Difference Between Phrases And Quotes

The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires.

I had a friend who used to tell me that all the time,” Holly said, and suddenly felt like crying. It was that phrase—I had a friend. Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but God, some of them healed so slowly. And the difference between I have and I had was such a gulf.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

He took his own life” is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’. These differences between the pupils—for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences—must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud-pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have—I believe the English already use the phrase—‘parity of esteem’. An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma—Beelzebub, what a useful word!—by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age-group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coaeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.

Contrary to Expectation. A wise man, the wonder of his age, taught his disciples from a seemingly inexhaustible store of wisdom. He attributed all his knowledge to a thick tome which was kept in a place of honour in his room. The sage would allow nobody to open the volume. When he died, those who had surrounded him, regarding themselves as his heirs, ran to open the book, anxious to possess what it contained. They were surprised, confused and disappointed when they found that there was writing on only one page. They became even more bewildered and then annoyed when they tried to penetrate the meaning of the phrase which met their eyes. It was: 'When you realise the difference between the container and the content, you will have knowledge.

To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.

For [Stephen] Harper, a national daycare plan bordered on being a socialist scheme, a phrase he had once used to describe the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. For [Paul] Martin, whose plan would have transferred to the provinces $5 billion over five years, the national program was what Canadianism was all about. "Think about it this way," [Martin] said. "What if, decades ago, Tommy Douglas and my father and Lester Pearson had considered the idea of medicare and then said, 'Forget it! Let's just give people twenty-five dollars a week.' You want a fundamental difference between Mr. Harper and myself? Well, this is it.

Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.

In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!

The differences which exist between every one of our real impressions -- differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality -- derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at anyone epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which -- here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; here the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs -- the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each one of them filled with things of a color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.

The key difference between a geek and a critic is that a critic digs deep and tries to get behind the surface of things, for better or worse, while a geek is interested in his own hedonism, the thrill of discovery.A geek is expansive and associative and doesn’t necessarily care what a film or a scene ‘means’. It’s the difference between the encyclopaedia and the scholar. A critic likes an interesting association, a nice phrase; the geek admires the beau geste, a pulpy story and its codes of honour taken seriously. Tarantino rather combines those two roles. He is encyclopaedic but also interpretive. He is a human Rolodex of credits. His films are like stuffed overnight bags breaking at the seams. The Handel of filmmakers, he takes the whole of cinema as his resource. But he also provides new meanings, new interpretations of old moments by the way he recontextualizes them.

Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.

It was that phrase—I had a friend. Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but God, some of them healed so slowly. And the difference between I have and I had was such a gulf.

Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one’s own condition, a seeking proof of one’s special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, “Never again.” In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to my people; the other that it should never again happen to any people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.

And speaking of this wonderful machine: [840] I’m puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, The other kind, much more decorous, when He’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar [850] A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method A is agony! The brain Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will Can interrupt, while the automaton Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.

What, then, was the difference between America and Moscow? The “muckraker” said it was a question of who owned the state. In America the people were supposed to own it, but most of the time the big businessmen bought it away from them. “It is privilege which corrupts politics,” was his phrase.

Americans have swapped the awkward phrase “same-sex marriage” for the term “marriage equality.” The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That’s not what traditional marriage was.

I found myself comparing my life against Adrian's. The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. “He took his own life” is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands—and then out of them. How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

The coining of their new catch-phrase 'homophiliac' displayed in contrast to 'homophobic' was rather amusing, though to think that they believe it means anything different to 'homophobic' is just facetious. It's like someone trying to create a difference in definition between 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' - or to make the one look better or less reprehensible than the other.

And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of over-simplification. For now I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin to vaguely understand. For I had somehow thought that ‘going away’ was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly ‘Vancouver’ that I had glibly rolled from off my tongue; or with the crossing of bodies of water or with the boundaries of borders. And because my father told me I was ‘free’ I had foolishly felt that it was really so. Just like that. And I realize now that the older people of my past are more complicated than perhaps I had ever thought. And that there are distinctions between my sentimental, romantic grandfather and his love for coal, and my stern and practical grandmother her hatred of it; and my quietly strong but passive mother and the souring extremes of my father’s passionate violence and the quiet power of his love. They are all so different. Perhaps it is possible I think now to be both and yet to see only one. For the man in whose glassed-in car I now sit sees only similarity. For him the people of this multi-scarred little town are reduced to but a few phrases and the act of sexual intercourse. They are only so many identical goldfish leading identical, incomprehensible lives within the glass prison of their bowl. And the people on the street view me from behind my own glass in much the same way and it is the way that I have looked at others in their ‘foreign licence’ cars and it is the kind of judgment that I myself have made. And yet it seems that neither these people nor this man are in any way unkind and not to understand does not necessarily mean that one is cruel. But one should at least be honest. And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am. I do not know. I am not sure. But I do know that I cannot follow this man into a house that is so much like the one I have left this morning and go down into the sexual embrace of a woman who might well be my mother. And I do not know what she, my mother, may be like in the years to come when she is deprived of the lighting movement of my father’s body and the hammered pounding of his heart. For I do not know when he may die. And I do not know in what darkness she may cry out his name nor to whom. I do not know very much of anything, it seems, except that I have been wrong and dishonest with others and myself. And perhaps this man has left footprints on a soul I did not even know that I possessed.

The phrase "too smart for his own good" was far too often applied to people who weren't in the least deserving of it. In Rhys's opinion, Tom Severin was the only person he'd ever met who actually was too smart for his own good. Severin often appeared relaxed and inattentive during a conversation or meeting, but later could recall every detail with almost perfect accuracy. He was bright, articulate, confident in his razor-edged intellect, and frequently self-mocking. Rhys, who had been raised by stern and joyless parents, had always liked people with Severin's quality of irreverence. They were of the same generation, with the same humble beginnings, the same appetite for success. The main difference between them was that Severin was highly educated. However, Rhys had never envied him for that. In business, instinct was equally as valuable as intelligence, sometimes even more so. Whereas Severin could sometimes talk himself into the wrong side of an issue, Rhys trusted the promptings of his own nature.

Despite shared language, ethnicity, and culture, alliances nurtured deep, long-standing hostilities toward one another, the original source of which was often unknown. They had always been enemies, and so they remained enemies. Indeed, hostility between alliances defined the natives’ lives. If covered by a glass roof, the valley would’ve been a terrarium of human conflict, an ecosystem fueled by sunshine, river water, pigs, sweet potatoes, and war among neighbors. Their ancestors told them that waging war was a moral obligation and a necessity of life. Men said, “If there is no war, we will die.” War’s permanence was even part of the language. If a man said “our war,” he structured the phrase the same way he’d describe an irrevocable fact. If he spoke of a possession such as “our wood,” he used different parts of speech. The meaning was clear: ownership of wood might change, but wars were forever. When compared with the causes of World War II, the motives underlying native wars were difficult for outsiders to grasp. They didn’t fight for land, wealth, or power. Neither side sought to repel or conquer a foreign people, to protect a way of life, or to change their enemies’ beliefs, which both sides already shared. Neither side considered war a necessary evil, a failure of diplomacy, or an interruption of a desired peace. Peace wasn’t waiting on the far side of war. There was no far side. War moved through different phases in the valley. It ebbed and flowed. But it never ended. A lifetime of war was an inheritance every child could count on.

you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.

I said she didn’t have that problem herself anymore, since she’d decided to prefer women, and as far as I could see she had no scruples about stealing them or borrowing them when she felt like it. She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said “even steven” was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated I was living with my head in the sand.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

As I will be saying over and over again in this rambling volume, I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries. What is the difference between something and nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing? Should the something of which the universe is fundamentally composed be regarded as like atoms or be regarded as more like a mind? Or is the substratum best thought of as something neutral: material when structured one way, mental when structured another way? I have no desire even to try to answer such questions. I find nothing absurd about the notion that the external world is the mind of God, nor do I find it repulsive to suppose that God can create a world of substance, utterly unlike ideas in God’s mind or anybody’s mind, that can exist whether God thinks about it or not. How can I, a mere mortal slightly above an ape in intelligence, know what it means to say that something is “created” by God, or “thought” by God? One can play endless metaphysical games with such phrases,3 but I can no more grasp what is behind such questions than my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

In the Hebrew language, there is no distinction between knowing and doing. Knowing is doing and doing is knowing. In other words, if you aren't doing it, then you don't really know it... The phrase all out literally means "maximum effort." It's giving God everything you've got -- 100 percent. It's loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. It's not just worshiping God with your words. It's worshiping God with blood, sweat, and tears. It's more than sincere sentiments. It's sweat equity in kingdom causes. You cannot be the hands and feet of Jesus if you're sitting on your butt.

Should the girls decide to go for a walk, they would need to change into a different outfit, a light woollen tweed suit and sturdier boots - but on simpler days, such as for the garden party, they make mercifully few changes. Cora, like many married ladies in her position, takes the opportunity on quiet afternoons to take off her corset and wear a teagown for an hour or two before getting into her evening dress. Its huge advantage was that it was always ornately decorated but simply cut, meaning it was the only garment a woman could conceivably get in and out of alone, as it could be worn without a corset underneath. Worn between five and seven o'clock, it gave rise to the French phrase 'cinq a sept'. This referred to the hours when lovers were received, the only time of day when a maid wouldn't need to be there to help you undress and therefore discover your secret. Lady Colin Campbell's divorce had hinged on the fact that her clothes had clearly been fastened by a man who didn't know what he was doing; when her lady's maid saw her for the next change, the fastenings were higgledy-piggledy. But for Cora, the teagown is not for any illicit behaviour, just for respite from her underpinnings.

She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even-steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated, I was living with my head in the sand. (...) I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away, I said. You couldn't just ignore them .

English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else. So

We can easily imagine a monetary organization which, by the exclusive use of notes or clearing-house methods, allows all transfers to be made with the instrumentality of sums of money that never change their position in space. If differences due to the geographical position of money are disregarded in this way, we get the following law for the exchange-ratio between money and other economic goods: every economic good, that is ready for consumption (in the sense in which that phrase is usually understood in commerce and technology), has a subjective use-value qua consumption good at the place where it is and qua production good at those places to which it may be brought for consumption.

He would open the door of the drawing-room or the nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee at any rate, the center of some different order in the system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.

Harry Levin shrewdly phrased what he called “Cervantes’ formula”: This is nothing more nor less than a recognition of the difference between verses and reverses, between words and deeds, palabras and hechos—in short, between literary artifice and that real thing which is life itself. But literary artifice is the only means that a writer has at his disposal. How else can he convey his impression of life? Precisely by discrediting those means, by repudiating that air of bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped. When Pascal observed that the true eloquence makes fun of eloquence, he succinctly formulated the principle that could look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar. It remained for La Rochefoucauld to restate the other side of the paradox: some people would never have loved if they had not heard of love.

Reading Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë after Jane Eyre is a curious experience. The subject of the biography is recognisably the same person who wrote the novel, but the effect of the two books is utterly different. The biography is indeed depressing and painful reading. It captures better, I believe, than any any subsequent biography the introverted and puritan pessimist side of Charlotte Brontë, and conveys the real dreariness of the world of privation, critical discouragement and limited opportunity that so often made her complain in her letters that she felt marked out for suffering. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is exhilarating reading, partly because the reader, far from simply pitying the heroine, is struck by her resilience, and partly because the novel achieves such an imaginative transmutation of the drab. Unlike that of Jane Austen's Fanny Price or Dickens's Arthur Clennam or John Harmon, Jane Eyre's response to suffering is never less than energetic. The reader is torn between exasperation at the way she mistakes her resentments and prejudices for fair moral judgements, and admiration at the way she fights back. Matthew Arnold, seeking 'sweetness and light' was repelled by the 'hunger, rebellion and rage' that he identified as the keynotes of the novel. One can see why, and yet feel that these have a more positive effect than his phrase allows. The heroine is trying to hold on to her sense of self in a world that gives it little encouragement, and the novel does put up a persuasive case for her arrogance and pugnacity as the healthier alternatives to patience and resignation. That the book has created a world in which the golden mean seems such a feeble solution is both its eccentricity and its strength.

A while back a young woman from another state came to live with some of her relatives in the Salt Lake City area for a few weeks. On her first Sunday she came to church dressed in a simple, nice blouse and knee-length skirt set off with a light, button-up sweater. She wore hose and dress shoes, and her hair was combed simply but with care. Her overall appearance created an impression of youthful grace. Unfortunately, she immediately felt out of place. It seemed like all the other young women her age or near her age were dressed in casual skirts, some rather distant from the knee; tight T-shirt-like tops that barely met the top of their skirts at the waist (some bare instead of barely); no socks or stockings; and clunky sneakers or flip-flops. One would have hoped that seeing the new girl, the other girls would have realized how inappropriate their manner of dress was for a chapel and for the Sabbath day and immediately changed for the better. Sad to say, however, they did not, and it was the visitor who, in order to fit in, adopted the fashion (if you can call it that) of her host ward. It is troubling to see this growing trend that is not limited to young women but extends to older women, to men, and to young men as well. . . . I was shocked to see what the people of this other congregation wore to church. There was not a suit or tie among the men. They appeared to have come from or to be on their way to the golf course. It was hard to spot a woman wearing a dress or anything other than very casual pants or even shorts. Had I not known that they were coming to the school for church meetings, I would have assumed that there was some kind of sporting event taking place. The dress of our ward members compared very favorably to this bad example, but I am beginning to think that we are no longer quite so different as more and more we seem to slide toward that lower standard. We used to use the phrase “Sunday best.” People understood that to mean the nicest clothes they had. The specific clothing would vary according to different cultures and economic circumstances, but it would be their best. It is an affront to God to come into His house, especially on His holy day, not groomed and dressed in the most careful and modest manner that our circumstances permit. Where a poor member from the hills of Peru must ford a river to get to church, the Lord surely will not be offended by the stain of muddy water on his white shirt. But how can God not be pained at the sight of one who, with all the clothes he needs and more and with easy access to the chapel, nevertheless appears in church in rumpled cargo pants and a T-shirt? Ironically, it has been my experience as I travel around the world that members of the Church with the least means somehow find a way to arrive at Sabbath meetings neatly dressed in clean, nice clothes, the best they have, while those who have more than enough are the ones who may appear in casual, even slovenly clothing. Some say dress and hair don’t matter—it’s what’s inside that counts. I believe that truly it is what’s inside a person that counts, but that’s what worries me. Casual dress at holy places and events is a message about what is inside a person. It may be pride or rebellion or something else, but at a minimum it says, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand the difference between the sacred and the profane.” In that condition they are easily drawn away from the Lord. They do not appreciate the value of what they have. I worry about them. Unless they can gain some understanding and capture some feeling for sacred things, they are at risk of eventually losing all that matters most. You are Saints of the great latter-day dispensation—look the part.

The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.

Yet it is the Outsider’s belief that life aims at more life, at higher forms of life, something for which the Superman is an inexact poetic symbol (as Dante’s description of the beatific vision is expressed in terms of a poetic symbol); so that, in a sense, Urizen is the most important of the three functions. The fall was necessary, as Hesse realized. Urizen must go forward alone. The other two must follow him. And as soon as Urizen has gone forward, the Fall has taken place. Evolution towards God is impossible without a Fall. And it is only by this recognition that the poet can ever come to ‘praise in spite of; for if evil is ultimately discord, unresolvable, then the idea of dennoch preisen is a self-contradiction. And yet it must be clearly recognized and underlined that this is not the Hegelian ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. Even if the evil is necessary, it remains evil, discord, pain. It remains an Existential fact, not something that proves to be something else when you hold it in the right light. It is as if there were two opposing armies: the Hegelian view holds that peace can be secured by proving that there is really no ground for opposition; in short, they are really friends. The Blakeian view says that the discord is necessary, but it can never be resolved until one army has. completely exterminated the other. This is the Existential view, first expressed by Soren Kierkegaard, the Outsider’s view and, incidentally, the religious view. The whole difference between the Existentialist and the Hegelian viewpoint is implicit in the comparison between the title of Hegel’s book, The Philosophy of History, and James Joyce’s phrase, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ Blake provided the Existentialist view with a symbolism and mythology. In Blake’s view, harmony is an ultimate aim, but not the primary aim, of life; the primary aim is to live more abundantly at any cost. Harmony can come later.

What would she tell me, about the Commander, if she were here? Probably she'd disapprove. She disapproved of Luke, back then. Not of Luke but of the fact that he was married. She said I was poaching, on another woman's ground. I said Luke wasn't a fish or a piece of dirt either, he was a human being and could make his own decisions. She said I was rationalizing. I said I was in love. She said that was no excuse. Moira was always more logical than I am. I said she didn't have that problem herself anymore, since she'd decided to prefer women, and as far as I could see she had no scruples about stealing them or borrowing them when she felt like it. She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even Steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated I was living with my head in the sand. We

Lying," he said out loud, hoping no one would hear. "I need to lie. Teach me, quickly." I wouldn't if I were you, came the response. For a start, it's a variable concept here. You are in a culture where ambiguity has been raised to a high level. Let me give an example: depending on phrasing, circumstance, expression, body movement, intonation and context, the statement "I love you" can mean I love you; I don't love you; I hate you; I want to have sex with you; I do, in fact, love your sister; I don't love you any more; leave me alone, I'm tired, or I'm sorry I forgot your birthday. The person being talked to would instantly understand the meaning but might choose to attribute an entirely different meaning to the statement. Lying is a social act and the nature and import of the lie depends in effect on an unspoken agreement between the parties concerned. Please note that this description does not even begin to explore the concept of deep lies, in which the speaker simultaneously says something he knows to be untrue and genuinely believes it nonetheless: politicians are particularly adept at this.

Christians have often been lamentably slow to grasp the profound secularity of the kingdom as it is proclaimed in the Gospels. Because Matthew (though not Mark or Luke) uses the phrase "the kingdom of heaven" - and perhaps because the greatest number of parables of the kingdom do indeed occur in Matthew - we have frequently succumbed to the temptation to place unwarranted importance on the word "heaven." In any case, we have too often given in to the temptation to picture the kingdom of heaven as if it were something that belonged more properly elsewhere than here. Worse yet, we have conceived of that elsewhere almost entirely in "heavenly" rather than in earthly terms. And all of that, mind you, directly in the face of Scripture's insistences to the contrary. In the Old Testament, for example, the principal difference between the gods of the heathen and the God who, as Yahweh, manifested himself to Israel was that, while the pagan gods occupied themselves chiefly "up there" in the "council of the gods," Yahweh showed his power principally "down here" on the stage of history. The pagan deities may have had their several fiefdoms on earth - pint-size plots of tribal real estate, outside which they had no interest or dominion, and even inside which they behaved mostly like absentee landlords; but their real turf was in the sky, not on earth. Yahweh, however, claimed two distinctions. Even on their heavenly turf, he insisted, it was he and not they who were in charge. And when he came down to earth, he acted as if the whole place was his own backyard. In fact, it was precisely by his overcoming them on utterly earthly ground, in and through his chosen people, that he claimed to have beaten them even on their heavenly home court. What he did on earth was done in heaven, and vice versa, because he alone, as the One Yahweh, was the sole proprietor of both. In the New Testament, that inseparability of heavenly concerns from earthly ones is, if anything, even more strenuously maintained. The kingdom Jesus proclaims is at hand, planted here, at work in this world. The Word sown is none other than God himself incarnate. By his death and resurrection at Jerusalem in A.D. 29, he reconciles everything, everywhere, to himself - whether they be things on earth or things in heaven.

Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.

But I don't know anyone who has an easy life forever. Everyone I know gets their heart broken sometime, by something. The question is not, will my life be easy or will my heart break? But rather, when my heart breaks, will I choose to grow? Sometimes in the moments of the most searing pain, we think we don't have a choice. But we do. It's in those moments that we make the most important choice: grow or give up. It's easy to want to give up under the weight of what we're carrying. It seems sometimes like the only possible choice. But there's always, always, always another choice, and transformation is waiting for us just beyond that choice. This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen. I'm coming to think there are at least two kinds of pain. There's the anxiety and fear I felt when we couldn't sell our house. And then there's the sadness I felt when I lost the baby or when my grandma passed away. Very different kinds of pain. The first kind, I think, is the king that invites us to grow. The second kind is the kind that invites us to mourn. God's not trying to teach me a lesson through my grandma's death. I wasn't supposed to love her less so the loss hurt less acutely, I'm not supposed to feel less strongly about the horror of death and dying. When we lose someone we love, when a dear friend moves away, when illness invades, it's right to mourn. It's right to feel deep, wrenching sadness. But then there's the other kind of pain, that first kind. My friend Brian says that the heart of all human conflict is the phrase "I'm not getting what I want." When you're totally honest about the pain, what's at the center? Could it be that you're not getting what you want? You're getting an invitation to grow, I think, as unwelcome as it may be. It's sloppy theology to think that all suffering is good for us, or that it's a result of sin. All suffering can be used for good, over time, after mourning and healing, by God's graciousness. But sometimes it's just plain loss, not because you needed to grow, not because life or God or anything is teaching you any kind of lesson. The trick is knowing the difference between the two.

Rationalism has swerved between two radical extremes in its attitude toward revelation. There is the widespread present admission that reason is barren as a source of final truth, but that it would be a sell-out to madness to invoke revelational theology. But a very different tradition in the history of philosophy, not without recent representatives, holds that philosophy finds its ideal intellectual expression and summit in theology. For Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and even Spinoza, philosophy is at its apex an intellectual love of the Divine. It is this regard for theology as “the inner side of a philosophy,” to use Miss Emmet’s phrase (The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, p. 150), that turns some systems of metaphysics into a religious faith, albeit a false one. Such outlooks on the surface eliminate a direct clash between philosophy and theology. But, insofar as theology is viewed as the capstone of speculative philosophy, they do so only by denying the comprehensive intellectual implications of revealed theology, and in principle even deny to theology its own right of survival on the basis of special divine disclosure. Sooner or later—and usually sooner than its advocates think—this view works itself around to the other, in which rationalists suspect and disown all theology, only to discover at last that in doing so they have both idolatrized reason and emptied it into a vain thing.

A startlingly clear memory jolted through Ronan, as fresh as the moment he'd lived it. It was the day Ronan had first come to Harvard to surprise Adam, back when he still thought he was moving to Cambridge. He'd been so full of anticipation for how the reveal would go and then, in the end, they'd walked right past each other. At the time, Ronan had thought it was because Adam looked so different after his time away. He was dressed differently. He held himself differently. He'd even lost his accent. And he'd assumed it had felt the same to Adam; Ronan had gotten older, lonelier, sharper. But now they were in this strange sea, and neither of them looked anything like the Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch the other had known. Adam was a collection of thoughts barely masquerading as a human form. Ronan Lynch was raw dark energy, alien and enormous. And yet when Adam's consciousness touched his, Ronan recognized him. It was Adam's footsteps on the stairs. His surprised whoop as he catapulted into the pond they'd dug. The irritation in his voice; the impatience of his kiss; his ruthless, dry sense of humor; his biting pride; his ferocious loyalty. It was all caught up in this essential form that had nothing to do with how his physical body looked. The difference between this reunion and the one at Harvard was that there in Cambridge they had been false. They'd both been wearing masks upon masks, hiding the truth of themselves from everyone, including themselves. Here, there was no way to hide. They were only their thoughts. Only the truth. "Ronan, Ronan, it is you. I did it. I found you. With just a sweetmetal, I found you." Ronan didn't know if Adam had thought it or said it, but it didn't matter. The joy was unmistakable. "Tamquam," said Ronan, and Adam said, "Alter idem." Cicero had written the phrase about Atticus, his dearest friend. Qui est tamquam alter idem. Like a second self. Ronan and Adam could not hug, because they had no real arms, but it didn't matter. Their energy darted and mingled and circled, the brilliant bright of the sweetmetals and the absolute dark of the Lace. They didn't speak, but they didn't have to. Audible words were redundant when their thoughts were tangled together as one. Without any of the clumsiness of language, they shared their euphoria and their lurking fears. They rehashed what they had done to each other and apologized. They showed everything they had done and that had been done to them in the time since they'd last seen each other--the good and the bad, the horrid and the wonderful. Everything had felt so murky for so long, but when they were like this, all that was left was clarity. Again and again they spiraled around and through one another, not Ronan-and-Adam but rather one entity that held both of them. They were happy and sad, angry and forgiven, they were wanted, they were wanted, they were wanted.

One could not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf ; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was oppressed. The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has thought of  anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humour seriously a maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them.

There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world. It’s been said many times before that cinema is a form of escape, it’s a stock phrase intended to be a condemnation, and cinema certainly served that purpose for me back then. It satisfied a need for disorientation, for shifting my attention to another place, and I believe it’s a need that corresponds to a primary function of integration in the world, an essential phase in any kind of development. Of course there are other more substantial and personal ways of creating a different space for yourself: cinema was the easiest method and it was within reach, but it was also the one that instantly carried me farthest away. I went to the cinema in the afternoon, secretly fleeing from home, or using study with a classmate as an excuse, because my parents left me very little freedom during the months when school was in session. The urge to hide inside the cinema as soon as it opened at two in the afternoon was the proof of true passion. Attending the first screening had a number of advantages: the half-empty theater, it was like I had it all to myself, would allow me to stretch out in the middle of the third row with my legs on the back of the seat in front of me; the hope of returning home without anyone finding out about my escape, in order to receive permission to go out once again later on (and maybe see another film); a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming. And in addition to these explanations that were unmentionable for various reasons, there was another more serious one: entering right when it opened guaranteed the rare privilege of seeing the movie from the beginning and not from a random moment toward the middle or the end, because that was what usually happened when I got to the cinema later in the afternoon or toward the evening.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “When seconds count the police are only minutes away.”  This is not a knock against the police.  Many officers are good friends of mine, and no police force can be everywhere—nor, in a free country, would we want them to be.  But calling the police almost never helps. Criminals, like predators in nature, do not attack when conditions favor the prey, when the sheepdog is alert beside the sheep.  Predators attack when the prey is vulnerable and unprotected.  In other words, when the cops can’t respond fast enough.  When an attack comes you probably won’t be standing in front of the police station.  You’ll be alone, or multi-tasking a busy life, or burdened (tactically speaking) with small children.  You could even be sound asleep.  Your attacker will choose that moment precisely because he thinks he can get away with it.  The mere thought of this is frightening.  And that’s a good thing.  Properly applied, a little bit of fear keeps us alert.  It is OK for children to live without fear.  Indeed, that is a top priority of every parent.  Adults, though, must see the world for what it is, both very good and very bad, and prepare for the worst so they can safely enjoy the best.     This book is about winning the legal battle, and leaves tactical training to others.  In no way does this imply, though, that your first priority shouldn’t be survival.  If you are in a fight for your life, for the life of your spouse or your children or your parents, you MUST win.  Period.  If you don’t win the physical fight, everything else becomes rather less pressing. The good news is that because we know how evil people target their prey we can use this knowledge against them.  Avoid looking weak and the bad guy will seek easier prey.  Stay alert and aware of your surroundings.  Project confidence.  Avoid places where you can get cornered, and make yourself look like more work than you’re worth.   Criminals are sometimes too stupid to know better, but that’s the exception.  They largely know the difference between easy and difficult victims. There’s more than enough easy prey for them.  If you look difficult they’ll move on.

The impression conveyed by these phrases of Vinteuil’s was different from any other, as if, in spite of the conclusions which science seems to be reaching, individuals did exist. And it was just when he was doing his utmost to be novel, that one could recognize, beneath the apparent differences, the deep similarities and the planned resemblances that underlay a work, when Vinteuil would pick up a given phrase several times, diversify it, playfully change its rhythm, bring it back again in the original form; this kind of deliberate echo, the product of intelligence, inevitably superficial, could never be so striking as the hidden, involuntary resemblances which sprang to the surface, under different colors, between the two distinct masterpieces; for then Vinteuil, striving powerfully to produce something new, searched into himself, and with all the force of creative effort touched his own essence, at a depth where, whatever question one asks, the soul replies with the same accent—its own. A particular accent, this accent of Vinteuil’s, separated from the accent of other musicians by a distinction much more marked than the one we perceive between the voices of different people, or even between the bellowing and the cry of two animal species; a real difference, the one that existed between the thought of some other musician and the eternal investigations of Vinteuil, the question that he put to himself in so many different forms, his speculation, endlessly painstaking but as free from the analytical forms of reasoning as if it had been conducted in the realm of the angels, so that we can measure its depth but no more translate it into human speech than disembodied spirits can when they are called up by a medium and interrogated about the secrets of death; his own accent, for in the end and even taking into account the acquired originality which had struck me in the afternoon, the family relationship which musicologists could trace between composers, it is to a single, personal voice that those great singers, the original musicians, always return in spite of themselves, a voice which is the living proof of the irreducible individuality of each soul.

In contemporary Western society, buying a magazine on astrology - at a newsstand, say - is easy; it is much harder to find one on astronomy. Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology; there are hardly any that have even a weekly column on astronomy. There are ten times more astrologers in the United States than astronomers. At parties, when I meet people that do not know I’m a scientist, I am sometimes asked “Are you a Gemini?” (chances of success, one in twelve), or “What sign are you?” Much more rarely am I asked “Have you heard that gold is made in supernova explosions?” or “When do you think Congress will approve a Mars Rover?” (...) And personal astrology is with us still: consider two different newspaper astrology columns published in the same city on the same day. For example, we can examine The New York Post and the New York Daily News on September 21, 1979. Suppose you are a Libra - that is, born between September 23 and October 22. According to the astrologer for the Post, ‘a compromise will help ease tension’; useful, perhaps, but somewhat vague. According to the Daily News’ astrologer, you must ‘demand more of yourself’, an admonition that is also vague but also different. These ‘predictions’ are not predictions; rather they are pieces of advice - they tell you what to do, not what will happen. Deliberately, they are phrased so generally that they could apply to anyone. And they display major mutual inconsistencies. Why are they published as unapologetically as sport statistics and stock market reports? Astrology can be tested by the lives of twins. There are many cases in which one twin is killed in childhood, in a riding accident, say, or is struck by lightning, while the other lives to a prosperous old age. Each was born in precisely the same place and within minutes of the other. Exactly the same planets were rising at their births. If astrology were valid, how could two such twins have such profoundly different fates? It also turns out that astrologers cannot even agree among themselves on what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they knew nothing about except their time and place of birth.

Christopher Phelan was talking with Prudence Mercer. The scheme of formal black and white was becoming to any man. On someone like Christopher, it was literally breathtaking. He wore the clothes with natural ease, his posture relaxed but straight, his shoulders broad. The crisp white of his starched cravat provided a striking contrast to his tawny skin, while the light of chandeliers glittered over his golden-bronze hair. Following her gaze, Amelia lifted her brows. “What an attractive man,” she said. Her attention returned to Beatrix. “You like him, don’t you?” Before Beatrix could help herself, she sent her sister a pained glance. Letting her gaze drop to the floor, she said, “There have been a dozen times in the past when I should have liked a particular gentleman. When it would have been convenient, and appropriate, and easy. But no, I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it’s been trampled by elephants, thrown into the Amazon, and eaten by piranhas.” Amelia smiled at her compassionately. Her gloved hand slipped over Beatrix’s. “Darling Bea. Would it console you to hear that such feelings of infatuation are perfectly ordinary?” Beatrix turned her palm upward, returning the clasp of her sister’s hand. Since their mother had died when Bea was twelve, Amelia had been a source of endless love and patience. “Is it infatuation?” she heard herself asking softly. “Because it feels much worse than that. Like a fatal disease.” “I don’t know, dear. It’s difficult to tell the difference between love and infatuation. Time will reveal it, eventually.” Amelia paused. “He is attracted to you,” she said. “We all noticed the other night. Why don’t you encourage him, dear?” Beatrix felt her throat tighten. “I can’t.” “Why not?” “I can’t explain,” Beatrix said miserably, “except to say that I’ve deceived him.” Amelia glanced at her in surprise. “That doesn’t sound like you. You’re the least deceptive person I’ve ever known.” “I didn’t mean to do it. And he doesn’t know that it was me. But I think he suspects.” “Oh.” Amelia frowned as she absorbed the perplexing statement. “Well. This does seem to be a muddle. Perhaps you should confide in him. His reaction may surprise you. What is it that Mother used to say whenever we pushed her to the limits of her patience?...’Love forgives all things.’ Do you remember?” “Of course,” Beatrix said. She had written that exact phrase to Christopher in one of her letters. Her throat went very tight. “Amelia, I can’t discuss this now. Or I’ll start weeping and throw myself to the floor.” “Heavens, don’t do that. Someone might trip over you.

... we find a complete contradiction in our wishing to live without suffering, a contradiction that is therefore implied by the frequently used phrase “blessed life.” This will certainly be clear to the person who has fully grasped my discussion that follows. This contradiction is revealed in this ethic of pure reason itself by the fact that the Stoic is compelled to insert a recommendation of suicide in his guide to the blissful life (for this is what his ethics always remains). This is like the costly phial of poison to be found among the magnificent ornaments and apparel of oriental despots, and is for the case where the sufferings of the body, incapable of being philosophized away by any principles and syllogisms, are paramount and incurable. Thus its sole purpose, namely blessedness, is frustrated, and nothing remains as a means of escape from pain except death. But then death must be taken with unconcern, just as is any other medicine. Here a marked contrast is evident between the Stoic ethics and all those other ethical systems mentioned above. These ethical systems make virtue directly and in itself the aim and object, even with the most grievous sufferings, and will not allow a man to end his life in order to escape from suffering. But not one of them knew how to express the true reason for rejecting suicide, but they laboriously collected fictitious arguments of every kind. This true reason will appear in the fourth book in connexion with our discussion. But the above-mentioned contrast reveals and confirms just that essential difference to be found in the fundamental principle between the Stoa, really only a special form of eudaemonism, and the doctrines just mentioned, although both often agree in their results, and are apparently related. But the above-mentioned inner contradiction, with which the Stoic ethics is affected even in its fundamental idea, further shows itself in the fact that its ideal, the Stoic sage as represented by this ethical system, could never obtain life or inner poetical truth, but remains a wooden, stiff lay-figure with whom one can do nothing. He himself does not know where to go with his wisdom, and his perfect peace, contentment, and blessedness directly contradict the nature of mankind, and do not enable us to arrive at any perceptive representation thereof. Compared with him, how entirely different appear the overcomers of the world and voluntary penitents, who are revealed to us, and are actually produced, by the wisdom of India; how different even the Saviour of Christianity, that excellent form full of the depth of life, of the greatest poetical truth and highest significance, who stands before us with perfect virtue, holiness, and sublimity, yet in a state of supreme suffering.

Hyphen This word comes from two Greek words together meaning ‘under one’, which gets nobody anywhere and merely prompts the reflection that argument by etymology only serves the purpose of intimidating ignorant antagonists. On, then. This is one more case in which matters have not improved since Fowler’s day, since he wrote in 1926: The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education … The wrong use or wrong non-use of hyphens makes the words, if strictly interpreted, mean something different from what the writers intended. It is no adequate answer to such criticisms to say that actual misunderstanding is unlikely; to have to depend on one’s employer’s readiness to take the will for the deed is surely a humiliation that no decent craftsman should be willing to put up with. And so say all of us who may be reading this book. The references there to ‘printers’ needs updating to something like ‘editors’, meaning those who declare copy fit to print. Such people now often get it wrong by preserving in midcolumn a hyphen originally put at the end of a line to signal a word-break: inter-fere, say, is acceptable split between lines but not as part of a single line. This mistake is comparatively rare and seldom causes confusion; even so, time spent wondering whether an exactor may not be an ex-actor is time avoidably wasted. The hyphen is properly and necessarily used to join the halves of a two-word adjectival phrase, as in fair-haired children, last-ditch resistance, falling-down drunk, over-familiar reference. Breaches of this rule are rare and not troublesome. Hyphens are also required when a phrase of more than two words is used adjectivally, as in middle-of-the-road policy, too-good-to-be-true story, no-holds-barred contest. No hard-and-fast rule can be devised that lays down when a two-word phrase is to be hyphenated and when the two words are to be run into one, though there will be a rough consensus that, for example, book-plate and bookseller are each properly set out and that bookplate and book-seller might seem respectively new-fangled and fussy. A hyphen is not required when a normal adverb (i.e. one ending in -ly) plus an adjective or other modifier are used in an adjectival role, as in Jack’s equally detestable brother, a beautifully kept garden, her abnormally sensitive hearing. A hyphen is required, however, when the adverb lacks a final -ly, like well, ill, seldom, altogether or one of those words like tight and slow that double as adjectives. To avoid ambiguity here we must write a well-kept garden, an ill-considered objection, a tight-fisted policy. The commonest fault in the use of the hyphen, and the hardest to eradicate, is found when an adjectival phrase is used predicatively. So a gent may write of a hard-to-conquer mountain peak but not of a mountain peak that remains hard-to-conquer, an often-proposed solution but not of one that is often-proposed. For some reason this fault is especially common when numbers, including fractions, are concerned, and we read every other day of criminals being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years, a woman becoming a mother-of-three and even of some unfortunate being stabbed six-times. And the Tories have been in power for a decade-and-a-half. Finally, there seems no end to the list of common phrases that some berk will bung a superfluous hyphen into the middle of: artificial-leg, daily-help, false-teeth, taxi-firm, martial-law, rainy-day, airport-lounge, first-wicket, piano-concerto, lung-cancer, cavalry-regiment, overseas-service. I hope I need not add that of course one none the less writes of a false-teeth problem, a first-wicket stand, etc. The only guide is: omit the hyphen whenever possible, so avoid not only mechanically propelled vehicle users (a beauty from MEU) but also a man eating tiger. And no one is right and no-one is wrong.

ANNALS OF LANGUAGE WORD MAGIC How much really gets lost in translation? BY ADAM GOPNIK Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs. Although berries and beans may be separated by a subtle sound within a language, the larger space between like words in different languages is just as hazardous. Two words that seem to indicate the same state may mean the opposite. In English, the spiritual guy is pious, while the one called spirituel in French is witty; a liberal in France is on the right, in America to the left. And what of cultural inflections that seem to separate meanings otherwise identical? When we have savoir-faire in French, don’t we actually have something different from “know-how” in English, even though the two compounds combine pretty much the same elements? These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another. Histoire in French means both “history” and “story,” in a way that “history” in English doesn’t quite, so that the relation between history and story may be more elegantly available in French. But no one has trouble in English with the notion that histories are narratives we make up as much as chronicles we discern. Indeed, in the preface, the editors cheerfully announce that any strong form of the belief to which their book may seem to be a monument is certainly false: “Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” So their Dictionary is a self-exploding book,

Simple class-based bigotry that infected truth in the liberal media. And he knew the difference between those same propaganda dicks who distinguished between blue collar and white collar workers with the old Soviet-catchphrase, “Working Class,” as if human beings were broken down into different species according to their education or wealth or jobs. He hated that jarringly divisive phrase as the kind of Cold War propaganda that launched “class struggle” and “people’s democracy” as American political concerns, among the evil Communist movement’s greatest coups. It was something he only heard from the so-called “elites” but never back home in the old neighborhood. “Old Harbor Village housing projects.

Create an “Inner Child” Map. Adults have a different way of viewing things compared to a child, and this activity is a kind of bridge between how you think now as an adult and your inner child. Adults usually prefer to create organizers or charts in order to plan or understand something. This time you will be creating an organizer, more specifically called a semantic map, that can help you discover your inner child. To create an “inner child” map, you can get a picture of yourself as a child, probably around the age of 7 or 8. If you do not have any pictures, then you can simply draw yourself when you were in that age. Place the picture or the drawing at the center of a piece of paper, with enough room for scribbles all around it. Then, begin recalling as much as you can all of the phrases or words that you can associate with this child version of you. Brainstorm on everything, such as your favorite color back then, the gifts that you wanted for Christmas, your nickname, your favorite movie, the book that you kept reading over and over again with a flashlight under your blanket, an imaginary friend, or the silly urban legends that you used to believe in. Once you have finished your “inner child map” you are so much closer to discovering him or her, if you haven’t already.

We may define union with Christ as follows: Union with Christ is a phrase used to summarize several different relationships between believers and Christ, through which Christians receive every benefit of salvation. These relationships include the fact that we are in Christ, Christ is in us, we are like Christ, and we are with Christ.

Guideline #5: Select your vocabulary with meticulous care. Did you increase sales or orchestrate explosive growth in revenues? Did you provide good levels of customer service or unparalleled levels of quality customer service? As a receptionist, did you merely greet people, or were you the manager of first impressions? Are you a good problem solver, or can you resolve complex technical issues professionally and expeditiously? Words are power, and keywords and phrases are powerful agents for eliciting the right emotions to enthusiastically engage prospective employers to want to read your document. Well-chosen words can be the difference between an interview and a missed opportunity, so select your words and messages with painstaking precision.

As our economy shifts more and more onto an information basis, we are inadvertently creating a divided society. The upper class is composed of those who have mastered the nuances of differentiating between "RAM" and "hard disk." The lower class consists of those who treat the difference as inconsequential. The irony is that the difference really is inconsequential to anyone except a few hard-core engineers. Yet virtually all contemporary software forces its users to confront a file system, where your success is fully dependent on knowing the difference between RAM and disk. Thus the term "computer literacy" becomes a euphemism for social and economic apartheid. Computer literacy is a key phrase that brutally bifurcates our society.

The only thing that seems to differ between the major schools of meditation is the point of concentration. Some traditions use mantras, others follow the breath, some have their eyes open, others have their eyes closed, some use simple words, others use prayers and the list can go on. Despite extravagant claims to the contrary, modern research has found no significant difference between the points of concentration at the beginning stages of meditation, which means it doesn’t really matter which mantra, word or phrase you choose to begin with. The main thing is to practice whatever meditation method that you have chosen; sit still and let the mind settle.

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Edward B. Burger;Michael Starbird) - Your Highlight on page 17 | location 251-270 | Added on Monday, 6 April 2015 03:03:56 Understand simple things deeply The most fundamental ideas in any subject can be understood with ever-increasing depth. Professional tennis players watch the ball; mathematicians understand a nuanced notion of number; successful students continue to improve their mastery of the concepts from previous chapters and courses as they move toward the more advanced material on the horizon; successful people regularly focus on the core purpose of their profession or life. True experts continually deepen their mastery of the basics. Trumpeting understanding through a note-worthy lesson. Tony Plog is an internationally acclaimed trumpet virtuoso, composer, and teacher. A few years ago we had the opportunity to observe him conducting a master class for accomplished soloists. During the class, each student played a portion of his or her selected virtuosic piece. They played wonderfully. Tony listened politely and always started his comments, “Very good, very good. That is a challenging piece, isn’t it?” As expected, he proceeded to give the students advice about how the piece could be played more beautifully, offering suggestions about physical technique and musicality. No surprise. But then he shifted gears. He asked the students to play a very easy warm-up exercise that any beginning trumpet player might be given. They played the handful of simple notes, which sounded childish compared to the dramatically fast, high notes from the earlier, more sophisticated pieces. After they played the simple phrase, Tony, for the first time during the lesson, picked up the trumpet. He played that same phrase, but when he played it, it was not childish. It was exquisite. Each note was a rich, delightful sound. He gave the small phrase a delicate shape, revealing a flowing sense of dynamics that enabled us to hear meaning in those simple notes. The students’ attempts did not come close—the contrast was astounding. The fundamental difference between the true master and the talented students clearly occurred at a far more basic level than in the intricacies of complex pieces. Tony explained that mastering an efficient, nuanced performance of simple pieces allows one to play spectacularly difficult pieces with greater control and artistry. The lesson was simple. The master teacher suggested that the advanced students focus more of their time on practicing simple pieces intensely—learning to perform them with technical efficiency and beautiful elegance. Deep work on simple, basic ideas helps to build true virtuosity—not just in music but in everything. ==========

Galileo found that a ball rolling down an incline acquires just enough velocity to return it to the same vertical height on a second incline of any slope, and he learned to see that experimental situation as like the pendulum with a point-mass for a bob. Huyghens then solved the problem of the center of oscillation of a physical pendulum by imagining that the extended body of the latter was composed of Galilean point-pendula, the bonds between which could be instantaneously released at any point in the swing. After the bonds were released, the individual point-pendula would swing freely, but their collective center of gravity when each attained its highest point would, like that of Galileo's pendulum, rise only to the height from which the center of gravity of the extended pendulum had begun to fall. Finally, Daniel Bernoulli discovered how to make the flow of water from an orifice resemble Huyghens' pendulum. Determine the descent of the center of gravity of the water in tank and jet during an infinitesimal interval of time. Next imagine that each particle of water afterward moves separately upward to the maximum height attainable with the velocity acquired during that interval. The ascent of the center of gravity of the individual particles must then equal the descent of the center of gravity of the water in tank and jet. From that view of the problem the long-sought speed of efflux followed at once. That example should begin to make clear what I mean by learning from problems to see situations as like each other, as subjects for the application of the same scientific law or law-sketch. Simultaneously it should show why I refer to the consequential knowledge of nature acquired while learning the similarity relationship and thereafter embodied in a way of viewing physical situations rather than in rules or laws. The three problems in the example, all of them exemplars for eighteenth-century mechanicians, deploy only one law of nature. Known as the Principle of vis viva, it was usually stated as: "Actual descent equals potential ascent." Bernoulli's application of the law should suggest how consequential it was. Yet the verbal statement of the law, taken by itself, is virtually impotent. Present it to a contemporary student of physics, who knows the words and can do all these problems but now employs different means. Then imagine what the words, though all well known, can have said to a man who did not know even the problems. For him the generalization could begin to function only when he learned to recognize "actual descents" and "potential ascents" as ingredients of nature, and that is to learn something, prior to the law, about the situations that nature does and does not present. That sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means. Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together. TO borrow once more Michael Polanyi's useful phrase, what results from this process is "tacit knowledge" which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.

Does God expect us to be holy? In Leviticus 11:44, 45, God says “consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy.” In all of this, God is teaching His people to live antithetically. That is, He is using these clean and unclean distinctions to separate Israel from other idolatrous nations who have no such restrictions, and He is illustrating by these prescriptions that His people must learn to live His way. Through dietary laws and rituals, God is teaching them the reality of living His way in everything. They are being taught to obey God in every seemingly mundane area of life, so as to learn how crucial obedience is. Sacrifices, rituals, diet, and even clothing and cooking are all carefully ordered by God to teach them that they are to live differently from everyone else. This is to be an external illustration for the separation from sin in their hearts. Because the Lord is their God, they are to be utterly distinct. In v. 44, for the first time the statement “I am the LORD your God” is made as a reason for the required separation and holiness. After this verse, that phrase is mentioned about 50 more times in this book alone, along with the equally instructive claim, “I am holy.” Because God is holy and is their God, the people are to be holy in outward ceremonial behavior as an external expression of the greater necessity of heart holiness. The connection between ceremonial holiness carries over into personal holiness. The only motivation given for all these laws is to learn to be holy because God is holy. The holiness theme is central to Leviticus (see 10:3; 19:2; 20:7, 26; 21:6–8).

Our fathers were often away. But then sometimes, out of the blue, they’d be gone forever. Often away and gone forever: the two phrases marked the difference between having a living father and a dead one. It wasn’t a big difference, but it was big enough to make us cry when no one was looking. One

Actually,” Matthew said mildly, “the available figures indicate that as soon as soap is mass-produced at an affordable price, the market will increase approximately ten percent a year. People of all classes want to be clean, Mr. Mardling. The problem is that good quality soap has always been a luxury item and therefore difficult to obtain.” “Mass production,” Mardling mulled aloud, his lean face furrowed with thought. “There is something objectionable about the phrase…it seems to be a way of enabling the lower classes to imitate their betters.” Matthew glanced at the circle of men, noting that the top of Bowman’s head was turning red—never a good sign—and that Westcliff was holding his silence, his black eyes unreadable. “That’s exactly what it is, Mr. Mardling,” Matthew said gravely. “Mass production of items such as clothing and soap will give the poor a chance to live with the same standards of health and dignity as the rest of us.” “But how will one sort out who is who?” Mardling protested. Matthew shot him a questioning glance. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.” Llandrindon joined in the discussion. “I believe what Mardling is asking,” he said, “is how one will be able to tell the difference between a shopgirl and a well-to-do woman if they are both clean and similarly dressed. And if a gentleman is not able to tell what they are by their appearance, how is he to know how to treat them?” Stunned by the snobbery of the question, Matthew considered his reply carefully. “I’ve always thought all women should be treated with respect no matter what their station.” “Well said,” Westcliff said gruffly, as Llandrindon opened his mouth to argue. No one wished to contradict the earl, but Mardling pressed, “Westcliff, do you see nothing harmful in encouraging the poor to rise above their stations? In allowing them to pretend there is no difference between them and ourselves?” “The only harm I see,” Westcliff said quietly, “is in discouraging people who want to better themselves, out of fear that we will lose our perceived superiority.

Writing surrogate letters wasn’t quite so easily justified; there was something slightly but definitely dishonest about it. To get one placed, you had to sound like the real thing, but not so much that you discredited your own position or insulted the intelligence of the supporter whose name you were hoping to attach to it. You had to start the letter off with some sassy stock phrase or rhetorical question: “Representative So-and-so just doesn’t get it” or “Which constitution is Senator So-and-so reading?” Then you’d make your case without sounding like you knew too much about the topic. That’s where surrogate letters sometimes went wrong. They would refer to specific revenue numbers or to the names of subcommittees or explain the difference between house and senate versions of bills. Average people didn’t know these things, and if a surrogate letter used them, it sounded like what it was, and editors wouldn’t run them. I spent a day writing these wretched things. It wasn’t worth it unless you produced ten or fifteen; newspapers likely wouldn’t print a letter taking a certain view if they got only one, but if they got a handful they’d feel bound to run one or two. It was a mind-numbing exercise: each one had to sound clumsy but not stupid; each had to approach the question from a different angle; and none could use the same vocabulary. We sent them out to the ostensible authors, and over the next two weeks or so I would see my little creations pop up in a variety of newspapers. Sometimes a few words had been changed by the surrogates, but by and large they slapped their names on the letters and forwarded them to their hometown newspapers. I felt the whole exercise was pointless, but perhaps the letters did contribute in a small way to the sense that Knotts’s allegations had been grossly unfair and that the governor had acted properly. Had he? I thought so at the time, but enough time has passed that I can admit I don’t know. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute television special. They had no experience writing for the medium and quickly ran out of material, so they shifted their concept to a half-hour weekly show. When they submitted their script, most of the network executives didn’t like it or didn’t get it. One of the actors involved in the program described it as a “glorious mess.” After filming the pilot, it was time for an audience test. The one hundred viewers who were assembled in Los Angeles to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the show dismissed it as a dismal failure. One put it bluntly: “He’s just a loser, who’d want to watch this guy?” After about six hundred additional people were shown the pilot in four different cities, the summary report concluded: “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.” The performance was rated weak. The pilot episode squeaked onto the airwaves, and as expected, it wasn’t a hit. Between that and the negative audience tests, the show should have been toast. But one executive campaigned to have four more episodes made. They didn’t go live until nearly a year after the pilot, and again, they failed to gain a devoted following. With the clock winding down, the network ordered half a season as replacement for a canceled show, but by then one of the writers was ready to walk away: he didn’t have any more ideas. It’s a good thing he changed his mind. Over the next decade, the show dominated the Nielsen ratings and brought in over $1 billion in revenues. It became the most popular TV series in America, and TV Guide named it the greatest program of all time. If you’ve ever complained about a close talker, accused a partygoer of double-dipping a chip, uttered the disclaimer “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” or rejected someone by saying “No soup for you,” you’re using phrases coined on the show. Why did network executives have so little faith in Seinfeld? When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we’d all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for new ventures and products, 87 percent were completely unique. Our companies, communities, and countries don’t necessarily suffer from a shortage of novel ideas. They’re constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. The Segway was a false positive: it was forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss. Seinfeld was a false negative: it was expected to fail but ultimately flourished.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world,” E. B. White once wrote. “This makes it difficult to plan the day.” The Declaration of Independence promises Americans the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the quest for happiness, many of us choose to enjoy the world as it is. Originals embrace the uphill battle, striving to make the world what it could be. By struggling to improve life and liberty, they may temporarily give up some pleasure, putting their own happiness on the back burner. In the long run, though, they have the chance to create a better world. And that—to borrow a turn of phrase from psychologist Brian Little—brings a different kind of satisfaction. Becoming original is not the easiest path in the pursuit of happiness, but it leaves us perfectly poised for the happiness of pursuit.

The person who has learned to express a thought with entire exactness and idiomatic propriety in two languages; or where, from the want of analogy between the two languages, he finds this impracticable, to perceive the exact shade of difference between the two expressions; who can trace historically and logically the present meaning of a word from its original starting-point in reason and fact, and mark intelligently its gradual departures and their causes; who can perceive the exact difference between words and phrases nearly synonymous, and who can express that difference in terms clear and intelligible to others,—that person has already attained both a high degree of intellectual acumen himself, and an important means of producing such acumen in others.

If the other person is really another, at a certain stage I must be surprised, disoriented. If we are to meet not just through what we have in common but in what is different between us— which presupposes a transformation of myself and of the other as well—then our differences can no longer be opaque qualities. They must become meaning. In the perception of the other, this happens when the other organism, instead of "behaving" like me, engages with the things in my world in a style that is at first mysterious to me but which at least seems to me a coherent style because it responds to certain possibilities which fringed the things in my world. Similarly, when I am reading, there must be a certain moment where the author's intention escapes me, where he withdraws himself. Then I catch up from behind, fall into step, or else I turn over a few pages and, a bit later, a happy phrase brings me back and leads me to the core of the new signification, and I find access to it through one of its "aspects" which was already part of my experience. Rationality, or the agreement of minds, does not require that we all reach the same idea by the same road, or that significations be enclosed in definitions. It requires only that every experience contain points of catch for all other ideas and that "Ideas" have a configuration. This double requirement is the postulation of a world.

I believe that what the vast majority of the masses call life is just fiction. A therapist's work ends up being trying to bring them into nonfiction. Although I feel that many are just replacing a novel by another. Too many people tell me: 'Why do you talk like you know the truth? There is no truth'. It is as if they felt that I'm destroying their inner world by being direct. They feel the need to project a defense mechanism to protect it. Another common phrase is: 'You don't know me better than I know myself'. This one is also interesting. Because it is as if the person was saying: 'You don't know my novel better than I do because I am the author of it.’ Life pretty much follows the same principles — gravity, air, water, fire, weight, hight; all of which is represented in maths, physics, and other sciences. But most people these days consider a personal attack when you make them observe something that may touch their inner world. It's the oversensitivity paradox in which we live today, for people want to feel more alive but are afraid to live at the same time. Allegorically speaking, they need to float like a bubble of steel. And many times they are perfectly fine in discussing others' issues until those issues are projected at them for self-analysis. Quite often, we are not really talking to a human being, but to his alter-ego. There's not much difference between the real self and the alternate version of that self for such person. And how ironic when both the therapist and the patient play the same game from different perspectives. This is why people don't want the truth anymore, but an alternate version of reality where they can merge themselves as if they were merely a chemical solution melting with another. They are too afraid of the truth because they have often been hurt when trying to find it. However, the concept of truth merges with the personality of the individual. And that is why having a personality is now an outdated concept, often falling into the realm of the abstract — Everything is relative, everything is fine, and everyone is everything you can decide for yourself. So why live if life has no meaning? Well, life does have a meaning, but won't be found by running away from it.

There is a big difference between phrases "I must do it" and "I want to do it" when it comes to your own life!

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase “same-sex marriage” for the term “marriage equality.” The phrase is ordinarily employed to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That’s not what traditional marriage was.

I leave my hotel around two. Without thinking, I go in the direction of the Place du Vieux Marché. It is a truly vast square, bordered entirely by cafés, restaurants and luxury shops. It's here that Joan of Arc was burnt more than five hundred years ago. To commemorate the event they've piled up a load of weirdly curved concrete slabs, half stuck in the ground, which turn out on closer inspection to be a church. There are also embryonic lawns, flowerbeds, and some ramps which seem destined for lovers of skateboarding - unless it be for the cars of the disabled, it's hard to tell. But the complexity of the place does not end here: there are also shops in the middle of the square, under a sort of concrete rotunda, as well as an edifice which looks like a bus station. I settle myself on one of the concrete slabs, determined to get to the bottom of things. It seems highly likely that this square is the heart, the central nucleus of the town. Just what game is being played here exactly? I observe right away that people generally go around in bands, or in little groups of between two and six individuals. No one group is exactly the same as another, it appears to me. Obviously they resemble each other, they resemble each other enormously, but this resemblance could not be called being the same. It's as if they'd elected to embody the antagonism which necessarily goes with any kind of individuation by adopting slightly different behavior patterns, ways of moving around, formulas for regrouping. Next I notice that all these people seem satisfied with themselves and the world; it's astonishing, even a little frightening. They quietly saunter around, this one displaying a quizzical smile, that one a moronic look. Some of the youngsters are dressed in leather jackets with slogans borrowed from the more primitive kind of hard rock; you can read phrases on their backs like Kill them all! or Fuck and destroy! ; but all commune in the certainty of passing an agreeable afternoon devoted primarily to consumerism, and thus to contributing to the consolidation of their being. I note, lastly, that I feel different from them, without however being able to define the nature of this difference.

The way this question was phrased by the leading thinkers of the time was like this: ‘Where is the Way?’ The question of the Way (in Chinese ‘Dao’) is the single most important question that shaped Chinese religious civilization. It is important to appreciate how different this question is from the questions that have shaped Western civilization, namely the questions generated in classical Greek philosophy and Semitic religion. The questions that arose in Greek philosophy, such as ‘What is truth?’ or ‘What is goodness?’ suggest that wisdom consists in understanding fundamental abstract categories or first principles, which can then be applied to specific situations. From these abstract categories emerged the great Western disciplines of logic, metaphysics, law and science. The questions that arose in Semitic religions, such as ‘How may I obey the will of the creator?’ led to a religious life centred on the relationship between one god and a community of believers founded upon commandments and ethical precepts. When approaching Daoism, it is important to understand that Daoism is shaped neither by the categories of logical philosophy nor by the categories of belief in a monotheistic god who created the world out of nothing.

Buffett said there is a bias toward inflating the numbers in U.S. accounting. As Munger so delicately phrased it, “The difference between 12% and 13% is the corruption in U.S. accounting . . . the moral and intellectual failing of the U.S. accounting system.

For example, the difference between Pierre believes he is intelligent and He believes Pierre is intelligent is due to what are called relations of “command”: co-reference is impossible if the pronoun is located “higher” in the phrase structure than its nonpronominal antecedent. Now in the second case Pierre is found in a subordinated position, thus “lower” than he, so that they cannot be co-referential in the relevant sense.

There is an old Yiddish phrase I find apropos—but not by choice: “Man plans, God laughs.” I am a prime example. My life was pretty much laid out for me. I was a basketball star my entire childhood, destined to be an NBA player for the Boston Celtics. But in my very first preseason game, Big Burt Wesson slammed into me and ruined my knee. I tried gamely to come back, but there is a big difference between gamely and effectively. My career was over before I hit the parquet floor. I

knew he’d spoken the truth. It would be okay because Mr. Perfect would make it okay. The guy was responsible, dependable, a stand-up fellow. Hadn’t she rubbed it in, all the differences between Greg and Brody? Her boyfriend wouldn’t let her down. Guys like Greg Bannister had invented the phrase “do the right thing” just for this particular situation. In no time at all Brody’s office mom would be installed in whatever passed for suburban splendor in Alaska—a cozy split-level igloo perhaps, with a two-dogsled garage and a plastic flamingo out front. On the other side of the world, practically. Reflexively Brody pulled her closer. “I take it you haven’t done a pregnancy test yet.” She shook her head. “I want to wait until... well, I just want to wait.” “No more waiting. We’ll pick up one of those drugstore kits.” He pulled her up off the bench. “No.” “What do you mean, no? You’ve gotta find out.” “I will,” she said, “when I’m ready.” “Well, I’m ready now. Is there a pharmacy in this place?” He shooed away her hands when she tried to lift a bag, and grabbed the handles of all seven himself. They were awkward to carry and much too heavy for a mother-to-be, filled with a wrought-iron magazine rack, black marble bookends, and other household furnishings that reflected the taste of the

Whenever a noise exceeds our processing abilities—we can’t decipher all the different sound waves hitting our hair cells— the mind . . . stops trying to understand the individual notes and seeks instead to understand the relationships between the notes. The human auditory cortex pulls off this feat by using it's short- term memory for sound (in the left posterior hemisphere) to uncover patterns at the large level of the phrase, motif, and movement. This new approximation lets us extract order from all those notes haphazardly ͒flying through space, and the brain is obsessed with order . . . It is this psychological instinct—this desperate neuronal search for a pattern, any pattern, that is the source of music . . . We continually abstract on our own inputs, inventing patterns in order to keep pace with the onrush of noise. And once the brain ͒finds a pattern, it immediately starts to make predictions . . . It projects imaginary order into the future . . . The structure of music reflects the human brain’s penchant for patterns . . . But before a pattern can be desired by the brain, that pattern must play hard to get

I was thinking about you. About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what you do." "What?" For a moment Will was completely bewildered. "Tough in your head", "Do what you do"… These were not phrases that anyone used about him too often. What the fuck was it he’d told Rachel he did? Work in a coalmine? Teach young offenders? But then he remembered he’d never actually told Rachel any lies, and his bewilderment took a different shape. "What do I do?" "Nothing." That’s what Will thought he did. "So how come I have to be tough to do that?" "Because… most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and despair, and you don’t seem a very desperate person.

First, Cultural Marxism and Classical Marxism are two different things. Karl Marx was an economist. Classical Marxism is an economic system. You have the bourgeoisie and the proletariat along with the familiar phrase, “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” The goal was to produce the uprising of the masses to overthrow capitalism. Marx saw capitalism as oppressing the masses. He also saw religion as the opiate of the masses that allowed them to be oppressed by capitalism. He was rabidly atheistic. Most Christians would not identify with Marxism. That in part is why it is difficult to talk about Cultural Marxism. So we must mark the difference between the two.

However you translate this phrase, the meaning is obvious: sin and wickedness will have run their course and finally, after thousands of years, reached an end point. That means there will be no more capacity to be sensitive to sin. Mankind’s conscience will have been seared—yes, that is how evil the world will be. At that point, when sin has reached its maximum, the Anti-Messiah will show up and appear to save the day. He will come when people on earth have become so saturated with darkness and when evil is so abundant—when there’s such a demonic stronghold and Satan has such reign on the earth—mankind will no longer be able to tell the difference between right and wrong. They will be incapable of detecting such darkness in a global leader because the entire world—including themselves—will be so darkened by sin. In the previous chapter we looked at past examples of when the world had grown this dark. In Noah’s time the world was so filled with violence that it corrupted the planet. In Lot’s time Sodom and Gomorrah were so overrun by sexual immorality that the cities’ men threatened to kill Lot if he prevented them from having sex with the angels visiting him. In our time more people are enslaved than ever in history, and each year as many unborn babies are murdered as American soldiers have been killed in all wars combined.5 We celebrate our immorality by marketing it as entertainment, and we even bless such immorality in our churches when we approve of homosexuality

precisely because each state was sovereign, and precisely because a strong union was necessary if states were to survive and thrive, a strong majority of these sovereign states should be free to reunite in a different way. Rather than creating another rope of sand—another mere treaty or league or confederation—the states should combine to form a new continental people under a new continental Constitution. In that new Constitution, each state could no longer be fully “sovereign,” as it had been between 1776 and 1787. The consenting states would need to merge into a new, larger, Westphalian nation-state, much as the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England had merged eighty years earlier to form—this was the key phrase in 1707—“an entire and perfect union.”5 Scotland and England had entered this merger for geostrategic reasons: the British snake would be easier to defend if not divided in two. Four score years later, America would need to do something similar for similar reasons.

You got this.” I turn just before I exit the booth, connecting our eyes. “For me. Sing for me.” I hear the difference immediately. I don’t know if it’s Amber’s miracle tea that has saved more than one voice on a rough night, or if it was our pep talk, but Kai nails it. She measures her breathing, every phrase spaced as it should be. Every note, properly supported. And emotion . . . God, as jaded as I am, it takes a lot for me to get goosebumps, but my goosebumps have goosebumps when she sings the lyrics this time. I don’t stop her once. I’m afraid to, scared I’ll ruin something magnificent by meddling with it. And when I told her to sing for me, I didn’t expect her to sing to me, but she does, stretching a live wire between her eyes and mine. I’m not only transfixed, but also painfully aroused by the whole thing. It’s so incredibly personal to have my words in her mouth. It’s almost an erotic experience to see something that came from my mind, from my heart, dwelling inside of her. I scoot under the board as far as I can so these guys can’t tease me about getting a hard on for a second verse. My synesthesia is in overdrive. I close my eyes, trapping all the colors the music shows me beneath my eyelids, not sharing them with anyone. Bright gold mixed with blue and green, a musical paisley splashed across the palette of my mind, splashed across my senses.

Alternative facts” was not a phrase concocted to justify or whitewash a lie—it was a declaration that the new administration reserved the right to lie. Conway spoke to Todd from the position of power, threatening him from the first with the prospect of losing access. The two of them were having two different conversations: Todd was trying to cover a major news story, which was that the new White House press secretary had lied to the public; Conway was setting the new terms of the conversation between the administration and the media.

In a professional software engineering environment, criticism is almost never personal - it’s usually just part of the process of making a better project. The trick is to make sure you (and those around you) understand the difference between a constructive criticism of someone’s creative output and a flat-out assault against someone’s character. The latter is useless - it’s petty and nearly impossible to act on. The former can (and should!) be helpful and give guidance on how to improve. And, most important, it’s imbued with respect: the person giving the constructive criticism genuinely cares about the other person and wants them to improve themselves or their work. Learn to respect your peers and give constructive criticism politely. If you truly respect someone, you’ll be motivated to choose tactful, helpful phrasing—a skill acquired with much practice.

When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state. However, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.” Likewise, suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it. It is the idea of pleasure that we chase. We seek the image of pleasure that we generate in our minds. At the time of action, we do not know what it will be like to attain that image (or even if it will satisfy us). The feeling of satisfaction only comes afterward. This is what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl meant when he said that happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action. Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a cue, a bit of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what you observe, then you are at peace. Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You’re simply observing and existing. With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why you are acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action—even when friction is high. Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia…to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy…good writing stops.

Arbitrage,” in the usual sense, means to make money by taking advantage of differences in the price of something between different markets. It is spatial, in other words, and hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what is going on simultaneously in different places. Microsoft is making money by taking advantage of differences in the price of technology in different times. Temporal arbitrage, if I may coin a phrase, hinges on the arbitrageur knowing what technologies people will pay money for next year, and how soon afterwards those same technologies will become free.

Investment bankers are conservative, cultured, slow-moving men (and a few women) who advise corporate executives about which country clubs they should join; their favorite phrase is, “How extremely interesting.” Salesmen and traders are wild, cunning, aboriginal creatures who advise money managers about deceiving their bosses and finding new strip bars; their favorite phrase is, “Fuck you.” Investment bankers eat fruit. Salesmen and traders eat meat, preferably fried meat. By law, there is a barrier—called a “Chinese Wall”—between the two sides that prevents them from discussing certain business issues. In reality, the Chinese Wall is superfluous; the two sides are located on different floors and are perfectly happy to speak to each other only once a year, when they meet to argue about bonuses. Those bonus confrontations can be like the meeting of matter and antimatter.

Writer and director Aislinn Clarke doesn’t use the phrase elevated horror. But she has suggested that a difference does exist between something being “scary” and true, lingering horror. The creation of horror depends on upending convention and, she suggests, should “punch up” against those in power rather than “merely making monsters of those at the bottom

People acted how they looked like. The reactions of the world to one’s appearance were an invisible estimation of one’s perception of themselves. The beautiful and the hideous each got treated a certain way—experiencing wildly different kinds of years. The beautiful were told phrases the hideous never heard. The beautiful struggled more with envy, while the hideous spent more time practicing courage, for things never easily bent their way. Every person accepted how they were treated and sank into that role. It showed in the way they sat. How their heads turn. When they spoke. If they spoke. Mannerisms were then not a matter of individual personality, but collective decree. Andrei would notice in a stranger all the things their body did, memorize them, and project them imaginarily on a different person. The imagined transference would never work! It seemed odd, like a miscalculation, to visualize a gorgeous Adonis walk with his head down and fidgety fingers the way a shy man did. There was undeniably a pattern of traits between strangers, courtesy of the strangers they meet.

The researchers also identified which words or phrases best differentiated between repayers and defaulters. Repayers were more likely to use words and phrases related to their financial situation (e.g., “interest” and “tax”) or improvements in financial ability (e.g., “graduate” and “promote”). They also used words and phrases that indicated their financial literacy (e.g., “reinvest” and “minimum payment”) and were more likely to discuss topics such as employment and school, interest rate reductions, and monthly payments. Defaulters, on the other hand, used distinctly different language. They were more likely to mention words or phrases related to financial hardships (e.g., “payday loan” or “refinance”), for example, or hardship more generally (e.g., “stress” or “divorce”), as well as words and phrases that tried to explain their situation (e.g., “explain why”) or discuss their work state (e.g., “hard work” or “worker”). Similarly, they were more likely to plead for help (e.g., “need help” or “please help”) or touch on religion. In fact, while people who used the word “reinvest” were almost 5 times more likely to repay their loan in full, those who used the word “God” were almost 2 times more likely to default.

Tracking data becomes more detailed, analyses become further-reaching, and data is retained for a long time in order to build up detailed profiles of each person for marketing purposes. Now the relationship between the company and the user whose data is being collected starts looking quite different. The user is given a free service and is coaxed into engaging with it as much as possible. The tracking of the user serves not primarily that individual, but rather the needs of the advertisers who are funding the service. I think this relationship can be appropriately described with a word that has more sinister connotations: surveillance. Surveillance As a thought experiment, try replacing the word data with surveillance, and observe if common phrases still sound so good [93]. How about this: “In our surveillance-driven organization we collect real-time surveillance streams and store them in our surveillance warehouse. Our surveillance scientists use advanced analytics and surveillance processing in order to derive new insights.” This thought experiment is unusually polemic for this book, Designing Surveillance-Intensive Applications, but I think that strong words are needed to emphasize this point. In our attempts to make software “eat the world” [94], we have built the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure the world has ever seen. Rushing toward an Internet of Things, we are rapidly approaching a world in which every inhabited space contains at least one internet-connected microphone, in the form of smartphones, smart TVs, voice-controlled assistant devices, baby monitors, and even children’s toys that use cloud-based speech recognition. Many of these devices have a terrible security record [95]. Even the most totalitarian and repressive regimes could only dream of putting a microphone in every room and forcing every person to constantly carry a device capable of tracking their location and movements. Yet we apparently voluntarily, even enthusiastically, throw ourselves into this world of total surveillance. The difference is just that the data is being collected by corporations rather than government agencies [96].

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

make them progress more smoothly. As you write, be sure that the transitions between one idea and another are clear. If you move from one idea to another too abruptly, the reader may miss the connection between them and lose your train of thought. Pay particular attention to the transitions from one paragraph to another. Often, you’ll need to write transition sentences that explicitly lead the reader from one paragraph to the next. Clarity Perhaps the fundamental requirement of scientific writing is clarity. Unlike some forms of fiction in which vagueness enhances the reader’s experience, the goal of scientific writing is to communicate information. It is essential, then, that the information is conveyed in a clear, articulate, and unclouded manner. This is a very difficult task, however. You don’t have to read many articles published in scientific journals to know that not all scientific writers express themselves clearly. Often writers find it difficult to step outside themselves and imagine how readers will interpret their words. Even so, clarity must be a writer’s first and foremost goal. Two primary factors contribute to the clarity of one’s writing: sentence construction and word choice. SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION. The best way to enhance the clarity of your writing is to pay close attention to how you construct your sentences; awkwardly constructed sentences distract and confuse the reader. First, state your ideas in the most explicit and straightforward manner possible. One way to do this is to avoid the passive voice. For example, compare the following sentences: The participants were told by the experimenter to press the button when they were finished (passive voice). The experimenter told the participants to press the button when they finished (active voice). I think you can see that the second sentence, which is written in the active voice, is the better of the two. Second, avoid overly complicated sentences. Be economical in the phrases you use. For example, the sentence, “There were several different participants who had not previously been told what their IQ scores were,” is terribly convoluted. It can be streamlined to, “Several participants did not know their IQ scores.” (In a moment, I’ll share with you one method I use to identify wordy and awkwardly constructed sentences in my own writing.) WORD CHOICE. A second way to enhance the clarity of one’s writing is to choose one’s words carefully. Choose words that convey precisely the idea you wish to express. “Say what you mean and mean what you say” is the scientific writer’s dictum. In everyday language, we often use words in ways that are discrepant from their dictionary definition. For example, we tend to use theory and hypothesis interchangeably in everyday language, but they mean different things to researchers. Similarly, people talk informally about seeing a therapist or counselor, but psychologists draw a distinction between therapists and counselors. Can you identify the problem in this

Elia often used the phrase “doing time.” I saw what he meant by it. Time in prison isn’t celebrated, commemorated, or even lived in, but something done with your hands, a repetitive chore, like doing laundry or shelving books. There’s a difference between being in prison and doing time. Elia was, I now saw, making masterful work of that task.