Feels The Intangible Quotes

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The POSITIVE THINKER sees the INVISIBLE, feels the INTANGIBLE, and achieves the IMPOSSIBLE.
Winston S. Churchill (My Early Life, 1874-1904)
He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crowd)
Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is. When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology. It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again.
David Levithan (Every Day (Every Day, #1))
Names are illusions,” he growled. “Nonsensical labels seized upon by people to make them feel better about the intangibility of their puny existences. I am this. I am that,” he mocked. “I came from so and so. Ergo I am … whatever the blah-blah you want to claim. Bloody hell, spare me.
Karen Marie Moning (Dreamfever (Fever, #4))
Kästner was one reason I called my book barge the Literary Apothecary,” said Perdu. “I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.
Nina George (The Little Paris Bookshop)
Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.
Mira Bartok (The Memory Palace)
Feelings are intangible,” he said. “You can’t see them, can’t touch them. You can hurt and no one would know. But physical pain is real. You can see blood and broken bones. It’s simple in a way feelings are not, and cutting makes the abstract pain of feelings substantial.
Shaun David Hutchinson (At the Edge of the Universe)
Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They're a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting "Hey!" in time to that damned song—they're all charged with magic. My magic comes from the same places. And maybe from darker places than that. Fear is an emotion, too. So is rage. So is lust. And madness. I'm not a particularly good person. I'm no Charles Manson or anything, but I'm not going to be up for canonization either. Though in the past, I think maybe I was a better person than I am today. In the past I hadn't seen so many people hurt and killed and terrorized by the same kind of power that damn well should have been making the world a nicer place, or at the least staying the hell away from it. I hadn't made so many mistakes back then, so many shortsighted decisions, some of which had cost people their lives. I had been sure of myself. I had been whole.
Jim Butcher (Dead Beat (The Dresden Files, #7))
A positive attitude is most easily arrived at through a deliberate and rational analysis of what’s required to manifest unwavering positive thought patterns. First, reflect on the actual, present condition of your mind. In other words, is the mind positive or not? We’ve all met individuals who perceive themselves as positive people but don’t appear as such. Since the mind is both invisible and intangible, it’s therefore easier to see the accurate characteristics of the mind through a person’s words, deeds, and posture. For example, if we say, “It’s absolutely freezing today! I’ll probably catch a cold before the end of the day!” then our words expose a negative attitude. But if we say, “The temperature is very cold” (a simple statement of fact), then our expressions, and therefore attitude, are not negative. Sustaining an alert state in which self-awareness becomes possible gives us a chance to discover the origins of negativity. In doing so, we also have an opportunity to arrive at a state of positiveness, so that our words and deeds are also positive, making others feel comfortable, cheerful, and inspired.
H.E. Davey
The Formless Way We look at it, and do not see it; it is invisible. We listen to it, and do not hear it; it is inaudible. We touch it, and do not feel it; it is intangible. These three elude our inquiries, and hence merge into one. Not by its rising, is it bright, nor by its sinking, is it dark. Infinite and eternal, it cannot be defined. It returns to nothingness. This is the form of the formless, being in non-being. It is nebulous and elusive. Meet it, and you do not see its beginning. Follow it, and you do not see its end. Stay with the ancient Way in order to master what is present. Knowing the primeval beginning is the essence of the Way.
Lao Tzu
And I learn that facing your greatest fear is liberating. You no longer have to worry about it, because it has already happened. And you have survived. I want to face some more fears, it feels so freaking liberating. I want to just jump off the freaking Brooklyn Bridge.
Wendy Wunder (The Museum of Intangible Things)
I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.
António R. Damásio (Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain)
She once told me how she could feel the missing part of her arm- how she sometimes experienced the sensation of a hand- that it is possible to feel something without its physical presence. Perhaps love is like this and we are all limbs of one giant intangible body.
Simon Van Booy (The Secret Lives of People in Love)
Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.
Helen Keller
Empty Spaces I wanted to feel less. To not be burdened by emotion, To not feel sadness, To not know loss. I envied the inanimate, The trees that stand proudly in winter, Not missing their leaves. I wanted to be weightless, To not experience limitation. I didn’t want time to pass, The blur of days, months, years. It moved too quickly, I wanted to grasp on, Hold it. It eluded me, Intangible, Like light. I wanted to preserve life before you were gone. I didn’t want to know grief. But the pain kept me connected. It meant that I loved you, It meant that I would always be a little broken, It meant that our love filled all of the empty spaces. It meant that you would be with me... forever.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
Love is an intangible thing. When you truly love, you learn that what you feel is more significant than anything that you can see. Love has more power than any weapon. It is more life giving than food or medicine. Sometimes love lasts forever and sometimes it lasts just long enough to teach you what you need to learn.
Kate McGahan
She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named—when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.
Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)
When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
Ernest Shackleton (South: The last Antarctic expedition of Shackleton and the Endurance (Adlard Coles Maritime Classics))
For me, art is the desire to preserve the intangible feeling of such a moment, hidden in all the littlest details, and then to communicate that to others.
Rachel Hartman (Seraphina (Seraphina, #1))
Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to.... How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.
Alain de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work)
Seekers inevitably want to get a better handle on life; we want to figure things out. We know intuitively that the events of our lives are not always arbitrary. We feel connected, however intangibly. We know that it is in our higher self-interest to unravel the mysteries in our own lives. There must be a higher purpose and greater meaning. As we become more and more spiritually evolved, we become more determined to find wisdom and reach a deeper understanding of our lives and our paths.
Surya Das (Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be: Lessons on Change, Loss, and Spiritual Transformation)
He felt the tremble . . . Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasn’t she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him.
Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)
I'm looking for a miracle, I expect the impossible, I feel the intangible, I see the invisible!
D.C. Thomson & Company Limited
No one can understand exactly what grief feels like for another person, because depending on your relationship to the deceased, you feel your grief differently from everyone else on the planet." -Hannah
Wendy Wunder (The Museum of Intangible Things)
And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building. I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
When I thought of myself, of the feelings I had, of the things I thought I understood so well, I imagined myself somehow abstractly, because that other visual recollection was painful and unpleasant for me. No sooner would I call to mind my physical appearance than the finest, most lyrical, wonderful visions would vanish in an instant - so monstrous was its disparity with the intangible, glittering world that existed in my imagination. It seemed to me that there could be no greater contrast than that between my inner life and my outward appearance; sometimes I even imagined that I was trapped in someone else's strange, almost hateful body.
Gaito Gazdanov (Het fantoom van Alexander Wolf)
Still remember what you said "The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible ;) #Cerialah
Nuci Priatni
The thought of losing him now makes me feel like I can’t breathe. And there is this part of him that seems intangible to me, a part that I will never be able to grasp in my hands. It is like a butterfly flitting away in the breeze, so beautiful but I will never catch it.
Raine Anthony (Phoenix)
He smiles at me, feeling the same elation I am, I can tell. I can tell because the feeling hangs between us like a rope. When you share a feeling with someone it takes on matter and weight. Even if you're the only ones who can sense it, it becomes a tangible thing with properties like shape and weight and heat." -Hannah
Wendy Wunder (The Museum of Intangible Things)
When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wavelength novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear! ("Unseen - Unfeared")
Francis Stevens (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps)
This human need for mysticism – surrender to an unknown truth, union – stands at the helm of all romantic feeling. It is, in essence, the same intimacy known in a mother’s arms; in those who are deprived of the experience, the need freezes and, distorted, it can rent a life. All addiction has as its foundation skewed yearning for the same transcendence. For me, the spell of the material was broken by my brother’s death; after his suicide, all I wanted was the renewal of my connection to the intangible.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke (Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love)
We fail to build slack because we focus on what must be done now and do not think enough about all the things that can arise in the future. The present is imminently clear whereas future contingences are less pressing and harder to imagine. When the intangible future comes face to face with the palpable present, slack feels like a luxury.
Sendhil Mullainathan (Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much)
Uh, hi," she said, lifting a hand in greeting. "Hi yourself," Liam said, feeling remarkably calm, under the circumstances. "Did you just walk out of that closet?" He looked her over, taking in her unusual attire, jewels, sword, and all. She looked exotic, stunningly beautiful, and in some intangible way, more herself than he'd ever seen her. "Nice outfit. Special occasion?" He was fairly certain she hadn't just come from a costume ball. Unless it was one that involved some kind of giant pumpkin and a fairy godmother.
Deborah Blake (Wickedly Dangerous (Baba Yaga, #1))
The art of the great historic civilizations never impress us as much as an Eskimo harpoon or a mask from the South Pacific. The contact is physical, and the feeling we experience is very much like acute anxiety. Inner or outer space, the world below or beyond, becomes a great weight pressing down upon us. Each work is a solid block of time, time standing still, time more massive than a mountain, despite the fact that it is as intangible as air or thought. The handiwork of primitive peoples reveals the time before time.
Octavio Paz
Art expresses complex intangible feelings we can't explain in any other way. Art is everywhere, art is love; love is God; God is art. They're one and the same.
J. Matthew Nespoli
Why were you cutting yourself?" He touched his arm absently, ran his finger over one of the scabs. "Feelings are intangible. You can't see them, can't touch them. You can hurt and no one would know. But physical pain is real. You can see blood and broken bones. It's simple in a way feelings are not, and cutting makes the abstract pain of feelings substantial.
Shaun David Hutchinson (At the Edge of the Universe)
Who you affect is more powerful than who you are at any given moment. Nothing is as enduring as a great memory. In the end, its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, and feelings that last. Stone cracks. Wood rots. Skin dies. But great thoughts, beautiful experiences, and inspiring legends… they live forever. If you can change the way people think and feel, the way they see themselves, and the way they interpret the world, it means you can change the way they live their lives, and how they affect others. That is, by far, the longest lasting thing you can create.
John Geiger
They were interesting things, stars. Like clouds, you could see them and could not deny their existence. Yet you couldn’t touch them, hold them, or own them. You couldn’t feel them. Love was somewhat the opposite, he pondered. It can’t be seen but it can be felt. It was intangible, like the stars and the clouds, like the heavens and destiny. Yet it existed, he knew this to be true.
Paige Elwood (The City of Love: A Medieval Time Travel Romance (Eternity Rings))
But the world now seemed changed. He went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that had not been his in the days before the battle. He had looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And because of all this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever menacing.
Jack London (White Fang)
The tangible and factual components of reality along with the intangible strands of memory and imagination constitute the framework that houses our vital life force. A person is likewise composed of contradictory and complementary forces of pain and pleasure, darkness and lightness, and clashing and harmonizing bands of thoughts and feelings. The web and root of all persons consists of both the expressible and the unsayable. Who has not held imaginary conversations with gods, devils, and spirits? Persons whom enthusiastically cultivate an inner life, ardently experience the quick of nature, and willingly immerse themselves in all aspects of everyday living will experience renewal. Analogous to the heat source of fire, we need the spark of desire to fuel our hearts and the spirit of the breeze to spread our heart songs.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
My heart sometimes feels like it will burst for them both. The love has a strange fleeting intangibility about it and seems always to disappear and be converted into the past even before I have properly grasped it.
Ben Hatch (Are We Nearly There Yet?: A Family's 8000-Mile Car Journey Around Britain)
He realised he and his mother were alone. Her hand trembled. He felt the tremble. Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasn’t she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace? That groaning out of darkness? That crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assaults of midnights? Doubts flushed him.
Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)
I fancy myself a writer. And writing, in its most eloquent manner, since time became a concept indoctrinated by true troglodytes, tickles my dong; it throttles my flume; it punts my epididymus to horizons fantastical. And not just writing bullshit; a few seemingly overused words to describe the belched bark of a goddamn sequoia, but actually writing. Writing to me is not about thinking, it's not about personality traits or hell, even the conveyance of feelings. Writing is like breathing to me. I have to do it. I have to inhale it and exhale it, no matter what comes in and likewise what comes out. Traversing the slopes of the soul, scratching that all but intangible itch, I find solace in the abyss of my complacency. It‟s not for recognition, not for income or monetary satisfaction. None of that really matters to me. The only thing that matters to me is finding the way to transfer a thought to paper; a heartbeat to the surface; a blink and a gasp to submissively correspond with the outcry of tangible suspense.
Dave Matthes
So, consider this. Today he’s sober, no traces of chemicals caught in his bloodstream, no bullet-blown high patching synthetic samples over the melody of his mind. Does that make this real or a side-effect of the comedown? Falling in love feels no-parachute sorts of terrifying, the ground rushing up too hard and too fast. If love is intangible, hypothetical, subjective and experienced on a uniquely individual basis, how can Jaxon ever truly know if that’s the way he’s feeling? But then, realistically, how can he know that it’s not?
Reanna Pryce (Lines (Record Label Love, #1))
What is this thing of intangible substance that wreaks consequential havoc on our lives? What is this sensitive thread that runs through heart and mind, and when given the slightest tremor grasps hold of all sanity, dragging the afflicted down to insufferable depths or flinging him weightless to euphoric heights? What is this magic we would deem imagination, fantasy, or pretend if not for the evidence of power manifest by human consequences? Effortlessly controlling us, it affects the infected in an instant. It takes but one word, one thought, one act to become immersed. To stop it is hopeless. To stifle it, demanding. To think to master it is both improbable and pretentious. What is this invisible hand that blinds our eyes and reigns hearts with a string? It is nature's drug and poison we call emotion.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
She tells me she draws and paints and stitches. She tells me that drawing and painting and stitching are just doing, that what makes something art is the intention behind it. If the intention is to communicate some intangible feeling or slippery truth that resists capture by words, then it is art
Sophie White (Where I End)
Tangible makes us feel better. Tangible helps us predict a good ROI, but brand loyalty, relationships, and other key foundations of community are inherently intangible but almost incalculably invaluable. We can conduct surveys and look at indicators like all of those we’ve just listed, but as it stands, there is no perfect measure .
Mary Thengvall (The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success)
THE TEN CHARACTERISTICS OF DIFFERENCE THINKERS They practice empathy because they care enough to make an impact. They have a clear sense of the change they want to make in the world. They are impatient about tactics and endlessly patient about implementing their strategy. They ask the right questions, and that means that they talk more than twice as much as they listen, because talking takes guts. Mostly, they ignore those who offer empty criticism. They watch what people do and don’t just believe what people tell them. They innovate and create at the edges, ignoring the market of everyone. They make products for their customers, instead of trying to find customers for their products. They understand that they need to give people a story to tell—a ‘you’ve gotta see this’ moment. They work hard to change how people feel, by creating intangible value that gives them an emotional point of difference. They understand that trust is their second-most valuable asset. The first is the willingness to be wrong for the right reason.
Bernadette Jiwa (Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing)
She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named - when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion towards the people who invented the concept of "telling time." How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.
Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)
Even in death, some souls leave an intangible mark on the world. It is impossible not to feel them there, feel their presence just beyond the veil that separates the living from those already risen into the arms of the Lifegiver. Though I pray the loved ones I’ve lost have long since returned to the world in Laor’s infinite circle of rebirth, I cannot help but feel that some part of each of them remains yet with me, suspended between this old life I was a part of and the new one they must now enjoy. It is painful to feel that presence and the constant reminder it bears to mind, and yet it is simultaneously wondrously consoling to know that they are—even in some small way—still there to watch over and guide me…” —
Bryce O'Connor (Winter's King (The Wings of War, #3))
Round-bottomed, soft-bellied, irrational, magical, too caring, too carefree, proudly demanding, unfettered by dependence, sexually unashamed, hairy, hungry, unpredictable, silently present, intangibly distant, ceaselessly gossipy, alarmingly uninhibited, seething with potential, incomprehensible, altogether unfathomable, dangerous and deliciously powerful, she is the hag. She bleeds. She laughs so hard her belly shakes, she snorts and farts. She is the dark side of woman, the inside, the raw side beneath the surface skin we are taught so well to cleanse and tone and remedy with paint. She is the woman whose self-expression is not quite under control. Mysterious, intuitive, emotional, curvaceous, lustful, needy, selfish, natural and free, she is the me we long to - but know we shouldn’t - reveal. Feeling
Emma Restall Orr (Kissing the Hag: The Dark Goddess and the Unacceptable Nature of Woman)
Samuel had strengthened the blood-tie between them, but no more than this. They would cherish each other in sickness and in health, walk through life sharing its pleasures and its sorrows, sleep side by side at night in the little room above the porch, grow old and frail, resting at last, not parted, in Lanoc Churchyard—but from the beginning to the end they would have no knowledge of one another. Janet’s feeling for Samuel ran parallel to her feeling for Thomas. The one was her husband, the other was her child. Samuel depended on her for care and for comfort until he should grow old enough to look after himself. She washed him and dressed him, seated him beside her in his high chair at table and fed him, helped him with his first steps and his first words, gave him all the tenderness and the affection he demanded from her. She gave to both Thomas and Samuel her natural spontaneity of feeling and a great simplicity of heart; but the spirit of Janet was free and unfettered, waiting to rise from its self-enforced seclusion to mingle with intangible things, like the wind, the sea, and the skies, hand in hand with the one for whom she waited. Then she, too, would become part of these things forever, abstract and immortal. Because
Daphne du Maurier (The Loving Spirit)
Your life is made up of the Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual parts that make up every human being—or P.I.E.S. for short. The Physical includes things like your body, health, and energy. The Intellectual incorporates your mind, intelligence, and thoughts. The Emotional takes into account your emotions, feelings, and attitudes. The Spiritual includes intangibles such as your spirit, soul, and the unseen higher power that oversees all.
Hal Elrod (The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life: Before 8AM)
It’s difficult to explain…you see, I have met her, and so I know that same powerful aspect in her eyes that Racath saw that night. But it is not easily put into words, not so easily described to someone who hasn’t seen it. It was just…something. Liken it to meeting a star. You do not know the star, have never spoken to it before, nor have you ever picked it out of the sparkle of its sisters in the night sky. But the star knows you. It has spent your whole life watching you from the sky. You can keep no secrets from it. It knows every thought in your mind, every move you have ever made, every flaw you have hidden, every pain you have felt. Like the millennia it spent before you were born were years in waiting. Waiting for you and only you, like you are what gives it purpose. Like watching over you is the dedication of its entire life. So it knows you better than you know yourself. And while the star is bright, a twinkling gem that brims with youth and beauty, there is an intangible wisdom to it. It is undeniably experienced. But not old. It may have lived for a thousand of years before you were born, counting every second until you were brought into the world. But, for a star, a thousand years is still very, very young. Young enough to kiss. That feeling, that meeting with a star, is what pierced Racath’s heart when Nelle looked into his eyes. She was starlight, nightfire on an ebon velvet sky. Rapture.
S.G. Night (Attrition: the First Act of Penance (Three Acts of Penance, #1))
Some of the variable words, say lunch and supper and dinner, may be highlighted but the differences are not particularly important. When we come to say `we just don't speak the same language' we mean something more general: that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation, or that we are aware, often intangibly, of different formations and distributions of energy and interest. In such a case, each group is speaking its native language, but its uses are significantly different, and especially when strong feelings or important ideas are in question. No single group is `wrong' by any linguistic criterion, though a temporarily dominant group may try to enforce its own uses as `correct'. What is really happening through these critical encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of a language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed.
Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society)
...it was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid's laughter — intangible things you couldn't lay your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immoveable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa's Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré's dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner.
Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
As the idea of culture has migrated from anthropology to organizational theory, so it has become highly instrumentalized and reified. It is another example of the hubris of managerialism, which claims to be able to analyse, predict and control the intangible, and with the result that it can bring about the opposite of what it intends. In other words, with the intention of ensuring that employees are more committed to their work and are more productive, repeated culture change programmes can have the effect of inducing cynicism or resistance in staff (McKinlay and Taylor, 1996). With an insistence that staff align their values with those of the organization, what may result is gaming strategies on the part of staff to cover over what they really think and feel (Jackall, 2009).
Chris Mowles (Managing in Uncertainty: Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life)
Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment. Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life.
Tim Wu
Finally, the inner accessibility and reflectiveness of theoretical knowledge which cannot basically be withheld from anybody, as can certain emotions and volitions, has a consequence that directly offsets its practical results. In the first place, it is precisely because of their general accessibility that factors quite independent of personal capacities decide on the factual utilization of knowledge. This leads to the enormous preponderance of the most unintelligent 'educated' person over the cleverest proletarian. The apparent equality with which educational materials are available to everyone interested in them is, in reality, a sheer mockery. The same is true of the other freedoms accorded by the liberal doctrines which, though they certainly do not hamper the individual from gaining goods of any kind, do however disregard the fact that only those already privileged in some way or another have the possibility of acquiring them. For just as the substance of education - in spite of, or because of it general availability - can ultimately be acquired only through individual activity, so it gives rise to the most intangible and thus the most unassailable aristocracy, to a distinction between high and low which can be abolished neither (as can socioeconomic differences) by a decree or a revolution. Thus it was appropriate for Jesus to say to the rich youth: 'Give away your goods to the poor', but not for him to say: 'Give your education to the underprivileged'. There is no advantage that appears to those in inferior positions to be so despised, and before which they feel so deprived and helpless, as the advantage of education. For this reason, attempts to achieve practical equality very often and in so many variations scorn intellectual education. This is true of Buddha, the Cynics, certain currents in Christianity, down to Robespierre's 'nous n'avons pas besoin de savants'. In speech and writing - which, viewed abstractly, are a manifestation of its communal nature - makes possible its accumulation, and, especially, its concentration so that, in this respect, the gulf between high and low is persistently widened. The intellectually gifted or the materially independent person will have all the more chances for standing out from the masses the larger and more concentrated are the available educational materials. Just as the proletarian today has many comforts and cultural enjoyments that were formerly denied to him, while at the same time - particularly if we look back over several centuries and millennia - the gulf between his way of life and that of the higher strata has certainly become much deeper, so, similarly, the rise in the general level of knowledge as a whole does not by any means bring about a general levelling, but rather its opposite.
Georg Simmel (The Philosophy of Money)
We have already pointed out that the Dioscuri represent a similar idea in somewhat different form: one sun is mortal, the other immortal. As this whole solar mythology is psychology projected into the heavens, the underlying idea could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal, the other immortal. Man is mortal, yet there are exceptions who are immortal, or there is something immortal in us. Thus the gods, or figures like Khidr and the Comte de Saint-Germain, are our immortal part which continues intangibly to exist. The sun comparison tells us over and over again that the dynamic of the gods is psychic energy. This is our immortality, the link through which man feels inextinguishably one with the continuity of all life.58 The life of the psyche is the life of mankind. Welling up from the depths of the unconscious, its springs gush forth from the root of the whole human race, since the individual is, biologically speaking, only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted.
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Book 46))
Final Cause is the reason, the interest in why you do what you do, your hope for how things turn out—how you imagine your best future. Final Cause is more than the goal of the goal—it’s the effectual living beyond the goal. Final Cause is the success after the success. Final Cause is the place where your time is spent on your values. Final Cause is where misaligned commitments are reexamined. Final Cause is purpose. Final Cause helps you integrate your purpose into everything you do—even before you’ve finished the puzzle to your big-picture dream. Puzzles are put together one piece at a time, not in one big block—and so are dreams. Final Cause helps you identify the big-picture dream, and Time Tipping helps you put together the oddly shaped interlocking pieces. The mosaic of our dreams draws closer as we draw the mosaic wide awake. Final Cause is your intangible expression of joyful living—that feeling of starting something new harmonizing with the fulfillment of accomplishment. To Time Tippers, Final Cause is not the end—it’s both the end and the beginning. The end informs the beginning so you can begin living the values of the end from the beginning.
Richie Norton (Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping)
And then she knew. No vision had ever terrified him. Never. In seventeen years. It was as if his own life were at stake. But he didn't See his own future. He only saw other's. She suddenly had a terrible feeling that she knew exactly whose future he'd Seen. Her voice was a whisper. "Do I get hurt?" His face contorted, but he didn't say anything. "Oh my god. Do I die?" He closed his eyes. "Oh." The air rushed out of her lungs on that one word. She was going to die. Luke's voice was tight, tortured when he said, "We gotta go." He bent down to pick up Sera's bag again, then headed out the door. Sera looked down at her feet. Their book bags lay there. She should probably pick those up, she thought. Luke was already on the porch, waiting. She reached down and grasped the bags, then woodenly stepped outside. Luke stared at her a moment, searching her face, then reached around her and locked the door. He started down the steps, but her voice stopped him. "Luke?" He turned to look at her. She was going to die. She knew she was going to die. But she couldn't stop herself from asking even though she already knew the answer. "Have you ever had a vision that didn't come true?" she said. "Ever?
Jen Meyers
The heart, it still beats stoically in my ribcage, but it knows its time is up. Strange how the repository of one’s existence is one’s heart, when all the heart does is pump the blood through the body. Not the soul that puts the life force into the body. The soul is intangible, it floats beyond oneself. It returns, pulled back by threads of loves, old and new, of the lives connected with one, of the belief that no, it isn’t time yet. The heart would beat on until the moment it decided it had done quite enough beating for a lifetime. A miracle organ, the heart, constantly beating through sickness, through health, through wakefulness, through sleep, through sorrow so terrible you think it would stop then and there, and through joy so intense you wish it would stop right then to freeze that moment forever. It beats on, regardless. And when it finally does stop, so does the body. Switched off, like a machine, the engine that powered it shuddering to a halt. The life force swirling away into the ethers, wherever it was that life forces went after the body had perished. Right now I am alive. The heart is beating, the soul is still restless, the feeling that there is more to come niggles. What more though, I don’t know.
Kiran Manral (The Face At the Window)
A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term "tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks. 5
Ivan Illich
For physical issues, we have an entire pharmacopoeia of pain medicine. For the actual pain of grief, we have . . . nothing. It’s always seemed so bizarre to me that we have an answer for almost every physical pain, but for this—some of the most intense pain we can experience—there is no medicine. You’re just supposed to feel it. And in a way, that’s true. The answer to pain is simply to feel it. Some traditions speak of practicing compassion in the face of pain, rather than trying to fix it. As I understand the Buddhist teaching, the fourth form of compassion in the Brahma Viharas, or the four immeasurables, describes an approach to the kinds of pain that cannot be fixed: upekkha, or equanimity. Upekkha is the practice of staying emotionally open and bearing witness to the pain while dwelling in equanimity around one’s limited ability to effect change. This form of compassion—for self, for others—is about remaining calm enough to feel everything, to remain calm while feeling everything, knowing that it can’t be changed. Equanimity (upekkha) is said to be the hardest form of compassion to teach, and the hardest to practice. It’s not, as is commonly understood, equanimity in the way of being unaffected by what’s happened, but more a quality of clear, calm attention in the face of immoveable truth. When something cannot be changed, the “enlightened” response is to pay attention. To feel it. To turn toward it and say, “I see you.” That’s the big secret of grief: the answer to the pain is in the pain. Or, as e. e. cummings wrote, healing of the wound is to be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It seems too intangible to be of use, but by allowing your pain to exist, you change it somehow. There’s power in witnessing your own pain. The challenge is to stay present in your heart, to your heart, to your own deep self, even, and especially, when that self is broken. Pain wants to be heard. It deserves to be heard. Denying or minimizing the reality of pain makes it worse. Telling the truth about the immensity of your pain—which is another way of paying attention—makes things different, if not better. It’s important to find those places where your grief gets to be as bad as it is, where it gets to suck as much as it does. Let your pain stretch out. Take up all the space it needs. When so many others tell you that your grief has to be cleaned up or contained, hearing that there is enough room for your pain to spread out, to unfurl—it’s healing. It’s a relief. The more you open to your pain, the more you can just be with it, the more you can give yourself the tenderness and care you need to survive this. Your pain needs space. Room to unfold. I think this is why we seek out natural landscapes that are larger than us. Not just in grief, but often in grief. The expanding horizon line, the sense of limitless space, a landscape wide and deep and vast enough to hold what is—we need those places. Sometimes grief like yours cannot be held by the universe itself. True. Sometimes grief needs more than an endless galaxy. Maybe your pain could wrap around the axle of the universe several times. Only the stars are large enough to take it on. With enough room to breathe, to expand, to be itself, pain softens. No longer confined and cramped, it can stop thrashing at the bars of its cage, can stop defending itself against its right to exist. There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it. The way to come to pain is with open eyes, and an open heart, committed to bearing witness to your own broken place. It won’t fix anything. And it changes everything.
Megan Devine
The only four times this word anamnesis is used in Scripture, it is in reference to the sacrifice that Christ made and is “remembered” in the Last Supper (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24, 25; Hebrews 10:3). The little clay-sculpted loaves in my hands feel like a memory I’m starved for. Like a memory become real between fingers. I had read it once that anamnesis was a term used to express an intangible idea moving into this material, tangible world. The philosopher Plato had used the word anamnesis to express a remembering that allowed the world of ideas to impact the world of our everyday, allowing something in another world to take form in this physical one. That was the point: remembrance, anamnesis, does not simply mean memory by mental recall, the way you remember your own address—but it means to experience a past event again through the physical, to make it take form through reenactment. Like the way you remember your own grandma Ruth by how your great-aunt Lois laughs, how she makes butterscotch squares for Sunday afternoons too, how she walks in her Birkenstocks with that same soft heel as Grandma did, her knees cracking up the stairs the same way too. The way your great-aunt Lois acts makes you remember in ways that make your grandma Ruth real and physically present again now.
Ann Voskamp (The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life)
The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries himself in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye sees black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one walks alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and trees—two formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one's own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon. One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One is afraid to glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities of night, things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances, obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, unknown but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches, alarming torsos of trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,—against all this one has no protection. There is no hardihood which does not shudder and which does not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is conscious of something hideous, as though one's soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness.
Victor Hugo (Complete Works of Victor Hugo)
Tatiana thought Deda was the smartest man on earth. Ever since Poland was trampled over in 1939, Deda had been saying that Hitler was coming to the Soviet Union. A few months ago in the spring, he suddenly started bringing home canned goods. Too many canned goods for Babushka’s liking. Babushka had no interest in spending part of Deda’s monthly pay on an intangible such as just in case. She would scoff at him. What are you talking about, war? she would say, glaring at the canned ham. Who is going to eat this, ever? I will never eat this garbage, why do you spend good money on garbage? Why can’t you get marinated mushrooms, or tomatoes? And Deda, who loved Babushka more than a woman deserved to be loved by a man, would bow his head, let her vent her feelings, say nothing, but the following month be back carrying more cans of ham. He also bought sugar and he bought coffee and he bought tobacco, and he bought some vodka, too. He had less luck with keeping these items stocked because for every birthday, anniversary, May Day, the vodka was broken open and the tobacco smoked and the coffee drunk and the sugar put into bread and pie dough and tea. Deda was a man unable to deny his family anything, but he denied himself. So on his own birthday he refused to open the vodka. But Babushka still opened the bag of sugar to make him blueberry pie. The one thing that remained constant and grew by a can or two each month was the ham, which everyone hated and no one ate.
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
Dear Shift in the storm, This is abnormal, but I love how the clouds are shifting in my life. I noticed the lens flare as the clouds drift away. I used to think I was better off because the storm was the storyteller of my life, and I thought it was here to stay. Now that the clouds are finally drifting away, the scattered light is awaking my soul to a brighter day. I use to be so lost, but Nurse Hope's kindness is helping me find my way. Her actions have made me realize that love doesn’t cost a thing and that I want more out of life. I know that it is possible. Dear shift in the storm, would you take my complex memories with you? Therefore, curiosity will not enable me to continue to think of the ‘what-ifs.' If you can, would you do me the honor of shrinking my and Kace's memories? Could you void them as they shrink in the fading light? There’s no need to expand what we are trying to do away with. May you melt our frozen tears? If not, could you please make them invincible in the light? Could Kace and I become intangible as our old life disappears in the shift of the storm? We’ve had more than our share of fragments—and we are ready to be set free. For far too long, we’ve reached our breaking point. Dear shift in the storm, could you wash away our fears and wash us whole—as we step into our new life? Let there be no more secrets and lies, for Kace and I have endured enough. We are ready to shed our skin, and we are most certainly ready for our new beginning. I feel the change because the tear stains on my face have left their footprints for me to walk into a new world. During this shift, I am going to be still because I know when the storm is over that I am going to be alright. I no longer have to be selfish for all the wrong reasons.
Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
1.      Establishing artificial time constraints: Allow the person being targeted to feel that there is an end in sight. 2.      Accommodating nonverbals: Ensure that both your body language as well as your voice is non-threatening.           3.      Slower rate of speech: Don’t oversell and talk too fast. You lose credibility quickly and come on too strong and threatening. 4.      Sympathy or assistance theme: Human beings are genetically coded to provide assistance and help. It also appeals to their ego that they may know more than you. 5.      Ego suspension: Most likely the hardest technique but without a doubt the most effective. Don’t build yourself up, build someone else up and you will have strong rapport. 6.      Validate others: Human beings crave being connected and accepted. Validation feeds this need and few give it. Be the great validator and have instant, great rapport. 7.      Ask… How? When? Why? : When you want to dig deep and make a connection, there is no better or safer way than asking these questions. They will tell you what they are willing to talk about. 8.      Connect with quid pro quo: Some people are just more guarded than others. Allow them to feel comfortable by giving a little about you. Don’t overdo it. 9.      Gift giving (reciprocal altruism): Human beings are genetically coded to reciprocate gifts given. Give a gift, either intangible or material, and seek a conversation and rapport in return. 10.  Managing expectations: Avoid both disappointment as well as the look of a bad salesman by ensuring that your methods are focused on benefitting the targeted individual and not you. Ultimately you will win, but your mindset needs to focus on them. You now have the top ten secrets on how to build rapport with anyone in just a few minutes.  There is nothing in these pages that
Robin Dreeke (It's Not All About "Me": The Top Ten Techniques for Building Rapport)
If a leaden bullet is composed of electric charges, may not a human spirit be composed of something equally intangible—or tangible? I found myself as Carlyle put it, "standing on the bosom of nothing." That was in 1920, when I was just turned sixty-nine. In the following year, on the 19th of December, 1 9 2 1, my wife died. The dear girl had a happy death. She never knew she was dying and she had no pain. She just fell asleep. The last time I saw her she was sleeping quietly, and she looked like a pretty child. There was a slight flush on her cheeks and one little white hand lay out on the green counterpane: "like an April daisy on the grass." That was at midnight, and she died at six the next morning. I had gone to bed, for I was exhausted with watching. For the last week or more she would not let me out of her room by night or day. When I got up on the morning of her death I found to my surprise that I did not believe she was dead. My materialism notwithstanding, I felt that my wife was alive. My daughters, who held the same materialistic views, shared my feeling. We could not believe that she was not. Perhaps it was because we had been so devoted to her, because she had so filled our lives. I began to ask myself if perhaps the spiritualists were right. I did what Lady Warwick did when the Socialist idea came to her. I read all the best spiritualist books I could get hold of. I read and thought steadily for a couple of years and then I wrote some articles in the Sunday Chronicle protesting against the harsh criticism and cheap ridicule to which spiritualists were subjected. Still, I was not convinced. I was only puzzled. The books had affected me as W. T. Stead's talk had affected me. I told myself that all those gifted and honourable men and women could not be dupes or knaves. And—if they were right?
Robert Blatchford (My Eighty Years)
I remember that as I sat there, my initial reaction was: flummoxed. Pray to God to heal a baby’s defective heart? Really? But doesn’t God, being omniscient, already know that this baby’s heart is defective? And doesn’t God, being omnipotent, already have the ability to heal the baby’s heart if he wants to? Isn’t the defective heart thus part of God’s plan? What good is prayer, then? Do these people really think that God will alter his will if they only pray hard enough? And if they don’t pray hard enough, he’ll let the baby die? What kind of a God is that? Such coldly skeptical thoughts percolated through my fifteen-year-old brain. But they soon fizzled out. As I sat there looking at the crying couple, listening to the murmur of prayers all around me, my initial skepticism was soon supplanted by a sober appreciation and empathetic recognition of what I was witnessing and experiencing. Here was an entire body of people all expressing their love and sympathy for a young couple with a dying baby. Here were hundreds of people caringly, genuinely, warmly pouring out their hearts to this poor unfortunate man, woman, and child. The love and sadness in the gathering were palpable, and I “got” it. I could see the intangible benefit of such a communal act. There was that poor couple at the front of the church, crying, while everyone around them was showering them with support and hope. While I didn’t buy the literal words of the pastor, I surely understood their deeper significance: they were making these suffering people feel a bit better. And while I didn’t think the congregation’s prayers would realistically count for a hill of beans toward actually curing that baby, I was still able to see that it was a serenely beneficial act nonetheless, for it offered hope and solace to these unlucky parents, as well as to everyone else present there in that church who was feeling sadness for them, or for themselves and their own personal misfortunes. So while I sat there, absolutely convinced that there exists no God who heals defective baby hearts, I also sat there equally convinced that this mass prayer session was a deeply good thing. Or if not a deeply good thing, then at least a deeply understandable thing. I felt so sad for that young couple that day. I could not, and still cannot, fathom the pain of having a new baby who, after only a few months of life, begins to die.
Phil Zuckerman (Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions)
Sometimes I don't feel I've translated them correctly. I listen to other songwriters and think they have translated their Sonic Light Being more concisely, so I study them and try to gain the tools to become a better interpreter of light into sound. Because this lives in a dimension where there are no real estate agents of light—at least not yet, thank God— I know it seems intangible to some people. But the sonic world can be visited. I started visiting this world when I was three, listening to a piece by Béla Bartók; I visited a configuration that day that wasn't on this earth. My toes were curled up in worn Methodist carpet, and I knew I wanted to take more journeys like this. It was euphoric. It is euphoric.
Tori Amos (Tori Amos: Piece by Piece: A Memoir)
When you give power, especially to those around you, you create a more powerful world. When your giving empowers others, you gain more confidence in them and, in turn, in yourself. If you give others enough power, they will go beyond independence to possess material and intangible prosperity. This will allow them to go from being recipients to givers and make it possible for them to feel the joy and significance you feel when you get to help others in need.
Tim Sanders (Today We Are Rich: Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence)
Your brand is the unique persona and identity of you, your company, product or service that sets it apart from others in the same market space. It is the image you or your business present to the world. A brand is composed of many different pieces which, together, capture the attention of your buyers. Some of the pieces are physical, but much of branding is intangible; ideas and thoughts put into words, pictures and videos. When small business owners ask themselves “What is branding?” the answer is, “the essence of the business, products or services.” Your personal brand conveys the way you are perceived; and how you want people to see and feel about you, your business and your products or services. You may want to sound very dignified and reinforce your ‘expert status’ and credibility depending on your products or services. Or you may want to sound approachable, edgy and smart. Whatever voice you choose, carry it into all your messaging, marketing materials, and web presence (your platform).
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek (Book Power: A Platform for Writing, Branding, Positioning & Publishing)
It brought back the feel of her love, something he hadn’t felt for centuries. Something that was familiar as his own voice. Funny how a feeling could stay with a person for so long."~Elijah
Jen Meyers
The Likert scale. Respondents are asked to choose where they fall on a range of possible feelings about a thing, generally in the form of “strongly dislike,” “dislike,” “strongly like,” “strongly disagree,” and “strongly agree.” Multiple choice. Respondents are asked to pick from mutually exclusive sets, such as “Republican, Democrat, Independent, other.” Rank order. Respondents are asked to rank order several items. Example: “Rank the following eight activities from least preferred (1) to most preferred (8).” Open ended. Respondents are asked to simply write out a response in any way they like. Example: “Was there anything you were dissatisfied with about our customer service?
Douglas W. Hubbard (How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business)
At first, much of spirituality can look like psychological healing and “personal growth.” This is a significant layer of the excavation and evolution because it’s about revealing limiting thoughts and feelings. Everyone can also benefit from the chance to explore their preferences and attractions. Before you know yourself well, you may be attracted to superficial pleasures because they’re easy, appealing, and enforced by society. If you continue to be open to questioning and exploring your true nature, those superficial needs and desires become less satisfying as you naturally turn further inward, connecting to your spiritual essence. As your spiritual practice reveals the value of the intangible, you’ll often be surprised that your experience of the world dramatically changes. Opening your heart with the presence of compassion and connection in your choices will begin to attune you to your subtler senses and perceptions. As you release judgment and expectations, you’ll experience the power of being fully present and aware. This is the beginning of spiritual experience. At times, you may encounter new dimensions of the world, such as the possibility of subtle energies, mysterious forces, or the sense that you’re being guided or watched over by Divine beings. An openness to the unfolding self leads to an openness to fresh possibilities, and you’ll witness your ability to effect change in the world.
Jonathan H. Ellerby (Return to the Sacred: Ancient Pathways to Spiritual Awakening)
To assert the subjective, transcendent, intangible nature of the mind, in opposition to the physical body, is to keep flipping the same dualism on its head, like preaching a mindfulness doctrine that is one half neuroscience and thr other half Buddhism. To return to a vision of the mental realm as entirely private and invisible to the outside world is to remain trapped in a state of affairs where we keep asking ourselves neurotic and paranoid questions, such as 'What am I really feeling?" or "I wonder if he is truly happy". It is in this sort of confused philosophical territory that the owner of the brain scanner can promise to resolve all moral and political questions, once and for all.
William Davies (The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being)
Dear Supreme Altruist- I hope you are in a receptive mood. Thanks very much for placing wihin me the bomb that never stops exploding. Though the benefits have been intangible and in fact I feel that this terrifying mechanism has generally made my life intolerable, I shall never ask you to reverse the situation. I feel I have done everything that may be reasonably expected of me in the way of self-abnegation. However, I now find to my dismay that my lifelong fear of death is beginning to desert me. I believe that this may mean that the bomb's continual explosions may be causing the growth of new slabs of man-bark instead of blasting the loathesome stuff away as it has been doing. I therefore humbly request that the explosive power of the bomb be increased. Please do not make me weaker; make the bomb stronger. Amen.
Jim Woodring (Jim)
When Maddy writes, the feeling of failure haunts her, and the feeling of success does the same. She's living an intellectual dichotomy so intangible it will drive her crazy if she gives in.
Justin Bog (Wake Me Up)
Women in general are expected to hold less power than men and there are different expectations as to the tasks we will perform and the positions we will subsequently hold. Women tend to be offered less opportunities in life and are generally treated with less respect than men. We tend to receive less reward, tangible and intangible, for the work we do and the roles we play; we are often made to feel less important and our opinions less valid. Women are encouraged to compromise rather than question; to acquiesce rather than agitate.
Gerrilyn Smith (Women and Self-Harm)
It’s safe to predict this result, and not just because I have seen it many times in the companies I work with. It is a straightforward prediction of the Lean Startup theory itself. When people are used to evaluating their productivity locally, they feel that a good day is one in which they did their job well all day. When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or—heaven forbid—meetings, I felt bad. What did I really accomplish that day? Code and product features were tangible to me; I could see them, understand them, and show them off. Learning, by contrast, is frustratingly intangible.
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
Alone among the older kids, he had a romantic imagination, a feel for the things of the spirit, for the intangibles in human affairs. (It’s what drew him to Churchill, a man whose appeal Joe Senior could never grasp.)
Fredrik Logevall (JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956)
Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It's based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there's not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.
Arundhati Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)
Or maybe there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It's based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there's not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
Now we see empathy more as an intangible capacity to understand what someone else is feeling.
Kaitlin Ugolik Phillips (The Future of Feeling: Building Empathy in a Tech-Obsessed World)
The first of these four parts of the self, and the only one made of solid matter, was the hamr. Hamr literally meant "skin" or "hide," but was essentially the same as what we today would call the "body." It was the visible part of the self that housed the invisible parts... ...One of the three invisible, spiritual parts of the self was the hugr. The hugr was someone's personality or mind, the intangible part that corresponds most closely to what we mean when we speak of someone's "inner self." It encompassed thought, desire, intuition (the Old Norse word for "foreboding" was hugboð), and a person's presence" - the feeling others get when they're around the person... ...The second of the spiritual parts of the self was the fylgja (plural fylgjur). The verb fylgja meant "to accompany," "to help," "to side with," "to belong to," "to follow," "to lead," "to guide," or "to pursue" depending on the context. The fylgja spirit did all of those many things, and the best translation of the noun fylgja is probably "attendant spirit," in both senses of the word "attendant" - one who accompanies and one who helps... ...The final part of the Viking self we'll examine here is the hamingja, "luck" or "fortune" (plural harningjur). In the words of Old Norse scholar Bettina Sommer, "luck was a quality inherent in the man and his lineage, a part of his personality similar to his strength, intelligence, or skill with weapons, at once both the cause and the expression of the success, wealth, and power of a family." The surest test of the strength of a person's hamingja was his or her fortune in battle.
Daniel McCoy (The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion)
They say other species have stopped short, and that only the human species, the humanoid branch, has made its definitive breakthrough. In fact while all the others persevered in their specific forms and ended up disappearing genetically, thus leaving evolution to run its course, only the human species succeeded in surpassing itself in the simulacrum of itself - in disappearing genetically to resuscitate artificially. By perpetuating itself in a world of clones and electronic prostheses (perfect in so far as they will have eliminated every potential species, including humanity), man will thus, in a definitive act, have wiped out the natural genesis of things. Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intang ible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sacred character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision-making function be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? Political charisma is precisely not that gracious charisma which emanates from the irresistible power of a pure object, such as the power of a woman, but an ungracious will which derives its power and its glory from voluntary servitude. This is true of all institutions, the military, the clerical, the medical, and more recently the psychoanalytic, but it is particularly so in politics which remains the most striking hallucination of all the weaknesses of the will.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
While many say Schrager’s work is about design, it isn’t—it’s about ideas and experiences. Ian uses the power of his ideas to tap into what he calls the “collective unconsciousness, the ethereal, elusive, and hard-to-define magic and energy.” He understands the power of this intangible, emotional place and uses it to connect deeply with his customers. He knows that “the way a product makes you feel is more important than how it looks. The goal is to create experiences that people will remember, to touch them in emotional and visceral ways, to lift their spirits, to assault their senses, and to wow them in tasteful ways.” But just as important, Schrager under- stands that an amazing experience can’t be created from ideas alone, knowing that “good execution is just as important as a good idea.” And he has consistently manifested his creative potential because he has regularly married the four key elements that create value in our new age: purpose, creativity, execution, and emotion.
Alan Philips (The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential)
How do tangible things create an intangible feeling of joy? At first, the answer seemed unequivocal: They don’t. Sure, there’s a certain pleasure in material things, but I’d always been led to believe that this is superficial and short-lived, not a meaningful source of joy.
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
Visual art is a compelling illustration of the power of story because art serves no practical purpose. Its value doesn’t grow because more people need paintings, like we need shovels after a blizzard—it grows because people connect with the artist through the art. The combination of the work and the story make them feel, and when that happens, people take action to satisfy their emotional need—in this case, desire—by buying and sharing the art. And it’s occurred this way since the beginning of time, except now the art—the intangibles—have more power than ever before.
Alan Philips
Through the fantastic trick of self-reference, our thoughts make the intangible phantasmagoria of present experience feel like a substantial external world unfolding across space and time.
Bernardo Kastrup (More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth and Belief)
Poetry is the soul of music, something divine, It is at the center and circumference of knowledge; Poetry in my view is the language of the soul demonstrating the most intimate feelings which the tongue cannot articulate. You do not need to be a professor, academic, intellect or a scholar to write poetry, as I believe it is intangible,
Munira Chowdhury (Munira Chowdhury)
We can feel and imagine intangible things like love and hope. And we have a conscience. But why? When Jesus Christ came to earth during the Roman era, His friends, family, and many witnesses who'd never met Him, wrote about Him, His arrival, and all He would do for mankind—and did do. He was the Son of God, God Incarnate, my friend. "He experienced this life so He could righteously judge us after death because He is loving, but He's also just. But He didn't only come to be a Man to know what it was like to live on earth; He came to die for mankind Himself. He was perfect, sinless, and He shed His blood so you wouldn't die the eternal death. It's every man and woman's choice, to accept by faith that gift of eternal life, or reject Him in indecision, which is to choose eternal death.
D.I. Telbat (Dark Rule (COIL, #3))
I couldn't wait any longer. I was being asked to wait for something as intangible, ephemeral and insubstantial as a feeling; for him to feel ready. But in my body, I was fighting the visceral, bloody truth..
Nell Frizzell (The Panic Years: Dates, Doubts, and the Mother of All Decisions)
I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.
Nina George
Within successful enterprises, whether they are products, personalities, a political or social cause, or a civic community lurks an intangible. In fact, consumers of those products become more than just customers. They feel an almost religious zeal that consumers of brands like Lestoil, Goodrich tires, and MCI never feel.
Patrick Hanlon (Primalbranding: Create Belief Systems that Attract Communities)
Now and then Fire sensed a raptor monster overhead. She kept her own mind hidden from them so they wouldn’t recognize her for the monster prey she was; but of course, in the absence of monster prey, they ate any living creature available. One that spotted Fire and Archer dropped down and began to circle, posing shamelessly, intangibly lovely, reaching for their minds, radiating a feeling that was hungry, primitive, and oddly soothing.
Kristin Cashore (Fire)
By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay. How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.
Monica Hesse (American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land)