from shared theological and humanistic virtues. Beyond the synagogue, mosques, temples, churches, missionary work, church positions and religious rituals comes a simple “message of truth” found in all of us, that binds theology---holistic virtues combined with purpose is the foundation of spiritual evolution. The diversity among us all is not divided truth, but the opportunity for unity through these shared values. Truth is the framework and roadmap of positive virtues. It unifies diversity when we choose to see it and use it. It is simple message often lost among the rituals, cultural traditions and socializing that goes on behind the chapel doors of any religion or spiritual theology. As we fight among ourselves about what religion, culture or race is right, we often lose site of the simple message any great orator has whispered through time----a simplistic story explaining the importance of virtues, which magically reemphasizes the importance of loving one another through service.
Shannon L. Alder
Understand your purpose and the belief-energy. Belief energy is the core of leadership and success. Design your belief energy for higher purpose and values. Belief energy can inspire and motivate you and others. Articulate, communicate and radiate your positive belief energy.
Amit Ray (Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management)
Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.
Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
It's easy to complain about your life - how tough it is, how unfair it is, how stressful it is, how everyone else has it much better. But if you step into the life of someone you envy for just a day, you'll discover that everyone has their own problems, and they're usually worse than yours. Because your problems are designed specifically for you, with the specific purpose of helping you grow.
Kevin Hart - I Can't Make This Up
Death takes us by surprise, And stays our hurrying feet; The great design unfinished lies, Our lives are incomplete But in the dark unknown, Perfect their circles seem, Even as a bridge's arch of stone Is rounded in the stream. Alike are life and death, When life in death survives, And the uninterrupted breath Inspires a thousand lives. Were a star quenched on high, For ages would its light, Still traveling downward from the sky, Shine on our mortal sight. So when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken, The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Dresses won't worn out in the wardrobe, but that is not what dresses are designed for.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
It's good to know that challenges are designed to make me and not to break me.
Renae A.Sauter
The true ENTREPRENEUR is a risk taker, not an excuse maker.
VDEXTERS
Be Bold! Be Strong! Cling to thoughts of victory and deliverance. You are Victorious By Design!
Ann Marie Bryan
We interrogate the world by making.
Bill Bendyshe Burnett
There is only one you on the globe today. You have been built to inspire and designed to dazzle. Live your uniqueness!
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Be who you were created to be, and you will set the world on fire. - St. Catherine of Sienna
Gina La Morte (Designing Your Dream: Discovering the destiny that's been fashioned for you)
Design a life! Don't maintain it.
Shannon L. Alder
When we all play our part the world will run as designed. Do your part and do it now!
TemitOpe Ibrahim
We are designed for social contact, for connectedness. If we don´t have that in our lives, our minds and bodies begin the slow process towards death. Loneliness is lethal.
Tanya Byron (The Skeleton Cupboard: Stories From a Clinical Psychologist)
It’s only fabric! Freestyle fabric cutting and sewing is a low-risk endeavor with a strong payoff of personal growth and empower- ment.
Patricia Belyea (East-Meets-West Quilts: Explore Improv with Japanese-Inspired Designs)
There is no room for church mice in improv quilting. You have to own your ideas, your choices, and your determination.
Patricia Belyea (East-Meets-West Quilts: Explore Improv with Japanese-Inspired Designs)
If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy). One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns. Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what's your point?
Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
Unlike the rest of nature, our mission in life is not etched in stone. We can choose our destiny, and we do, either by design or default, by taking control of our lives’ or relinquishing it to others.
Glenn A. Maltais
Despite what you think you know, sometimes your plans may be interrupted. Because you were designed for a purpose. You are on a mission to achieve greatness. No matter what obstacles lie in your path, you will reach your destination. Remember God's grace is sufficient.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Nothing is quite as beautiful as seeing someone do exactly what they were designed to do, to watch someone who has found that thing, that passion, that singular calling and expresses it with conviction.
Lori Stanley Roeleveld
My home is designed in silence & peace. What other decorations should I seek? In this journey of nowhere, but within Those will taste bliss who are meek. Beyond that where I do not exist I shall reach without me. The separated part will finally merge in the eventual embrace of Thee.
Rabb Jyot
It's only when movement becomes the most natural state in our lives that we can finally begin to enjoy the motion. And it's only when standing still becomes impossible that we can finally embrace the kinds of changes that are inevitable in our lives. We were not designed to stand still. If we were, we'd have at least three legs. We were designed to move. Our bodies are bodies that have walked across vast continents. Our bodies are bodies that have carried objects of art and war over great distances. We are no less mobile than our ancestors. We are athletes. We are warriors. We are human.
John Bingham (Running for Mortals: A Commonsense Plan for Changing Your Life With Running)
a designer who says they were “inspired” to do something opens the door for a stakeholder to give feedback that’s just as subjective. Whim begets whim. Now you’ve got a roomful of people arguing about their favorite colors.
Mike Monteiro (You're My Favorite Client)
The success of every websites now depends on search engine optimisation and digital marketing strategy. If you are on first page of all major search engines then you are ahead among your competitors in terms of online sales.
Dr. Christopher Dayagdag
I remember seeing a sign in a bar that said, “Alcohol may not solve your problems, but neither will water or milk.” Well, that is very true. Having a drink or two takes the edge off. Happy hour is the perfect way to do so. You’ll find inspiration, and sometimes even enlightenment, during happy hour. It’s a time to make plans, to share dreams, to envision success, and to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Happy hour also helps get you through the tough times because it gives you a designated space to hash things out and put them in perspective. Conversely, you can use happy hour as a time not to hash things out, but to laugh and remember, which also gives good perspective.
Art Rios (Let's Talk: ...About Making Your Life Exciting, Easier, And Exceptional)
On rainy days or summer evenings or during long programs designed for adults, we were not allowed to say, "This is boring" or "I'm bored." If she even thought she smelled those words coming, she would quietly remind me that my attitude was what I made of it. If I was bored it was because I was boring.
Beth Guckenberger
THE PRINCIPLE OF CREATIVE LIMITATION Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world. Artists by nature crave freedom, so the principle that the structure/setting relationship restricts creative choices may stir the rebel in you. With a closer look, however, you’ll see that this relationship couldn’t be more positive. The constraint that setting imposes on story design doesn’t inhibit creativity; it inspires it.
Robert McKee (Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting)
The "more" of Christianity is a myth; a deceitful illusion designed to keep you busy and running in circles, always seeking but never finding, always learning but never coming to the knowledge of the Truth—a carrot on a stick, if you will.
D.R. Silva (It's All About Jesus: What They Never Told You in Church)
Everything--the section of comfortable chairs in the middle, the long colourful chains that dangled lights from the ceiling--seemed designed to make you feel like you were part of something larger, without actually being made to feel small.
David Levithan (Wide Awake)
Fathers of the fatherless sons and daughters, you failed to realize your children are a blueprint of you. However, you are all so selfish you do not see your blueprint, the blueprint that you’ve created. You are put here to help and show them the way. You are the one who’s supposed to lay out the design plan for your sons and daughters.
Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
We, who had no designated safe havens where we could carry our vomit for other people to clean up for us — who were too urgently needed to afford to pause for occasional maintenance, too dignified to succumb to emotional fatigue — not for us the overpaid charlatans disguised as therapists, who would only poke at our scabs and suck our money. No. We, the unbreakable ones, we ourselves were all the therapy that we needed.
N. Maria Kwami (Secrets of the Bending Grove)
Essence loves whatever is happening because it either created it or allowed you (your ego) to create it for your growth and evolution. What you learn to love about whatever you are experiencing is not how it makes you feel, but how perfectly it is suited to support your evolution toward greater love, wisdom, compassion, courage, patience, and understanding. Life is perfectly designed to evolve us, and that is what is lovable about every moment.
Gina Lake (What About Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment)
We create our future self by default or design.
Nicole Cody
Building a lasting brand takes work. No Brand is cast in Concrete. As you grow, you may need to rebrand repeatedly.
Sam Maiyaki
We are all special in God's eyes because He has designed us to carry His treasures.
Euginia Herlihy
Some concepts take courage.
Talismanist Giebra (Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.)
Life is a grand puzzle, with pieces interlocking, pieces elusive, pieces missing. But in the end, God puts it all together and we see the full picture. (Sean Culver)~pg 210
Nancy Moser (The Fashion Designer (The Pattern Artist #2))
Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in the supernatural tale. 'There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. The themes of fantastic literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years.
Howard Kerr (The Haunted dusk: American supernatural fiction, 1820-1920)
Encourage yourself that you are good enough to be the owner of your own storehouse. Colour your world; redesign your mental pictures about yourself! Dream big and manifest the dreams!
Israelmore Ayivor (Dream big!: See your bigger picture!)
We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the vision. Round after round of creative selection moved us step by step from the spark of an idea to a finished product.
Ken Kocienda (Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs)
Moses’ epic achievement is establishing a divinely inspired system for provoking both Abrahamic critical thinking (Hanif ) and channeling it toward restorative growth (Muslim). This system, embodied in a scripture called the Torah (“instruction” or “guidance”), had to be accessible and practical for ordinary people, with structures designed to assist free-thinkers to unleash their individual potential. Not surprisingly, Moses finds the generation of emancipated slaves quite set in their ways despite the dramatic exodus from Egypt. He ultimately concentrates his energies on training a new generation of disciples—“Only the youth among Moses’ people were open to his mes- sage” (10:83).
Mohamad Jebara (The Life of the Qur'an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy)
In terms of systems design, shapes are important. Rectangles are not common in nature. That's probably because from a systems design perspective, rectangles often degrade efficiency instead of contributing to efficiency. Yet humans have designed an entire supply chain system based on rectangles, squares and straight lines. If we want to be more efficient, we should replace those rectangles, squares and straight lines with ovals, circles and hexagons. And maybe some other nature inspired geometries.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Broad-Based Education: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005
George Beahm (I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words)
The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.
Oliver Bullough (The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation)
Loving yourself is of vital importance. Because there is no way you'll love another soul if you fail to have self love. Embrace your beautiful spirit and shine light for those who may be living in the dark. You are human and your heart is designed to love and live. You can not be open to love if you're not loving yourself.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana (Sweet Destiny)
When you weep, Jesus weeps with you. And together you enter into the dance of tears. The dance of tears with Jesus is a precious intimacy He shares only with those who have known deep suffering. In the dance of tears, Jesus shares your pain. He carries your deep sorrows in His everlasting arms. And He ultimately turns your mourning into dancing. He revives and saves your crushed spirit. What a blessed comfort in our deepest darkness to know the One who shares the depth of every pain and loss, every joy and gladness. Jesus, He is the One.
Catherine Martin (A Woman's Heart That Dances: Keeping in Step with God's Design for You)
God is not just the starting point of your life; he is the source of it. To discover your purpose in life you must turn to God’s Word, not the world’s wisdom. You must build your life on eternal truths, not pop psychology, success-motivation, or inspirational stories. The Bible says, “It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.
Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?)
I think that in life, as in game design, you have to find the fun. There is joy out there waiting to be discovered, but it might not be where you expected. You can’t decide what something’s going to be before you embark on it, and you shouldn’t stick with a bad idea just because you’re fond of it. Take action as quickly and repeatedly as possible, take advantage of what you already know, and take liberties with tradition. But most importantly, take the time to appreciate the possibilities, and make sure all of your decisions are interesting ones.
Sid Meier (Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games)
On the contrary, she was aware only of a sort of timelessness, as though it was all part of a plan, a predestined design, conceived the day she was born. What was happening to her had been meant to happen, what was going to go on happening. Without any recognizable beginning, it did not seem possible that it could ever have an end.
Rosamunde Pilcher (The Shell Seekers)
An artist’s job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master—be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.
Anonymous
Don't resist when life needs to remove the "old" to make room for the the "new." The pain you're feeling isn't caused by letting things or people go, what's actually hurting you is swimming exhaustively against the natural flow that was intended to carry you. What's truly meant for you shouldn't feel forced, and your blessings are definitely on the way. So stop clinging to whatever needs to be purged... focus instead on freeing yourself to receive. What God has for you, is meant just for you... you'll never have to fight or compete with anyone for what's been divinely designated as yours.
Kianu Starr
You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters - only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation. But there is no heroism in serving your masters. Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all. All these stories, all these fantasies, all these superpowers - are designed to steal heroism from you, to make it impossible, fantastical, remote, and unachievable - and make you useful to your masters (as a hit man, if needed). What is the opposite of this? The opposite of fantasy is philosophy. The opposite of mythology is integrity. And integrity is truth in action.
Stefan Molyneux
the paradox of choice.” Most people don’t want more options; they just want what they want. When overwhelmed by choice, we tend to fall into behavioral patterns used by those whom Schwartz calls “optimizers”—people paralyzed by the fear that if they only waited a little while longer or searched a little harder, they could find what they think they want at the best possible price.
Tim Brown (Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation)
It’s okay to be messy. Like sunflowers, galaxies, and fingerprints, your life is an intricately designed spiral. Your wrinkles, bumps, and bruises show the world you are a force of nature. Forget linear. When you embrace chaos, it brings its own kind of order.
Kristen Lee (Mentalligence: A New Psychology of Thinking--Learn What It Takes to be More Agile, Mindful, and Connected in Today's World)
I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to accept objectives which are limited by physical, logical, and technological constraints, and to accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committee will ever do this until it is too late.
C.A.R. Hoare
It's Swatow lace, I believe-- beautiful, isn't it? The design is titled "The Disc of the Moon"-- apparently it was inspired by the poem "Midnight Song" by the Tang-era poet Li Bai. I looked it up, and it turns out it's about longing for someone who's a great distance away.
Hisashi Kashiwai (The Kamogawa Food Detectives (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #1))
If you want to see the beauty of any fish, throw it into the water, you will see how best it can swim because that is its source. Do you want to see the beauty in you? Don't look in the mirror, don't put on makeups, no jewelleries or expensive designer clothes, just go back and reconnect to your source and I bet, the best of you will show up. Until you return back to God, your best won't come out because He is your source.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?
C. Robert Cargill (Dreams and Shadows (Dreams & Shadows, #1))
What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? And wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your names adored as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly and returned to their warm firesides. Why that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Fathers of the fatherless sons and daughters, your spitefulness isn’t hurting the Chief Guardians. Your bitter ways are hurting your flesh and blood – your sons and daughters. Your deceptions are the dimensions of you. Your sons and daughters are a blueprint of you in so many ways, such as their height, features at every angle, physical appearance, size, and at times, the version of their character and attitude. Fathers of the fatherless sons and daughters, you failed to realize your children are a blueprint of you. However, you are all so selfish you do not see your blueprint, the blueprint that you’ve created. You are put here to help and show them the way. You are the one who’s supposed to lay out the design plan for your sons and daughters.
Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
Colonial, white supremacist organizational practices seem inevitable because they were so universally adopted over the next centuries, and they still govern the great majority of our institutions, but they were design choices. This means that other choices are available, even when they seem far-fetched. We know what spices and organizations look like, feel like, and function like when they are inspired by the colonizers’ principles of separation, competition and exploitation. How would they be different if they were based on principles like integration and interdependence, reciprocity and relationship?
Edgar Villanueva (Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance)
‎"All that history, the love & laughter, is designed for youth. It is what keeps the story of who we are alive from one generation to the next. It ensures our indelible mark in the souls of generations we will never have the pleasure of holding in a warm embrace. Life is short people. Before you know it, another decade will pass, people you love will be lost to this world, and all that will be left of them is what we carry in our hearts." Elsie Love 2011
Elsie Love
Fear is not to be overcome, or dreaded, or avoided, or expelled from our life; neither is it to be our dwelling, obsession or constant companion. But it should be respected, recognized, and humbly listened to for its singular solemn advice. Indeed, it's wise and cautionary warnings should always be heeded. Fear was designed to function as a familiar adviser, an overly critical, cautious, conservative friend - not our foe. When it is accepted, and appreciated for what it is, fear is a sage, a warning system, and one of our oldest, most experienced guides. When it holds itself at bay as necessary, it is like the security detail that waits at some serious attention in the back of the room, ever watchful, ever ready, benign, non-threatening - until circumstances require its sensitive, timely services.
Connie Kerbs (Paths of Fear: An Anthology of Overcoming Through Courage, Inspiration, and the Miracle of Love (Pebbled Lane Books Book 1))
Whatever your storybook carries within its pages, own it with love, courage and compassion. Remember that you can change your story at any time- nothing is fixed and we all have free will. We should not seek to love someone else’s journey more than we love our own; the swords of comparison are sharp and cutting to our soul and innermost values. We are all designed unique with our own original paths to walk through; we lose momentum and our natural impulses for creativity and progression when we focus our energy on other people.
Christine Evangelou (Rocks Into Roses: Life Lessons and Inspiration for Personal Growth)
All languages that derive fromLatin form the word 'compassion' by combining the prefix meaning 'with' (com-) and the root meaning 'suffering' (Late Latin, passio). In other languages- Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance- this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefixcombined with the word that means 'feeling' (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wsspół-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, medkänsla). In languages that derive from Latin, 'compassion' means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, 'pity' (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. 'To take pity on a woman' means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word 'compassion' generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion- joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, 'Throw me out!' But instead of throwing her out, he seized her and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.
Milan Kundera
One young fellow pointed to another steamer in the distance, and said it was the Lady of the Lake, a United States vessel which until recently was thought to be the fastest boat on the Lake; but she had just lost a trial-of-speed race to the new Royal Mail Standard boat, the Eclipse, which outran her by four minutes and a half. And I said didn't that make him proud, and he said no, because he had bet a dollar on the Lady. And all present laughed. Then something came clear to me which I used to wonder about. There is a quilt pattern called Lady of the Lake, which I thought was named for the poem; but I could never find any lady in the pattern, nor any lake. But now I saw the boat was named for the poem, and the quilt was named for the boat; because it was a pinwheel design, which must have stood for the paddle going around. And I thought that things did make sense, and did have a design to them, if only you pondered them long enough. And so perhaps might be with recent events, which at the moment seemed to me entirely senseless; and finding out the reason for the quilt pattern was a lesson to me, to have faith.
Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)
Our forefathers were not only brave. I believe they were right. I believe that what they meant was that every man born had equal right to grow from scratch by way of his own power unhindered to the highest expression of himself possible to him. This of course not antagonistic by sympathetic to the growth of all men as brothers. Free emulation not imitation of the "bravest and the best" is to be expected of him. Uncommon he may and will and should become as inspiration to his fellows, not a reflection upon them, not to be resented but accepted--and in this lies the only condition of the common man's survival. So only is he intrinsic to democracy. Persistently holding quality above quantity only as he attempts to live a superior life of his own, and to whatsoever degree in whatever case he finds it; this is his virtue in a democracy such as ours was designed to be. Only this sense of proportion affords tranquility of spirit, in itself beauty, in either character of action. Nature is never other than serene even in a thunderstorm. The assumption of the "firm countenance, lips compressed" in denial or resentment is not known to her as it is known to civilization. Such negation by human countenance may be moral (civilization is inclined to morality) but even so not nature. Again exuberance is repose but never excess.
Frank Lloyd Wright (A Testament)
It's easy to complain about your life - how tough it is, how unfair it is, how stressful it is, how everyone else has it much better. But if you step into the life of someone you envy for a day, you'll discover that everyone has their own problems, and they're usually worse than yours. because your problems are designed specifically for you, with the specific purpose of helping you grow.
Kevin Hart - I Can't Make This Up
We are all part of a God factory. Gods are what come off the production line at the end of an eons-long, protracted, dialectical process designed to overcome every possible obstacle, trial, setback, difficulty and ordeal. You need to be a God to survive the dialectic. It takes you to hell and forces you to confront the Devil. The Devil is you. The Devil is your Shadow. Only Devils can become Gods. That is the law of the dialectic.
Thomas Stark (The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes (The Truth Series Book 12))
When I was an undergraduate studying economics under Professor Arthur Smithies of Harvard, he asked me in class one day what policy I favored on a particular issue of the times. Since I had strong feelings on that issue, I proceeded to answer him with enthusiasm, explaining what beneficial consequences I expected from the policy I advocated. “And then what will happen?” he asked. The question caught me off guard. However, as I thought about it, it became clear that the situation I described would lead to other economic consequences, which I then began to consider and to spell out. “And what will happen after that?” Professor Smithies asked. As I analyzed how the further economic reactions to the policy would unfold, I began to realize that these reactions would lead to consequences much less desirable than those at the first stage, and I began to waver somewhat. “And then what will happen?” Smithies persisted. By now I was beginning to see that the economic reverberations of the policy I advocated were likely to be pretty disastrous— and, in fact, much worse than the initial situation that it was designed to improve. Simple as this little exercise might seem, it went further than most economic discussions about policies on a wide range of issues. Most thinking stops at stage one.
Thomas Sowell (Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One)
I faced people from all walks of business who fully disregarded design (though they were completely influenced by it). I also met fine artists who drowned in their own work and the dense creative universe in their minds. Then I met designers. And instantly fell in love. Let me tell you why. Designers are familiar with critiques. They not only tolerate them but actively look out for them. They honestly believe in iterations and learn to edit down their work. They embrace simplicity and create beauty based on requirements other than their own. Design education teaches you to run away from assumptions and to have the stomach to scrap your work often. I’m bringing this up because it’s time to bridge the gap between design and business.
Laura Busche (Lean Branding)
What does it really look like?" "I can show you," he purrs, letting the light settle in his palm. "Say the word, and I will lay your own soul bare before you. Surrender, and I promise, the last thing you see will be the truth." There it is again. One time salt, and the next honey, and each designed to cover poison. Addie looks at the ring, lets herself linger on it one last time, and then forces her gaze up past the light to meet the dark. "You know," she says, "I think I'd rather live and wonder.
Victoria Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. Evolution has produced chemical compounds exquisitely organized to accomplish the most complicated and delicate of tasks. Many organic chemists viewing crystal structures of enzyme systems or nucleic acids and knowing the marvels of specificity of the immune systems must dream of designing and synthesizing simpler organic compounds that imitate working features of these naturally occurring compounds.
Donald J. Cram
The city of Prague had always felt enchanted to him. It was a moment frozen in time. Having suffered far less damage than other European cities in World War II, the historical capital of Bohemia enjoyed a dazzling skyline that still sparkled with all its original architecture—a uniquely varied and pristine sampling of Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau, and Neoclassical designs. The city’s nickname—Stověžatá—literally meant “with a hundred spires,” although the actual number of spires and steeples in Prague was closer to seven hundred. In the summer, the city occasionally illuminated them with a sea of green floodlights; the awe-inspiring effect was said to have inspired Hollywood’s depiction in The Wizard of Oz of the Emerald City—a mystical destination that, like Prague, was believed to be a place of magical possibilities.
Dan Brown (The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6))
God Will, I wish you'd stop telling me what to do. What if I like watching television? What if I don't want to do much else other than read a book?" My voice had become shrill. "What if I'm tired when I get home? What if I don't need to fill my days with activity?" "Bur one day you might wish you had", he said quietly. "Do you know what I would do if I were you?" I put down my peeler. "I suspect you're going to tell me." "Yes. And I'm completely unembarrassed about telling you. I'd be doing night school. I'd be training as a seamstress or a fashion designer or whatever it is that taps into what you really love." He gestured at my minidress, a Sixties-inspired Pucci-type dress, made with the fabric that had once been a pair of Grandad's curtains. The first time Dad had seen it he had pointed at me and yelled, "Hey, Lou, pull yourself together!" It had taken him a full five minutes to stop laughing. "I'd be finding out what I could do that didn't cost much - keep-fit classes, swimming, volunteering, whatever. I'd be teaching myself music or going for long walks with somebody else's dog, or -" "Okay, okay, I get the message," I said, irritably. "But I'm not you, Will." "Luckily for you.
Jojo Moyes (Me Before You (Me Before You, #1))
[...] For instance, a gay man who played with dolls in his childhood, dresses pink and engages in anal sex with another man triggers a gender prejudice, by proxy rather than based on a characteristic of their own, like racism and classism do: dolls and pink are traditionally associated with the feminine sphere, anal sexuality has a higher stigma mainly because a more visible power level play comes into effect (with a dominant and a submissive role) than other sex positions. Consequently, when a man crosses his "designated" gender role boundary of masculinity, strength, dominance into femininity, weakness, submission, then he is no longer valued as a human being, for the man has become [or is] a woman. Therefore, homophobia and transphobia are actually by-products of misogyny, which is is turn gynophobic whitewashing, deeply rooted in the dominant ideology of patriarchy and historical sexism.
Vincent Bozzino (Philosophy Trips: A Naive's Guide)
You are designed for success. Life's tough, but you are greater than its challenges. No matter what you have been through, you're still here. You have a history of victory. So ignore the haters, the doubters, and free yourself from the emotional saboteurs. Don't ever forget that you are beautiful, you are capable, you are worthy... you are enough. Set healthy standards and stick to them. Don't settle. Set healthy goals and follow them. Let your behavior speak the love and passion in your heart. Live life to the fullest... make each day worth remembering... Dream BIG & dare to go for it... Be unapologetically you!
Steve Maraboli
The imperfect freedom that property and law make possible, and on which the soixante-huitards depended for their comforts and their excitements, was not enough. That real but relative freedom must be destroyed for the sake of its illusory but absolute shadow. The new ‘theories’ that poured from the pens of Parisian intellectuals in their battle against the ‘structures’ of bourgeois society were not theories at all, but bundles of paradox, designed to reassure the student revolutionaries that, since law, order, science and truth are merely masks for bourgeois domination, it no longer matters what you think so long as you are on the side of the workers in their ‘struggle’. The genocides inspired by that struggle earned no mention in the writings of Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault and Lacan, even though one such genocide was beginning at that very moment in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot, a Paris-educated member of the French Communist Party.
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
It is conventional wisdom now that anything built by the government will be a disaster. But the two "Voyager" spacecraft were built by the government (in partnership with that other bugaboo, academia). They came in at cost, on time, and vastly exceeded their design specifications--as well as the fondest dreams of their makers. Seeking not to control, threaten, wound, or destroy, these elegant machines represented the exploratory part of our nature set free to roam the Solar System and beyond. This kind of technology, the treasures it uncovers freely available to all humans everywhere, has been, over the last few decades, one of the few activities of the United States admired as much by those who abhor many of its policies as by those who agree with it on every issue. "Voyager" cost each American less than a penny a year from launch to Neptune encounter. Missions to the planets are one of those things--and I mean this not just for the United States, but for the human species--that we do best.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
I write for you, for me, for the 70% of us who make up the fabric of society: ordinary people with extraordinary lives, who play the roles of parents, siblings, children, neighbours and friends. We are those who work and study with tenacity, those who with effort and dedication bring sustenance to our homes, my novels and stories of horror, suspense and mystery are designed for the emerging generations, for those readers who seek freshness in literature and who feel distanced from traditional literature, with its labyrinth of ostentatious and complex words that often alienate the average citizen..., I write for the marginalised, for those who have felt that literature does not offer them a mirror in which to reflect themselves, for those who seek in the pages a refuge or an acknowledgement of their existence, I write for the free and critical spirits, for the innate rebels who question the structures and narratives of our civilisation, I write for the dreamers who imagine a world beyond the reach of politics and corporations, for those who resist being moulded by the great entertainment machines that seek to numb our minds and wills; It is my voice, through writing, that seeks to resonate with yours, inviting you on a literary journey where together we explore the confines of our reality and the abysses of our imagination".
Marcos Orowitz (Talent for Horror: Homage to Edgard Allan Poe ("Talent for Horror" Series book revelation 2022))
It’s one thing building a cloister to reflect the 768 of the numerological Bismillah, it’s another planning a giant alphabet out of an entire city before you’ve even built your first mosque.’ ‘It is, but remember, Sinan was chief architect and city planner at the time of the conquest of Cairo. He practised on that city; demolishing and building where he liked. I have no doubt that he was already forming the idea of a sacred geometry. His first building as Architect of the Abode of Felicity was the Haseki Hürrem Mosque for the Kadin Roxelana. Not his greatest work by any means, and he was working from existing designs, but it was identifiable as his first mature work. There’s a story in his autobiography Tezkiretül Bünyan that while he was surveying the site he noticed that children were pulling live fish from a grating in the street. When he went to investigate he discovered an entire Roman cistern down there. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to realize his vision. Hidden water. The never-ceasing stream of Hurufism.
Ian McDonald (The Dervish House)
I'd finally reached the end of myself, all my self-reliance and denial and pride unraveling into nothingness, leaving only a blank Alison-shaped space behind. It was finished. I was done. But just as I felt myself dissolving on the tide of my own self-condemnation, the dark waves receded, and I floated into a celestial calm. I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - significant. I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a peircing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase - nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it. I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose. And as long as I had a part in the music of the spheres, even if it was only a single grace note, I was not worthless. Nor was I alone. God help me, I prayed as I gathered up my raw and weary sense, flung them into the wormhole - And at last, found what I'd been looking for.
R.J. Anderson (Ultraviolet (Ultraviolet, #1))
We're nothing but human. The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. Don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone. We all want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other's misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. You the people have the power.. the power to create machines.. the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful.. To make this life a wonderful adventure. We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale.. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly. Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe.
Anonymous
But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Life of a software engineer sucks big time during project release. Every single team member contribution is very important. At times, we have to skip breakfast, lunch and even dinner, just to make sure the given ‘TASK’ is completed. Worst thing, that’s the time we get to hear wonderful F* words. It can be on conference calls or on emails, still we have to focus and deliver the end product to a client, without any compromise on quality. Actually, every techie should be saluted. We are the reason for the evolution of Information Technology. We innovate. We love artificial intelligence. We create bots and much more. We take you closer to books. Touch and feel it without the need of carrying a paperback. We created eBook and eBook reader app: it’s basically a code of a software engineer that process the file, keeps up-to-date of your reading history, and gives you a smoother reading experience. We are amazing people. We are more than a saint of those days. Next time, when you meet a software engineer, thank him/her for whatever code he/she developed, tested, designed or whatever he/she did!
Saravanakumar Murugan (Coffee Date)
We feel Divine Love entering us firstly through gentle, soft, humbling, kind and loving feelings, independent of any other person. This can be experienced as gently overwhelming as it increases, dependent on the depth of our desire for It. As we heal further, and more of our negative, repressed emotions and causal soul wounds are removed, the entering of Divine Love into our souls becomes stronger and stronger, bringing deep tears, powerful sensations and expansions in the heart and soul in immense gratitude, humility and feelings of great love and even more yearning for God. There may also be whole body tingling and sensations, crown chakra and heart explosions, feelings of being fully bathed in love and light, great feelings of humility, awe and wonder at the indescribable nature of God’s Love, and at how much He loves you. Receiving Divine Love can feel like being immersed in a bath of love all over, in every part of you, every cell. Deep peace, joy and waves of ecstasy, rapture and bliss arise and flow all over, and great humility washes over the soul. Immense love for God as the most wondrous, awe inspiring Soul that He Is is felt. A deepening into the essence of your pure soul occurs, along with the deep desire to give more of your soul to God. You feel deeply nurtured and embraced in God’s Arms. There is nothing better than resting and dropping into This. You feel the purity of His Love that is the most pleasurable feeling your soul will ever experience. Heat, pressure, inner and outer movements, pulsing, physical shifts and alignments can occur as you open and embody more Divine Love and the feeling of Blessedness this brings. This Blessedness also arises in felt feelings of forgiveness and mercy. Divine Love is Perfect in its trust and tenderness. We become more and more like a child; innocent, joyful, playful and beautiful as we were created to Be. This play is a pure and glorious sensation, wishing to share itself freely and touching all others. Receiving Divine Love can also become so powerful that we are brought to our knees in immense gratitude, rapture, pain and bliss, sometimes all at once. Receiving Divine Love in its fullness is overwhelming, and can even be physically painful in the heart as it inflows to such a degree that the heart actually stretches to accommodate It all. It is both rapturous and ecstatic, as the body may rock, sway and stretch as it receives more and more Divine Love.8 There is no better feeling in all universes than to receive this Greatest Love of all loves, the most pleasurable feelings a soul can experience as it has actually been designed this way, yet our physical bodies cannot take too much of it at one time! When I receive Divine Love in a rapturous way, it is blissful to the soul yet sometimes painful to the physical. Sometimes I have to stop praying as the body becomes too tired.
Padma Aon Prakasha (Dimensions of Love: 7 Steps to God)
Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to be convinced that the system is rotten, only, that there's something they can do about it. And at any rate, even if it were possible to have an anticapitalist revolution without gun-battles in the streets -- which most of us are hoping it is, since let's face it, if we come up against the US army, we will lose -- there's no possible way we could have an anticapitalist revolution while at the same time scrupulously respecting property rights. Yes, that will probably mean the suburban middle class will be the last to come on board. But they would probably be the last to come on board anyway.
David Graeber (Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination)
A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.
Ellen Kaplan (Out of the Labyrinth: Setting Mathematics Free)
All A players have six common denominators. They have a scoreboard that tells them if they are winning or losing and what needs to be done to change their performance. They will not play if they can’t see the scoreboard. They have a high internal, emotional need to succeed. They do not need to be externally motivated or begged to do their job. They want to succeed because it is who they are . . . winners. People often ask me how I motivate my employees. My response is, “I hire them.” Motivation is for amateurs. Pros never need motivating. (Inspiration is another story.) Instead of trying to design a pep talk to motivate your people, why not create a challenge for them? A players love being tested and challenged. They love to be measured and held accountable for their results. Like the straight-A classmate in your high school geometry class, an A player can hardly wait for report card day. C players dread report card day because they are reminded of how average or deficient they are. To an A player, a report card with a B or a C is devastating and a call for renewed commitment and remedial actions. They have the technical chops to do the job. This is not their first rodeo. They have been there, done that, and they are technically very good at what they do. They are humble enough to ask for coaching. The three most important questions an employee can ask are: What else can I do? Where can I get better? What do I need to do or learn so that I continue to grow? If you have someone on your team asking all three of these questions, you have an A player in the making. If you agree these three questions would fundamentally change the game for your team, why not enroll them in asking these questions? They see opportunities. C players see only problems. Every situation is asking a very simple question: Do you want me to be a problem or an opportunity? Your choice. You know the job has outgrown the person when all you hear are problems. The cost of a bad employee is never the salary. My rules for hiring and retaining A players are: Interview rigorously. (Who by Geoff Smart is a spectacular resource on this subject.) Compensate generously. Onboard effectively. Measure consistently. Coach continuously.
Keith J. Cunningham (The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board)
I hope you'll make mistakes. If you make mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I could become the writer I wanted to be, seemed stifling. I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it all up as I went along. They just read what I wrote and they paid me for it or they didn't. The nearest thing I had, was a list I made when I was about 15, of everything I wanted to do. I wanted to write an adult novel, a children's book, a comic, a movie, record an audio-book, write an episode of Doctor Who, and so on. I didn't have a career, I just did the next thing on the list. When you start out in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing. This is great. People who know what they're doing, know the rules, and they know what is possible and what is impossible. You do not, and you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts, were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible, by going beyond them, and you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do, and because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again. That's much harder than it sounds, and sometimes, in the end, so much easier than you might imagine, because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. When you start out, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned. The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I've never regretted the time I spent on any of them. If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that, whether you're a musician or a photographer, a fine artist, or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, singer, a designer, whatever you do, you have one thing that's unique, you have the ability to make art. For me, for so many of the people I've known, that's been a lifesaver the ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times, and it gets you through the other ones. The one thing that you have, that nobody else has, is you! Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw, and build, and play, and dance and live, as only you can. Do what only you can do best, make good art.
Neil Gaiman