Fuller Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Fuller. Here they are! All 200 of them:

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Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
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Margaret Fuller
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Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
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W.E.B. Du Bois
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Dare to be naΓ―ve.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn.
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Thomas Fuller (A Pisgah Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof: With the History of the Old and New Testament Acted Thereon)
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What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
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Ted Hughes
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When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing β€” a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Most people say developing is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. People grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen around the place that hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone.
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Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
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Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.
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Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea)
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A stumble may prevent a fall.
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Thomas Fuller
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If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
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Thomas Fuller
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I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
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Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
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We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I've always thought--put together all those random pieces form everyone who's ever known you from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you'd probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.
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Deb Caletti (Stay)
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Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ― Margaret Fuller
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Margaret Fuller
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In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Never forget that you are one of a kind. Never forget that if there weren't any need for you in all your uniqueness to be on this earth, you wouldn't be here in the first place. And never forget, no matter how overwhelming life's challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (I Seem to Be a Verb)
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Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.
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Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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Dare to be naive.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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If you have knowledge , let others light their candles in it.
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Margaret Fuller
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Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Mistakes are great, the more I make the smarter I get.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.
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Millard Fuller
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Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
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Margaret Fuller
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We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Do you have any idea what it feels like to suddenly realize that the reason you’ve have been so lost your whole life is because a piece of you was missing and you never even knew itβ€”only to find that missing piece and know that you can’t have it and so you will never, ever be whole?
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Olivia Fuller (Something Wicked (The Wicked Game, #2))
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Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
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Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
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If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
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Anne Tyler (The Amateur Marriage)
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Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
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Thomas Fuller
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We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
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Thomas Fuller
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Either war is obsolete or men are.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.
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Margaret Fuller
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What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.
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Alexandra Fuller (Scribbling the Cat)
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Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.
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Patricia Fuller
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All things are difficult before they are easy.
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Thomas Fuller
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It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Grunch of Giants)
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Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.
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Thomas Fuller
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There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Critical Path)
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Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (I Seem to Be a Verb)
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Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity)
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Her grief still burdened her, and she knew she would bear it the rest of her days.
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Dana Fuller Ross (Independence! (Wagons West, #1))
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When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
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James Truslow Adams (The Epic of America)
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It is the property of fools to be always judging.
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Thomas Fuller
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Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
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Margaret Fuller
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There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
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Margaret Fuller
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I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Thinking incomplete knowledge of the industry presents a fuller picture.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.
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Thomas Fuller
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If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
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Thomas Fuller
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You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.
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Alexandra Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness)
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Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (The Buckminster Fuller Reader)
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Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.
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Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
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People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
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Alice Duer Miller
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How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
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Robert Penn Warren
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There are some works so luminous that they fill us with shame for the meager life to which we are resigned, that they implore us to lead another, wiser, fuller life; works so powerful that they give us strength, and force us to new undertakings. A book can play this role.
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HervΓ© Le Tellier
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I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you're up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You're intoxicated by the boundless space.
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W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor’s Edge)
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God is a verb
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
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Alexandra Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood)
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Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the β€˜expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferredβ€”ergo, highly secureβ€”lifelong position.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.
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C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet (The Space Trilogy, #1))
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Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
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Claire Fuller (Swimming Lessons)
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The highest glory of the creature is in being only a vessel, to receive and enjoy and show forth the glory of God. It can do this only as it is willing to be nothing in itself, that God may be all. Water always fills first the lowest places. The lower, the emptier a man lies before God, the speedier and the fuller will be the inflow of the diving glory.
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Andrew Murray (Humility: The Journey Toward Holiness – Classic Devotional Meditations on the Character of Christ for Easter 2026)
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Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger or higher or wider, nothing is more pleasant, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth, for love is born of God and cannot rest except in God, Who is created above all things.
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Thomas Γ  Kempis (The Imitation of Christ)
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Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
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I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.
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Margaret Fuller
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If you don't understand white supremacy/racism ,everything that you do understand will only confuse you..
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Neely Fuller Jr. (The United Independent Compensatory Code System Concept a textbook/workbook for Thought, Speech and/or Action for Victims of Racism (white supremacy))
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What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.
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Margaret Fuller
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The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
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Margaret Fuller
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Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth)
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The best books... The best books of men are soon exhausted-- they are cisterns, and not springing fountains. You enjoy them very much at the first acquaintance, and you think you could hear them a hundred times over- but you could not- you soon find them wearisome. Very speedily a man eats too much honey: even children at length are cloyed with sweets. All human books grow stale after a time- but with the Word of God the desire to study it increases, while the more you know of it the less you think you know. The Book grows upon you: as you dive into its depths you have a fuller perception of the infinity which remains to be explored. You are still sighing to enjoy more of that which it is your bliss to taste.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon
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The noblest revenge is to forgive
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Thomas Fuller
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Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
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Thomas Fuller
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.
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Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
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When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But β€œwhen it’s deadening,” you feel β€œshattered at the end of the day, just shattered.
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Johann Hari (Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions)
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If we dump all the machinery and take the knowledge we have in the ocean within six months humanity will die. If we dump all the politician all around the world in the ocean everything will go along very nicely.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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The worse the passage the more welcome the port.
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Thomas Fuller
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To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?
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Charles Fuller
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The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Marriage hath in it less of beauty but more of safety, than the single life; it hath more care, but less danger, it is more merry, and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows, and fuller of joys; it lies under more burdens, but it is supported by all the strengths of love and charity, and those burdens are delightful.
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Bishop Jeremy Taylor
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It’s been rewarding to be this honest lately. I’m determined to stay this honest, as if lives depend on it, which I guess they sort of do. No one will die if I lie, but lives can grow and be fuller when I tell the truth.
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Adam Silvera (History Is All You Left Me)
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Govern thy life and thy thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and read the other.
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Thomas Fuller
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...primarily the individual is going to study at home.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies)
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The fuller your bladder, the more intense your orgasm, Ana.
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E.L. James
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How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
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George Eliot (Adam Bede)
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Friendships multiply joys and divide griefs.
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Thomas Fuller
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Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Happy Fuller: Somehow you always love in a special way the one who gives you the most grief.
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Nora Roberts (Carnal Innocence)
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This is not a full circle. It's Life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we all make to get on with it.
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Alexandra Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood)
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Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.
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Gregory Maguire (Mirror Mirror)
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The universe is non-simultaneously apprehended
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I think therefore I am, right?" "No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes's philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. 'I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.' Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was.
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John Green (Turtles All the Way Down)
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When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Only Integrity Is Going to Count)
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My father was fond of saying 'If you own too many possessions sooner or later they start owning you.
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Claire Fuller (Our Endless Numbered Days)
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Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies)
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He that plants trees loves others besides himself.
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Thomas Fuller
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There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.
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Margaret Fuller
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Two things a man should never be angry at: what he can help, and what he cannot help.
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Thomas Fuller
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Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself
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Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Dover Thrift Editions: Literary Collections))
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Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.
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Lois McMaster Bujold (Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga, #15))
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And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
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We as economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies)
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Cowboy up, cupcake.
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Alexandra Fuller (The Legend of Colton H. Bryant)
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We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.
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Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
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I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.
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Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
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Richard Buckminster 'Bucky' Fuller
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It’s about believing two opposing ideas in your head at the same time: hope and grief.
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Claire Fuller (Swimming Lessons)
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Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.
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Margaret Fuller
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Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.
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Thomas Fuller
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The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy
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R. Buckminster Fuller
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A fox should not be of the jury at a goose's trial.
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Thomas Fuller
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Good is not good, where better is expected
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Thomas Fuller
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Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure)
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Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth)
β€œ
Love is a mighty power, a great and complete good; Love alone lightens every burden, and makes the rough places smooth. It bears every hardship as though it were nothing, and renders all bitterness sweet and acceptable. The love of Jesus is noble, and inspires us to great deeds; it moves us always to desire perfection. Love aspires to high things, and is held back by nothing base. Love longs to be free, a stranger to every worldly desire, lest its inner vision become dimmed, and lest worldly self-interest hinder it or ill-fortune cast it down. Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing wider, nothing more pleasant, nothing fuller or better in heaven or earth; for love is born of God, and can rest only in God above all created things. Love flies, runs, leaps for joy; it is free and unrestrained. Love gives all for all, resting in One who is highest above all things, from whom every good flows and proceeds. Love does not regard the gifts, but turns to the Giver of all good gifts. Love knows no limits, but ardently transcends all bounds. Love feels no burden, takes no account of toil, attempts things beyond its strength; love sees nothing as impossible, for it feels able to achieve all things. Love therefore does great things; it is strange and effective; while he who lacks love faints and fails.
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Thomas Γ  Kempis (The Inner Life)
β€œ
Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.
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Margaret Fuller
β€œ
The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. It is spontaneously inquisitive. It sorts out and endeavors to understand
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking)
β€œ
What a difference it makes to come home to a child!
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Margaret Fuller
β€œ
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
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Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
β€œ
If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
β€œ
There is an effective strategy open to architects. Whereas doctors deal with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on their work in laboratories as do doctors in anticipatory medicine.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure)
β€œ
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
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James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
β€œ
Dates only make us aware of how numbered our days are, how much closer to death we are for each one we cross off. From now on, Punzel, we're going to live by the sun and the seasons.' He picked me up and spun me around, laughing.'Our days will be endless.
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Claire Fuller (Our Endless Numbered Days)
β€œ
It’s difficult to live with both hope and grief.
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Claire Fuller (Swimming Lessons)
β€œ
Compliments cost nothing, yet many pay dear for them.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
With foxes we must play the fox.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.
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Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
β€œ
Great hopes make great men.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
You gazed at the moon and fell in the gutter.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
It is new design by architects versus world revolution by political leadership.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure)
β€œ
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
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Margaret Fuller
β€œ
I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Only Integrity Is Going to Count)
β€œ
It's madness the sheep to talk peace with the wolf
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
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Margaret Fuller
β€œ
A book that is shut is but a block.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.
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Charles Stross (The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3))
β€œ
A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure)
β€œ
We bend. I bend to sweep crumbs and I bend to wipe vomit and I bend to pick up little ones and wipe away tears... And at the end of these days I bend next to the bed and I ask only that I could bend more, bend lower. Because I serve a Savior who came to be a servant. He lived bent low. And bent down here is where I see His face. He lived, only to die. Could I? Die to self and just break open for love. This Savior, His one purpose to spend Himself on behalf of messy us. Will I spend myself on behalf of those in front of me? And people say, β€œDon’t you get tired?” and yes, I do. But I’m face to face with Jesus in the dirt, and the more I bend the harder and better and fuller this life gets. And sure, we are tired, but oh we are happy. Because bent down low is where we find fullness of Joy.
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Katie Davis
β€œ
I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.
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Alexandra Fuller (Scribbling the Cat)
β€œ
Try to be happy in this present moment, and put not off being so to a time to come--as though that time should be of another make from this which has already come and is ours.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
Flora would have liked to ask her parents why the words β€˜to father’ have such a different meaning from the words β€˜to mother’.
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Claire Fuller (Swimming Lessons)
β€œ
Good clothes open all doors.
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Thomas Fuller
β€œ
I don't seem to fit to associate with humans.
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Meg Cabot
β€œ
Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
β€œ
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.
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Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century)
β€œ
My mind is a center of Divine operation. The Divine operation is always for expansion and fuller expression, and this means the production of something beyond what has gone before, something entirely new, not included in the past experience, though proceeding out of it by an orderly sequence of growth. Therefore, since the Divine cannot change its inherent nature, it must operate in the same manner with me; consequently, in my own special world, of which I am the center, it will move forward to produce new conditions, always in advance of any that have gone before.
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Thomas Troward (The Dore Lectures on Mental Science)
β€œ
Over time, I came to realize that this was the point of reading Emerson and, for that matter, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and all the rest of them. The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn’t to hang on to their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past. *
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John Kaag (American Philosophy: A Love Story)
β€œ
Today’s news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity’s tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
β€œ
All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.
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Margaret Fuller
β€œ
I would like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us: you will look back at us with astonishment. You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little, at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take. At the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive. At the great truths staring us in the face which we failed to see, at the great truths we grasped at but could not get our fingers quite 'round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little. But what you will never know that it was how we were thinking of you and for you that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little that we have done. That it was in the thought of your larger realization and fuller life that we have found consolation for the futilities of our own. All I aspire to be and was not, comforts me.
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Olive Schreiner (Woman and Labor)
β€œ
There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving her contempt. Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in the twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honoured, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims. She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools' caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.
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George Eliot (Middlemarch)
β€œ
All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of no-where-nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Critical Path)
β€œ
Few realize that political action offers little solution to the world’s major problems. Few understand that the elite have created political parties in order to prevent real change from ever taking place. The political arena is merely the β€œsty” in which two or more mutually hostile agencies, created by the same hidden hand, get the chance to pummel one another. As alternative researcher Juri Lina so brilliantly put it: When the left wing Freemason is finished, the right-wing Freemason takes over The point has been emphasized by many an insider: The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you so not wish him to see – General Sir Archibald Wavel The world’s power structures have always β€˜divided to conquer’ and have always β€˜kept divided to keep conquered.’ As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity – not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories – that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore, they feel almost utterly helpless
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Critical Path)
β€œ
I figure... ...that the people are now more deeply conscious than ever before in history of the existence and functioning principles of universal, inexorable physical laws; of the pervading, quietly counseling truth within each and every one of us; of the power of love; and--each man by himself--of his own developing, dynamic relationship with his own conception of the Almightiness of the All-Knowing. ...that our contemporaries just don't wear their faith on their sleeves anymore. ...that people have removed faith from their sleeves because they found out for themselves that faith is much too important for careless display. Now they are willing to wait out the days and years for the truthful events, encouraged individually from within; and the more frequently the dramatic phrases advertising love, patriotism, fervent belief, morals, and good fellowship are plagiarized, appropriated and exhibited in the show windows of the world by the propaganda whips for indirect and ulterior motives, no matter how meager the compromise--the more do people withdraw within themselves and shun taking issue with the nauseating perversions, though eternally exhibiting quiet indifference, nonchalance or even cultivating seemingly ignorant acceptance.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
β€œ
Pure in heart means to be sing-hearted... to will one thing- God. All (Jesus)'s moments flowed from His single-heartedness, from His intimacy with God. That was His core. Christianity is full of paradoxes and this is one of the strangest. When we are centered in God alone, we are able to relate to more of life and the world, and find more meaning in them. In some way a centered life becomes wider and fuller. To form one's life around this single perspective enables us to deal with more problems, not fewer, embrace more of life, not less of it. One reason is that we're not so divided, overwhelmed or bogged down by trivia and confusion.
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Sue Monk Kidd (God's Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved)
β€œ
I haven't learned How or why Universe contrived to implode And intellectually code The myriadly unique Chromosomically orchestrated DNA-RNA, Quadripartite moleculed, Binary paired, Helically extended And unzippingly dichotomied Regenerative symphonic jazz, as A one and two, Three and four Me---You, Thee---They And more Thine and mine, Sweet citizen, THYMINE-CYTOSINE GUANINE-ADENINE
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R. Buckminster Fuller (And It Came To Pass β€” Not To Stay)
β€œ
It cannot be repeated too often that this transformation does not alienate him from the world. He will in no way be estranged from his daily tasks and duties, for he comes to realize that the most insignificant action he has to accomplish, the most insignificant experience which offers itself to him, stands in connection with cosmic beings and cosmic events. When once this connection is revealed to him in his moments of contemplation, he comes to his daily activities with a new, fuller power. For now he knows that his labor and his suffering are given and endured for the sake of a great, spiritual, cosmic whole. Not weariness, but strength to live springs from meditation.
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Rudolf Steiner (How to Know Higher Worlds)
β€œ
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary β€” the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trimtab.
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R. Buckminster Fuller
β€œ
I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are MDs or PhDs, have any comparable learning...I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.
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Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)
β€œ
It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.
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P.K. Page (The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction)
β€œ
Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems.
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Carl Safina (The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World)
β€œ
Because we were duped I tell you, duped as even yet we hardly realize; because we were misused, hideously misused. They told us it was for the Fatherland, and meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry.--They told us it was for Honor, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes.--They told us it was for the Nation, and meant the need for activity on the part of out-of-work generals!...Can't you see? They stuffed out the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism, their stupidity, their greed of business, and then paraded it before us as a shining ideal! And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can't you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without even knowing it!... There is only one fight, the fight against the lie, the half-truth, compromise, against the old order. But we let ourselves be taken in by their phrases; and instead of fighting against them, we fought for them. We thought it was for the Future. It was against the Future. Our future is dead; for the youth is dead that carried it. We are merely the survivors, the ruins. But the other is alive still--the fat, the full, the well content, that lives on, fatter and fuller, more contented than ever! And why? Because the dissatisfied, the eager, the storm troops have died for it.
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Erich Maria Remarque (The Road Back)
β€œ
A society that puts equalityβ€”in the sense of equality of outcomeβ€”ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
β€œ
If you ignorantly believe there’s not enough life support available on planet Earth for all humanity, then survival only of the fittest seems self-flatteringly to warrant magna-selfishness. However, it is due only to humans’ born state of ignorance and the 99.99-percent invisibility of technological capabilities that they do not recognize the vast abundance of resources available to support all humanity at an omni-high standard of living.
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R. Buckminster Fuller (Grunch of Giants)
β€œ
Under the current β€˜tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.
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Sandra Lee Bartky
β€œ
The greatest joy is joy in God. This is plain from Psalm 16:11: "You [God] will make known to me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever." Fullness of joy and eternal joy cannot be improved. Nothing is fuller than full, and nothing is longer than eternal. And this joy is owing to the presence of God, not the accomplishments of man. Therefore, if God wants to love us infinitely and delight us fully and eternally, he must preserve for us the one thing that will satisfy us totally and eternally; namely, the presence and worth of his own glory. He alone is the source of full and lasting pleasure. Therefore, his commitment to uphold and display his glory is not vain, but virtuous. God is the one being for whom self-exaltation is an infinitely loving act. If he revealed himself to the proud and self-sufficient and not to the humble and dependent, he would belittle the very glory whose worth is the foundation of our joy. Therefore, God's pleasure in hiding this from "the wise and intelligent" and revealing it to "infants" is the pleasure of God in both his glory and our joy.
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John Piper (The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God)
β€œ
Let us end on a very simple note: Let us listen to simple words; our Lord speak simply: β€œTrust Me, My child,” He says. β€œTrust Me with a humbler heart and a fuller abandon to My will than ever thou didst before. Trust Me to pour My love through thee, as minute succeeds minute. And if thou shouldst be conscious of anything hindering that flow, do not hurt My love by going away from Me in discouragement, for nothing can hurt so much as that. Draw all the closer to Me; come, flee unto Me to hide thee, even from thyself. Tell Me about the trouble. Trust Me to turn My hand upon thee and thoroughly to remove the boulder that has choked they river-bed, and take away all the sand that has silted up the channel. I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. I will perfect that which concerneth thee. Fear thou not, O child of My love; fear not.
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Amy Carmichael (If)
β€œ
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be
”
”
Alfred Tennyson (In Memoriam)
β€œ
I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould. But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there β€” ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions β€” that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered. Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives. […] I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown. Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown. You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete. This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.
”
”
Debbie Millman (Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design)
β€œ
Daddy didn’t say anything for a minute or so, and then he reached up and caught a firefly as it glowed beside him. β€œSee this light?” he asked me when the firefly lit up his hand. β€œYes’r.” β€œThat light is bright enough to light up a little speck of the night sky so a man can see it a ways away. That’s what God expects us to do. We’re to be lights in the dark, cold days that are this world. Like fireflies in December.” β€œTime meandered on without Gemma’s momma and daddy, and it meandered on without Cy fuller and Walt Blevins. . . but those of us left behind viewed life more dearly, felt it more keenly. I’d learned a bit more about God and I’d seen His powerful hands at work. As I was growing, my heart was changing. And the way I figured it, there were lessons learned in those dark days that would help me for years to come.” β€œAs I sat on the porch on that December day . . . I leaned my head against the rail and sighed deeply. The way I figured it just then, my summer may have been full of bad luck, but my life wasn’t. I figured as far as family went, I was one of the luckiest girls alive.
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Jennifer Erin Valent (Fireflies in December (Calloway Summers #1))
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There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast. "The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways. "Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller. "I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state. "You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.
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Tim Dorsey (Florida Roadkill (Serge Storms, #1))
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I feel completely embarrassed and remember the lock on the door and think: He knows, he knows, it shows, shows completely. β€œHe’s out back,” Mr. Garret tells me mildly, β€œunpacking shipments.” Then he returns to the papers. I feel compelled to explain myself. β€œI just thought I’d come by. Before babysitting. You, know, at your house. Just to say hi. So . . . I’m going to do that now. Jase’s in back, then? I’ll just say hi.” I’m so suave. I can hear the ripping sound of the box cutter before I even open the rear door to find Jase with a huge stack of cardboard boxes. His back’s to me and suddenly I’m as shy with him as I was with his father. This is silly. Brushing through my embarrassment, I walk up, put my hand on his shoulder. He straightens up with a wide grin. β€œAm I glad to see you!” β€œOh, really?” β€œReally. I thought you were Dad telling me I was messing up again. I’ve been a disaster all day. Kept knocking things over. Paint cans, our garden display. He finally sent me out here when I knocked over a ladder. I think I’m a little preoccupied.” β€œMaybe you should have gotten more sleep,” I offer. β€œNo way,” he says. Then we just gaze at each other for a long moment. For some reason, I expect him to look different, the way I expected I would myself in the mirror this morning . . . I thought I would come across richer, fuller, as happy outside as I was inside, but the only thing that showed was my lips puffy from kisses. Jase is the same as ever also. β€œThat was the best study session I ever had,” I tell him. β€œLocked in my memory too,” he says, then glances away as though embarrassed, bending to tear open another box. β€œEven though thinking about it made me hit my thumb with a hammer putting up a wall display.” β€œThis thumb?” I reach for one of his callused hands, kiss the thumb. β€œIt was the left one.” Jase’s face creases into a smile as I pick up his other hand. β€œI broke my collarbone once,” he tells me, indicating which side. I kiss that. β€œAlso some ribs during a scrimmage freshman year.” I do not pull his shirt up to where his finger points now. I am not that bold. But I do lean in to kiss him through the soft material of his shirt. β€œFeeling better?” His eyes twinkle. β€œIn eighth grade, I got into a fight with this kid who was picking on Duff and he gave me a black eye.” My mouth moves to his right eye, then the left. He cups the back of my neck in his warm hands, settling me into the V of his legs, whispering into my ear, β€œI think there was a split lip involved too.” Then we are just kissing and everything else drops away. Mr. Garret could come out at any moment, a truck full of supplies could drive right on up, a fleet of alien spaceships could darken the sky, I’m not sure I’d notice.
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Huntley Fitzpatrick (My Life Next Door)
β€œ
The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon, democracy. After a long triumph of world-city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will. If we call these money-powers 'Capitalism,' then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party. Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in the heaping-up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above and beyond all money-advantage. A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic stream in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness.
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Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West)
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As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
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Rudyard Kipling
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The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was β€œseized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.
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Jamie Fuller (The Diary of Emily Dickinson)