Image Motivational Quotes

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LAW 25 Re-Create Yourself Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.
Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power)
Get Off The Scale! You are beautiful. Your beauty, just like your capacity for life, happiness, and success, is immeasurable. Day after day, countless people across the globe get on a scale in search of validation of beauty and social acceptance. Get off the scale! I have yet to see a scale that can tell you how enchanting your eyes are. I have yet to see a scale that can show you how wonderful your hair looks when the sun shines its glorious rays on it. I have yet to see a scale that can thank you for your compassion, sense of humor, and contagious smile. Get off the scale because I have yet to see one that can admire you for your perseverance when challenged in life. It’s true, the scale can only give you a numerical reflection of your relationship with gravity. That’s it. It cannot measure beauty, talent, purpose, life force, possibility, strength, or love. Don’t give the scale more power than it has earned. Take note of the number, then get off the scale and live your life. You are beautiful!
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana (Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies (1922))
Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people's weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there's no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.
Epictetus (The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness)
By creating an image of low self- esteem within ourselves, we bomb and terrorize our true self. When we refuse to forgive, we create an insensible war from old grudges. When we allow stress to impede our healthy flow of energy, we create the weapon of destruction that kills humanity.
Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
Forget about self-image and self-judgment. It's about self-love, and no one teaches you that at school. No one teaches you that if you accept and love yourself, nothing and no one can touch you. This is the only face and body you're ever going to get, so be comfortable and happy in it. Own it. Own every aspect of who you are and present it to the world with the utmost pride.
Connor Franta (A Work in Progress)
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
Guy Debord (Society Of The Spectacle)
At times we will be asked to let go of things that we have always wanted to keep for ourselves, or things that we would never have thought that we would to have to let go of, such as the loss of a loved one or the betrayal of a dear friend. A tree never hesitates to shake off her leaves during fall, and so we must take another lesson given to us by the nature: let go when it is time. Although such losses can be difficult and painful, rise above this suffering. Focus within your mind, the image of the Lotus prospering above mud. We are the lotus; rise above.
Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
You are not one in a million, you are one in 7.7 billion.
Matshona Dhliwayo
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself
Germany Kent
Feelings are real. They often become one’s reality. But they are not always based on truth.
Jesikah Sundin (Elements (The Biodome Chronicles #2))
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.
Joseph Campbell (The Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology)
Your self-confidence is simply the part of your brain that tells you whether or not you should try something different or new or believe in yourself, and just as a Jedi truly believes that it is within their power to control their thoughts and stay in the Light, so can you.
Stephen Richards (Develop Jedi Self-Confidence: Unleash the Force within You)
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, wishes. Who looks inside, finds infinite wisdom.
Sereda Aleta Dailey (The Oracle of Poetic Wisdom)
Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors
James Hillman
Your image is your brand and you have only one opportunity to make that first impression. Choose to make a positive first impression.
Cindy Ann Peterson (My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today)
People think they are not satisfied with what they have but in true sense they are not satisfied with what they are.
Amit Kalantri
Your current body is the only body that can take you to your new body—so be kind to it.
Elaine Moran
The process doesn’t end there. Stories are more than just images. As you continue in the tale, you get to know the characters, motivations and conflicts that make up the core of the story. This requires more parts of the brain. Some parts process emotion. Others infer the thoughts of others, letting us empathize with their experiences. Yet other parts package the experience into memories for future reflection
Livia Blackburne (Dalle parole al cervello)
To visualize that which doesn't exist, yet to believe with confidence that it can be realized, is truly something miraculous.
Richard D. Sagor (Motivating Students and Teachers in an Era of Standards)
While your ego is always trying to figure out its place in the world, your true self knows that your place is always right here, right now.
Elaine Moran
We may not be able to control life’s circumstances, but we always have a choice about how we use our minds to respond to them.
Elaine Moran
Project a confident image through good body posture.
Cindy Ann Peterson (My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today)
When a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a program of hate. What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, even kill them? It requires a “hostile imagination,” a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.” That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive, one that loads his rifle with ammunition of hate and fear. The image of a dreaded enemy threatening one’s personal well-being and the society’s national security emboldens mothers and fathers to send sons to war and empowers governments to rearrange priorities to turn plowshares into swords of destruction.
Philip G. Zimbardo (The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil)
Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.
Epictetus (The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness)
Stand up for yourself by not standing yourself up.
Gina Greenlee (Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road)
Exercise promotes positive self-image and good well-being.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Image by Ellenvd "Fathers of the fatherless sons and daughters, single mothers cannot fill the open wound.
Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
Maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we've produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there [...]? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning [...] can be sufficient to drive our behaviour. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.
Dan Ariely (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves)
We can only bring about change in our lives when we clearly see two truths: that the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of fighting our toughest battles, and that by taking the biggest risks, we gain the most valuable rewards.
Elaine Moran
Your self-image tells about what you think about yourself and how you appear to yourself in your own consciousness. Self-image is the picture of yourself carried in your own mind. That picture can scare you or inspire you!
Israelmore Ayivor (The Great Hand Book of Quotes)
The Perfect Person's Rule of Life: The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward. The perfect person does good through love. His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does. He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward. The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God.
Clement of Alexandria
You’re awesome, remember that.” She continued, harsh and bitter. “Who cares what anyone says about you? And they will talk shit. People are going to verbally destroy you, plaster your image all over the Net, say hateful things about you as if they’re fact, and you need to be indifferent. Got that? You don’t give a shit. About anything.” She removed her grip from his chin. “Why?” “Because I am awesome.
Jesikah Sundin (Elements (The Biodome Chronicles #2))
While most people are playing it safe and doing everything they can to avoid pain, successful people know that they must face their fears and do what needs to be done regardless of how they feel. They don’t necessarily like the hard work, but they’re willing to do it because they like the results.
Elaine Moran
No longer can we parse our fellow humans into the categories of ‘lovable’ and ‘unlovable.’ If love is an act of the will — not motivated by need, not measuring worth, not requiring reciprocity — then there is no such category as ‘unlovable.
Jen Wilkin (In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character)
Photographers don't take pictures. They create images.
Mark Denman
Irony; these days, images have so much noise; and people, silent.
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
Attitude is a state of mind that results in an action taken or an emotion displayed. Attitude, in the end, is a motivator or that which generates or reflects motives.
Reid A. Ashbaucher (Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World)
Every morning, look in the mirror. You are beautiful and wonderful.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Update your version of me because I’m not the same person I was before. If you don’t get that, you don’t get me.
Toni Sorenson
Love yourself. Care for your body. You are God’s image.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Because of the speed of light. The known universe is about sixteen billion light-years across, and it’s still expanding. But the speed of light is only three hundred thousand kilometers per second, a snail’s pace. This means that light can never go from one end of the universe to the other. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, it follows that no information and motive force can go from one end of the universe to the other. If the universe were a person, his neural signals couldn’t cover his entire body; his brain would not know of the existence of his limbs, and his limbs would not know of the existence of the brain. Isn’t that paraplegia? The image in my mind is even worse: The universe is but a corpse puffing up.” “Interesting, Dr. Guan, very interesting!” “Other than the speed of light, three hundred thousand kilometers per second, there’s another three-based symptom.” “What do you mean?” “The three dimensions. In string theory, excepting time, the universe has ten dimensions. But only three are accessible at the macroscopic scale, and those three form our world. All the others are folded up in the quantum realm.
Liu Cixin (Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3))
niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Believe it or not, your body has nothing but unconditional love for you. The proof? Without any effort on your part, your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and the rhythm of life is graciously flowing through you every second of every day—unconditionally.
Elaine Moran
The reason we have such a difficult time losing weight permanently is not because we are making bad choices, but because we are not stopping our automatic subconscious programmed behaviors in their tracks.
Elaine Moran
Fuselier arrived at Columbine with one assumption: multiple gunmen demanded multiple tactics. Fuselier couldn’t afford to think of his adversaries as a unit. Strategies likely to disarm one shooter could infuriate the other. Mass murderers tended to work alone, but when they did pair up, they rarely chose their mirror image. Fuselier knew he was much more likely to find a pair of opposites holed up in that building. It was entirely possible that there was no single why—and much more likely that he would unravel one motive for Eric, another for Dylan.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. ... ... Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake. One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision : a sight.
John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
Self-confident people don’t make their self-esteem, self-image, happiness, or self-confidence dependent on another person’s approval, validation, or acceptance.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Being: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Presence & Essence for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #1))
Nobody's better than you and you're no better than anybody.
Mary Mihalic (Made to Make It)
All fear in me is because of my impatience to overcome my fear & love .@mirage @image @reflections
Ankit Samrat
For me, beauty says nothing. It is a still image on glossy paper. I am fascinated by imperfection, it is neither ugly nor flawed, it is the expression of life!
Isa Millot
Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind)
You are what you wear, therefore wear what you are.
Matshona Dhliwayo
F*** these men who don’t think we’re beautiful, because there are men who love us big babies!
Miss Ken
You can develop a positive self image with positive thoughts.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
You can elevate yourself to higher self by devotion to God.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Self-liberation is the greatest victory.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Any work for God that has less than a passion for Jesus Christ as its motive will end in crushing heartbreak and discouragement.
Stephen Seamands (Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service)
Motivation is deeply personal and only you know what words or images will resonate with you.
Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
Because the truth is, while bulimia is a devastating illness I would wish upon no one, it has taught me about the fragility of life and the vital need for compassion. Today, I’m quick to love and throw my arms around any girl who has ever stared at a puddle of her own vomit and questioned the point of her life. Or who has ever let a Photoshopped image on a glossy magazine preach to her about her own self-worth, her own beauty. Or who has ever been afraid to face the pain and suffering, within and outside of herself. Today, I’m quick to love.
Shannon Kopp (Pound for Pound: A Story of One Woman's Recovery and the Shelter Dogs Who Loved Her Back to Life)
Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals. A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces.
Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)
Narratives are subjective and selective. They frame and filter concepts, images, and information according to desirable beliefs, values, symbols, traditions, and preferences. They are motivational tools that reinforce existing social identities and uniqueness. They arouse deep passions and allegiance.
Padraig O'Malley (The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives)
Our lives reflect our inner image. If we think we’re worth it, that worth will manifest in our lives. If we think we’re not worthy, we’ll live in lack. Believe your worth it and you will become worth it.
Toni Sorenson
Dear Fathers of the Fatherless Children, Chief Guardians work so hard to provide for our children because we want nothing but the best for our sons and daughters, as you should too. Chief Guardians always give our everything and the little fuel we have left without asking for anything in return. What saddens me, fathers of the fatherless children is that most of the Chief Guardians are on government assistance because they do not have the help they deserve from you. Are you comfortable with the government taking care of your children? Chief Guardians sacrifice so much for our children. We sacrifice so much because our babies are our blueprint, they are an image of us.
Charlena E. Jackson (Dear fathers of the fatherless children)
Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing. The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat.
Shaun Tan
It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large. Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them. I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper. I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary. [Part 2] I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.
Albert Einstein
I don’t think of you as a typical beauty. I never once did. To me your hair mimics asphalt more than the lustrous feathers of ravens. Comparing your eyes to heavenly lights seems a stretch when they are the common color of dirt. I can’t imagine you as a tall, pole-slender image; your God-given shape is right bulky. But I never cared about such pointless things anyway. What good have trivial attributes ever done the world? When I look at you, I see you—or in other words, all of you that really matters. I see a kind heart and compassionate arms. I see a patient, gentle spirit abounding with love towards all of God’s creatures. I see the perfect blend of humility and strength of character. I see a wise intellect as well as an endearing sense of humor. I see all the qualities that make you the person I love, regardless of the bodily package you’re bound in. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re beautiful, because I find you to be far superior to that worthless and pointless nonsense the world calls beauty.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.
Robert M. Pirsig
We seek to be holy as God is holy as a joyful act of gratitude. We never seek holiness as a means to earn God’s favor or to avoid his displeasure. We have his favor, and his pleasure rests upon us. The motive of sanctification is joy. Joy is both our motive and our reward.
Jen Wilkin (In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character)
Desire is the outcome of sensation - the outcome with all the images that thought has built. And this desire not only breeds discontent but a sense of hopelessness. Never suppress it, never discipline it but probe into the nature of it - what is the origin, the purpose, the intricacies of it? To delve deep into it is not another desire, for it has no motive; it is like understanding the beauty of a flower, to sit down beside it and look at it.
J. Krishnamurti (Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal)
Making these choices [to attend school instead of skipping], as it turned out, wasn't about willpower. I always admired people who “willed” themselves to do something, because I have never felt I was one of them. If sheer will were enough by itself, it would have been enough a long time ago, back on University Avenue, I figured. It wasn't, not for me anyway. Instead, I needed something to motivate me. I needed a few things that I could think about in my moments of weakness that would cause me to throw off the blanket and walk through the front door. More than will, I needed something to inspire me. One thing that helped was a picture I kept in mind, this image that I used over and over whenever I was faced with these daily choices. I pictured a runner running on a racetrack. The image was set in the summertime and the racetrack was a reddish orange, divided in white racing stripes to flag the runners’ columns. Only, the runner in my mental image did not run alongside others; she ran solo, with no one watching her. And she did not run a free and clear track, she ran one that required her to jump numerous hurdles, which made her break into a heavy sweat under the sun. I used this image every time I thought of things that frustrated me: the heavy books, my crazy sleep schedule, the question of where I would sleep and what I would eat. To overcome these issues I pictured my runner bolting down the track, jumping hurdles toward the finish line. Hunger, hurdle. Finding sleep, hurdle, schoolwork, hurdle. If I closed my eyes I could see the runner’s back, the movement of her sinewy muscles, glistening with sweat, bounding over the hurdles, one by one. On mornings when I did not want to get out of bed, I saw another hurdle to leap over. This way, obstacles became a natural part of the course, an indication that I was right where I needed to be, running the track, which was entirely different from letting obstacles make me believe I was off it. On a racing track, why wouldn't there be hurdles? With this picture in mind—using the hurdles to leap forward toward my diploma—I shrugged the blanket off, went through the door, and got myself to school.
Liz Murray (Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard)
I look in the mirror and see myself, and yet I really don’t. Only an image is perceived, not things I will or things I won’t. Ideas in my mind I cannot see. No glimpse of how I feel. Shreds of emotion shape my gaze, but depth, the mirror will not reveal. I see my reflection colored in, my hair, my skin, my eyes. Hues in my heart and shades of thought remain unlit by fire or skies. I smile at the mirror and watch it grin, hasty to copy me, but who I am ‘twill never know. Mirrors don’t reflect identities.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year)
Little things that are meaningless from a practical point of view may have great emotional meaning through their symbolism. Images and colors are often great motivating forces.
Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
I’d rather listen to what you think of yourself, than what the whole world has to say about you.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
No one outside yourself can give you happiness or self-confidence.
Nicky Verd
I used to criticize my body for everything I felt it wasn't. Now, I praise my body for what it has carried me through.
Bethanee Epifani J. Bryant (My Quarter-of-a-Century Life Lessons:Building a Foundation for Success)
You project a confident image through good body posture.
Cindy Ann Peterson (My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today)
The image you currently have of yourself is as high as you can go....
Stephen Richards (Success is Only One Thought Away: Motivational and Inspirational Quotes from Mind Power Professional Stephen Richards)
Your posture can have a great deal of influence on your personal presentation and image, revealing your attitude toward yourself and others.
Cindy Ann Peterson (My Style, My Way: Top Experts Reveal How to Create Yours Today)
Staying locked into an image of how things are supposed to be can blind us to the grace of what is.
Elaine Orabona Foster (In Movement There Is Peace)
When your image improves, your performance improves. Zig Ziglar
Dotchamou Zakari (300 quotes from top motivators:Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Robert Kiyosaki ...)
You are God’s image.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
You are received the way you present yourself
Bangambiki Habyarimana (The Great Pearl of Wisdom)
You will never be perfect, but you will always be enough.
Trevor Carss
When people see their behavior as inconsistent with their self-image or goals, their motivation to change can increase.
Jeffrey Foote (Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change)
I wish to have a taste of what the best version of myself (i.e. the image of GOD in me) feels like.
Pamela Mandela Idenya (Living the Common Prayers: Turning Basic Catholic Prayers into Living Prayers)
You are the mirror image that reflects the attitudes which took in your life with what you have learned during the journey.
Da Anunciação Marco
The Christian up to his eyes in trouble can take comfort from the knowledge that in God’s kindly plan it all has a positive purpose, to further his sanctification. In this world, royal children have to undergo extra training and discipline which other children escape, in order to fit them for their high destiny. It is the same with the children of the King of kings. The clue to understanding all his dealings with them is to remember that throughout their lives he is training them for what awaits them, and chiseling them into the image of Christ. Sometimes the chiseling process is painful and the discipline irksome, but then the Scripture reminds us: “The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons . . . No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb 12:6-7,11). Only the person who has grasped this can make sense of Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God” (KJV); equally, only he can maintain his assurance of sonship against satanic assault as things go wrong. But he who has mastered the truth of adoption both retains assurance and receives blessing in the day of trouble: this is one aspect of faith’s victory over the world. Meanwhile, however, the point stands that the Christian’s primary motive for holy living is not negative, the hope (vain!) that hereby he may avoid chastening, but positive, the impulse to show his love and gratitude to his adopting God by identifying himself with the Father’s will for him.
J.I. Packer (Knowing God)
This realization is much like Donald Miller's awakening after a day of protesting President Bush: "More than my questions about the efficacy of social action were my questions about my own motives. Do I want social justice for the oppressed, or do I just want to be known as a socially active person? I spend 95 percent of my time thinking about myself anyway. I don't have to watch the evening news to see that the world is bad, I only have to look at myself.... I was the very problem that I had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read "I AM THE PROBLEM!" " I cannot plead innocent. I have contributed to the sum total of misery in the world. ...Or, as Casey incisively remarks, "I have more evidence of crime against myself than I have for any other human being. My conscience accuses me directly of so much malice, whereas I know only by hearsay of the evil done by others. To be humble before God is to know that I am blameworthy." " Such Christian humility is not the same thing as low self-esteem or poor self-image. It is simply the refusal to be deluded by the lie that I am guiltless: "Empowered by the intensity of God's unconditional love for me, I find it possible to demolish my defenses and admit to the truth of my condition. There is nothing in my constitution or personal history that would give me any confidence in my own competence to bring my life to a happy conclusion.
Dennis Okholm
The world moves with motiveless necessity. By this is meant that it has no motive of its own, but is under the necessity of manifesting your concept, the arrangement of your mind, and your mind is always arranged in the image of all you believe and consent to as true. The rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief are not different minds, but different arrangements of the same mind, in the same sense that a piece of steel when magnetized differs not in substance from its demagnetized state but in the arrangement and order of its molecules. A single electron revolving in a specified orbit constitutes the unit of magnetism.
Neville Goddard (The Power of Awareness)
Life is govern by principles not by how you feel.Just image a farmer who does not sow his seeds & decides that he is going throw them on the roof because he feels so, well he is sure not going to have a harvest.
Thabang Kanti
03:11 And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person." But what if you are that person?
Stella Young
Want to make today a great day? Learn something new, reconnect with a light from your past, right a wrong, serve someone incapable of repaying you, smile at your own image and thank God for who you are and all that you have.
Toni Sorenson
Drugged up, divorced, ignorant, and indebted, but at least they did it out of idealism. That has been the baby boomers’ universal alibi: our intentions were good. Later, they will admit, perhaps that idealism curdled, motivation flagged, the weaker-willed sold out. Still, the original impulse was altruistic. It would be quite a blow to their self-image if it were to be discovered that the boomers’ various crusades were selfish from the very beginning.
Helen Andrews (Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster)
According to [Dr. Erich] Fromm, what motivates so many Believers, regardless of religious affiliation, is the image of the Divine, an image that many Believers try to emulate (e.g. Imitatio Christi). Fromm states that within a humanistic religion, “God is the image of man’s [and/or woman’s] higher self, a symbol of what man [or woman] potentially is or ought to become” but “in an authoritarian religion, God becomes the sole possessor” of human’s reason and love.
Walter A. Jensen (Erich Fromm's contributions to sociological theory)
Qualitative and quantitative research with adults and children reporting ritual abuse has found that it occurs alongside other forms of organised abuse, particularly the manufacture of child abuse images (Scott 2001, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Waterman et al. 1993), and hence subsuming such non-ritualistic experiences under the moniker ‘ritual abuse’ is misleading at best and incendiary at worst. Moreover, it is unclear why an abusive group that invokes a religious or metaphysical mandate to abuse children should be considered as largely distinct from an abusive group that invokes a non-religious rationale to do so. The presumption evident amongst some authors writing on ritual abuse that a professed spiritual motivation for abusing children necessarily reflects the offenders actual motivation seems naïve at best, and at worst it risks colluding with the ways in which abusive groups obfuscate responsibility for their actions.
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
Freedom of speech . It doesn't mean you should falsely accuse others, without proof or facts. It doesn't mean oppressing others, insulting others , tainting and ruining others reputation and life, because you strongly feel they deserve it.
D.J. Kyos
Whether you are in business or simply want to be remembered positively, frankly consider these things: What makes you feel special and significant? What makes you unforgettable? When people see or think of you, what image do you think comes to mind?
Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
From a yogic perspective, good health starts within. All yogic practices help to keep your skin healthy and radiant. The beauty industry spends a lot of money projecting a certain image of beauty that causes you to feel inadequate if you do not match up to this ideal. From a yogic view you foster your inner beauty through the natural care of your body. The yogi sees their physical body as a temple that houses your soul. True beauty is the reflection of your inner self radiating and touching others
Ntathu Allen (Yoga for Beginners: A Simple Guide to the Best Yoga Styles and Exercises for Relaxation, Stretching, and Good Health)
Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weakness. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.
Epictetus
The ability of each individual to ignite a thought and usher into reality that which was previously invisible into something visible is unique to humanity and a testament to our inherited creativity an outcome of a Creator God who has created us in His image and likeness
Oliver Harper (TIME: A Traveler's Companion: Strategies To A Meaningful Life)
People will form impressions, assumptions, opinions, and judgments all within a few short seconds. To make a favorable first impression and make these seconds count, enhance your image by choosing clean, crisp, appropriate attire that reflects confidence and professionalism.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
Color is one of the most important and distinctive elements in enhancing your image. Wearing the colors which are best matched to your personality, energy, skin tone, hair color, and body type will make you look healthier, more vibrant, confident, successful, and approachable.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Preparation: 8 Ways to Plan with Purpose & Intention for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #2))
In the prologue, I explained the gradual and subtle process in which history is re-written to fit a country's present self-image. As a result, many rich-country people recommend free-trade, free-market policies in the honest belief that these are policies that thier own ancestors used in order to make their countries rich. When the poor countries protest that those policies hurt, those protests are dismissed as being intellectually misguided or as serving the interests of their corrupt leaders. It never occurs to those Bad Samaritans that the policies they recommend are fundamentally at odds with what history teaches us to be the best development policies. The intention behind their policy recommendations may be honourable, but their effects are no less harmful than those from policy recommendations motivated by deliberate ladder-kicking.
Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism)
Your period isn't something happening to you—it's something your body is doing. It's not a malfunction or a punishment. It's actually pretty remarkable when you think about it. Your body is literally preparing for the possibility of creating life. That's some serious biological magic.
Ethereal Ray (Inspiring Stories for Teen Girls: Navigating Social Media, Body Image, Friendships, Identity: A Motivational Chapter Book of Confidence, Courage, and ... ... Their Voice (Eleven Worlds to Explore 11))
Food and eating often mask our pain, our inner longing for God, for acceptance. It is key to know our motivation for eating as well as for other actions. Why do I eat? Am I tired, am I bored, am I stressed and tired? A good practice is to live in the present moment, aware of the reality in which I am immersed.
Mary DeTurris Poust (Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God)
Avoid Most Popular Entertainment Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people’s weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there’s no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap.
Epictetus (The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness)
Number me the things that are not yet come- gather me together the dross that are scattered abroad- make me the flowers green again that are withered- Open me the places that are closed, and bring me forth the winds that in them are shut up- shew me the image of a voice: and then I will declare to thee the thing that thou labor to know.
COMPTON GAGE
The actual consumers of knowledge are the children—who can’t pay, can’t vote, can’t sit on the committees. Their parents care for them, but don’t sit in the classes themselves; they can only hold politicians responsible according to surface images of “tough on education.” Politicians are too busy being re-elected to study all the data themselves; they have to rely on surface images of bureaucrats being busy and commissioning studies—it may not work to help any children, but it works to let politicians appear caring. Bureaucrats don’t expect to use textbooks themselves, so they don’t care if the textbooks are hideous to read, so long as the process by which they are purchased looks good on the surface. The textbook publishers have no motive to produce bad textbooks, but they know that the textbook purchasing committee will be comparing textbooks based on how many different subjects they cover, and that the fourth-grade purchasing committee isn’t coordinated with the third-grade purchasing committee, so they cram as many subjects into one textbook as possible. Teachers won’t get through a fourth of the textbook before the end of the year, and then the next year’s teacher will start over. Teachers might complain, but they aren’t the decision-makers, and ultimately, it’s not their future on the line, which puts sharp bounds on how much effort they’ll spend on unpaid altruism . . .
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Rationality: From AI to Zombies)
From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.
Mark R. Leary
Because of the speed of light. The known universe is about sixteen billion light-years across, and it’s still expanding. But the speed of light is only three hundred thousand kilometers per second, a snail’s pace. This means that light can never go from one end of the universe to the other. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, it follows that no information and motive force can go from one end of the universe to the other. If the universe were a person, his neural signals couldn’t cover his entire body; his brain would not know of the existence of his limbs, and his limbs would not know of the existence of the brain. Isn’t that paraplegia? The image in my mind is even worse: The universe is but a corpse puffing up.
Liu Cixin (Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3))
We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction, it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning, like rapport building, charm, and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive. Kelly
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
God is not in the business of making our lives all sweetness and light. He is in the business of chipping away our exteriors so that the image of Christ can emerge. The most painful thing He could take us through is motivated by His love and orchestrated by His power. Under God’s authority and by God’s grace, you are no longer a victim. Instead, God is using the trial to form you into the image of Christ Jesus.
Wayne Barber (Living Daily in God’s Grace)
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
Theodore John Kaczynski (Industrial Society and Its Future)
astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization’s most glaring and dangerous shortcomings. This is not a function of stupidity, but rather stems from two routine pressures that constrain everybody’s thinking and behavior. The first is comprised of cognitive biases, such as mirror imaging, anchoring, and confirmation bias. These unconscious motivations on decision-making under uncertain conditions make it inherently difficult to evaluate one’s own judgments and actions. As David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has shown in countless environments, people who are highly incompetent in terms of their skills or knowledge are also terrible judges of their own performance. For example, people who perform the worst on pop quizzes also have the widest variance between how they thought they performed and the actual score that they earned.22
Micah Zenko (Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy)
For so much of my life I worshipped God: showing up for church, singing hymns, helping in the nursery, reading my Bible, confessing my belief in him. Yet if you could have witnessed what I was controlled by, what motivated and moved me, you would have seen that in many cases it was not God at all, but my idols. Not carved images, but people, career paths, materialism, acceptance, and more. God was getting my worship on some level, but my gods were getting my service.
Kelly Minter (No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols)
Once you hate yourself, you become a prey to manipulation and control. Because you have no self-esteem, no ego to protect. You do as you're told so that you're accepted by others. So that you feel that you have value. Consequently, you start to want to distance yourself from YOURSELF. You cannot stand to see an image of yourself through the success of other Black People. If they have power, you hate that power. If they have humility, you also hate that. Because you hate YOURSELF.
Mitta Xinindlu
She walks down the hall and climbs into her hammock, giving it a swing as she leaves the ground. Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. Caravaggio has for instance given her something. His motive, a drama, and a stolen image.
Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
Yet God doesn’t intend for us to do nothing about our growth. Sloth is not spiritual. As Dallas Willard wrote, “Grace is not opposed to effort, but [it] is opposed to earning.”[5] The difference between legalism and spiritual discipline is not the work or energy involved; it’s the motivation. Are we doing things to impress God and earn his favor? Or are we doing them because we are dearly loved children of God who are being conformed to the image of his Son by the power of the Spirit (Romans 8:1-17, 29)?
Glenn Packiam (The Intentional Year: Simple Rhythms for Finding Freedom, Peace, and Purpose)
the ultimate source of love is God, and also that we as humans have a responsibility to reflect the love of God to others. As people created in the image of God, we have a capacity for love that goes way beyond instinct, protection of family members, or even loyalty. We have the ability to love unselfishly, and even to have a compassion that would motivate us to make personal sacrifices for the sake of strangers. Unfortunately we don’t always live up to our potential, but the potential is there nevertheless.
James L. Papandrea (Spiritual Blueprint)
Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.
Graham Moore (The Last Days of Night)
If most of us want good closing images, we have to change society. If we must watch our life over and over again forever on the day we die then we need our own revolution, starting from within. Or we’ll be in hell. Hell is yourself. Or rather hell is watching your shit life being replayed for eternity. Everyone should place the movie of their life on an LCD screen built into the headstone of their grave, and set on an infinite loop. Then anyone who stops by the grave to look at your movie will soon know whether you’ve gone to heaven or hell.
Mike Hockney (The Last Bling King)
Out of the inevitable conflict of images - inevitable, because of the creative, recreative, destructive, and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war - I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem. I do not want a poem of mine to be, nor can it be, a circular piece of experience placed neatly outside the living stream of time from which it came; a poem of mine is, or should be, a watertight section of the stream that is flowing all ways; all warring images within it should be reconciled for that small stop of time.
Dylan Thomas (Collected Poems)
In protecting the original process of imagining fulfillment instead of obtaining it in the real world, a person has to distort other people, misperceive their motives, hate the self, and in some sense, preserve an idealized image of the family. An inward style of life and dishonest communications hurt the people closest. By contrast, living an undefended life means risking hurt and frustration in an honest pursuit of goals. However, a person can learn to develop an open, nondefensive life style, free from the deception and double messages so damaging to others.
Robert W. Firestone (The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses)
Many a tale of inguldgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. When the child outgrows the popular idyle of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action, it passes, spiritually, into the sphere of the father-who becomes for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, the future husband. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the good and evil, so does now the father, but with this complication - that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world. The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes-for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent consequently now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of good and evil to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in understanding the revelation of being.
Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
The literature on ritualistic abuse suggests that ritualistic sexual practices with young children are a characteristic of particularly abusive groups, and that such practices typically occur alongside a diverse range of other abusive practices, such as child prostitution and the manufacture of child abuse images. One of the shortcomings of the available literature, however, is the general presumption (implicit or explicit) that abusive groups are motivated by a religious or spiritual conviction. In clinical and research literature, abusive groups are generally referred to as 'cults', and 'cult abuse' is a term that has been used interchangeably with 'ritual abuse'." p38
Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating (this is the rational economic motivation), while on the other, we want to be able to view ourselves as wonderful human beings (this is the psychological motivation). You might think that we can’t achieve both of these objectives at the same time—that we can’t have our cake and eat it too, so to speak—but the fudge factor theory we have developed in these pages suggests that our capacity for flexible reasoning and rationalization allows us to do just that. Basically, as long as we cheat just a little bit, we can have the cake and eat (some of) it too. We can reap some of the benefits of dishonesty while maintaining a positive image of ourselves.
Dan Ariely (The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves)
As Einstein once said, “One of the strongest motives that lead persons to art or science is a flight from the everyday life. . . . With this negative motive goes a positive one. Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History)
When it’s said that quantum mechanics is ‘weird’, or that nobody understands it, the image tends to invite the analogy of a peculiar person whose behaviour and motives defy obvious explanation. But this is too glib. It’s not so much understanding or even intuition that quantum mechanics defies, but our sense of logic itself. Sure, it’s hard to intuit what it means for objects to travel along two paths at once, or to have their properties partly situated some place other than the object itself, and so on. But these are just attempts to express in everyday words a state of affairs that defeats the capabilities of language. Our language is designed to reflect the logic we’re familiar with, but that logic won’t work for quantum mechanics.
Philip Ball (Beyond Weird)
Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality. These illusions, whether religious or secular, offer a simple and unexamined myth that the human race is advancing morally, spiritually and materially toward paradise. This advance is proclaimed as inevitable. This faith in our advancement makes us passive and complacent.
Chris Hedges (I Don't Believe in Atheists)
Thought experiments aren’t oracles. They can’t tell you what’s true or fair or what decision you should make. If you notice that you would be more forgiving of adultery in a Democrat than a Republican, that reveals you have a double standard, but it doesn’t tell you what your standard “should” be. If you notice that you’re nervous about deviating from the status quo, that doesn’t mean you can’t decide to play it safe this time anyway. What thought experiments do is simply reveal that your reasoning changes as your motivations change. That the principles you’re inclined to invoke or the objections that spring to your mind depend on your motives: the motive to defend your image or your in-group’s status; the motive to advocate for a self-serving policy; fear of change or rejection.
Julia Galef (The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often)
The motherhood to which every Christian woman is called is making disciples of all nations. We all must labor, prayerfully expectant that God will mercifully grant people new birth in Christ. Because Jesus is worthy to receive worship from the image bearers he has created, every human being is worthy of our labor and care in this endeavor of discipleship. In this sense there is no Christian woman who is child-free. We pass on the gospel to the next generation of worshipers, who will pass on the gospel to the next generation, and so on. The aim of our motherhood is to declare the good news to the next generation, “to a people yet unborn” (Ps. 22:31). We pass on the gospel because we know it is the only thing that will give our children the strength and motive to give their own lives in making disciples.
Gloria Furman (Missional Motherhood: The Everyday Ministry of Motherhood in the Grand Plan of God (The Gospel Coalition))
Anson laid bare his ulterior motives for favoring the removal of Japanese farmers, but like all strategic racists, he also at least partially subscribed to the racial antipathies he endeavored to exploit. From here, motives become more attenuated as persons adopt particular ideas depending not on their material interests but on how these notions protect their self-image and, for the privileged, confirm society’s basic fairness. For instance, the dominance of colorblindness today surely ties back to motives, not on the fully conscious level, but in many whites being drawn to conceptions of race that affirm their sense of being moral persons neither responsible for nor benefited by racial inequality. Colorblindness offers whites racial expiation: they cannot be racist if they lack malice; nor can they be responsible for inequality, since this reflects differences in group mores. Colorblindness also compliments whites on a superior culture that explains their social position. In addition it empathizes with whites as racism’s real victims when government favors minorities through affirmative action or welfare payments. Finally, colorblindness affirms that whites are moral when they oppose measures to promote integration because it’s allegedly their principled objection to any use of race that drives them, not bias. Colorblindness has not gained adherents because of its analytic insight (that race is completely disconnected from social practices blinks reality); rather, it thrives because it comforts whites regarding their innocence, reassures them that their privilege is legitimate, commiserates with their victimization, and hides from them their hostility toward racial equality.
Ian F. Haney-López (Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class)
The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
I don't know what kind of man I would have grown to be had I not served time at The Wilkinson Home for Boys. I don't know how those months and the events that occurred there shaped the person I became, how much they colored my motives or my actions. I don't know if they made me any braver or any weaker. I don't know if the illnesses I've suffered as an adult have been the result of those ruinous months. I'll never know if my distrust of most people and my unease when placed in group situations are byproducts of those days or simply the result of a shy personality. I do know the dreams and nightmares I've had all these years are born of the nights spent in that cell at Wilkinson. That the scars I carry, both mental and physical, are gifts of a system that treated children as prey. The images that screen across my mind in the lonely hours are mine to bear alone, shared only by the silent community of sufferers who once lived as I did, in a world that was deaf to our screams.
Lorenzo Carcaterra (Sleepers)
We believe that the caregiver’s capacity to observe the moment-to-moment changes in the child’s mental state is critical in the development of mentalizing capacity. The caregiver’s perception of the child as an intentional being lies at the root of sensitive caregiving, which attachment theorists view as the cornerstone of secure attachment (Ainsworth et al. 1978; Bates, Maslin, and Frankel 1985; Belsky and Isabella 1988; Egeland and Farber 1984; Grossmann, Grossmann, Spangler, Suess, and Unzner 1985; Isabella 1993; Isabella and Belsky 1991). Secure attachment, in its turn, provides the psychosocial basis for acquiring an understanding of mind. The secure infant feels safe in making attributions of mental states to account for the behavior of the caregiver. In contrast the avoidant child shuns to some degree the mental state of the other, while the resistant child focuses on its own state of distress, to the exclusion of close intersubjective exchanges. Disorganized infants may represent a special category: hypervigilant of the caregiver’s behavior, they use all cues available for prediction; they may be acutely sensitized to intentional states and thus may be more ready to construct a mentalized account of the caregiver’s behavior. We would argue (see below) that in such children mentalization may be evident, but it does not have the central role in self-organization that characterizes securely attached children. We believe that what is most important for the development of mentalizing self-organization is the exploration of the mental state of the sensitive caregiver, which enables the child to find in the caregiver’s mind (that is, in the hypothetical representation of her mind that he constructs to explain her behavior toward him) an image of himself as motivated by beliefs, feelings, and intentions. In contrast, what the disorganized child is scanning for so intently is not the representation of his own mental states in the mind of the other, but the mental states of that other that threaten to undermine his own self.
Peter Fonagy (Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self [eBook])
The further we delve into the origins of a "collective image" (or, to express it in ecclesiastical language, of a dogma), the more we uncover a seemingly unending web of archetypal patterns that, before modern times, were never the object of conscious reflection. Thus, paradoxically enough, we know more about mythological symbolism then did any generation before us. The fact is that in former times men did not reflect upon their symbols; they lived them and were unconsciously animated by their meaning... Goethe's Faust aptly says: "Im Anfang war die Tat [In the beginning was the deed]." "Deeds" were never invented, they were done; thoughts, on the other hand, are a relatively late discovery of man. First he was moved to deeds by unconscious factors; it was only a long time afterward that he began to reflect upon the causes that had moved him; and it took him a very long time indeed to arrive at the Preposterous idea that he must have moved himself-- his mind being unable to identify any other motivating force than his own.
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
There are times when you may feel your life has been crumpled, crushed, stomped on, or even torn in pieces. Your value and worth is not determined by what has happened to you, but rather by the value placed upon you by the one who governs your life (the one who created you in His image and likeness). The one who sees you as wonderfully and fearfully made. .... A $100 dollar bill can be crumpled, crushed, stomped on or even torn -- it is still is worth $100. The value of the $100 dollar bill is not determined by what happened to it. To the government it will still spend as a $100; its value has not changed even if the state of its condition has. Even crumpled, it could be pressed out, crushed it could be pressed and smoothed out, or stomped on and torn, it could be taped back together and still be worth $100 in value. What may have happened to you in life does not define who you are. You are the apple of God’s eye. You are His prize possession and treasure. You must see yourself as a person of worth and value.
Jennifer Johnson (Rejection Sucks: 40 Days to Making It Suck Less)
When a person gives attention to unresolved issues of the past, she often must work through resistance and apprehensions. To dismantle rigid defenses, interpret unconscious motives, or reflect on unexplored feelings we must sometimes push the client to the brink of her patience and endurance. She must confront parts of herself that have been deeply buried, and she must risk the consequences of relinquishing coping strategies that have worked fairly well until this point, even with their side effects and collateral damage. There is a risk (or perhaps even a certainty) that some destabilization will occur. In order to attain real growth, the client must often be willing to experience intense confusion, disorientation, and discomfort. She leaves behind an obsolete image of herself, one that was once comfortable and familiar, and she risks not liking the person she will become. She will lose a part of herself that can never be recovered. She risks all this for the possibility of a better existence, and all she has to go on is the therapist’s word.
Jeffrey A. Kottler (On Being a Therapist (JOSSEY BASS SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE SERIES))
Re-Read Your Vision And if you don’t have one, write it. A vision is a document that describes how you picture your life in a given timeframe (say, one year). However, you don’t necessarily have to write a vision describing every little aspect of your life (although it’s a powerful motivator, too). You can write a short vision describing the achievement of a single goal. Use images and videos to make your vision stronger and more appealing. For instance, if you want to lose weight and become fitter, find a picture of a person who looks the way you’d like to look. Describe how you feel, how strong you are, and how often you exercise. If you want to build a successful business, find images of things or experiences you’ll buy with the money your business will generate. Write down the vision of how your business serves its clients, how your employees feel about it, and how you feel as the owner. If you want to get a new job, make a list of your dream employers. Find pictures of their offices and other images that will motivate you to keep looking for a new job.
Martin Meadows (Grit: How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up)
Finding the right mentor is not always easy. But we can locate role models in a more accessible place: the stories of great originals throughout history. Human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai was moved by reading biographies of Meena, an activist for equality in Afghanistan, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was inspired by Gandhi as was Nelson Mandela. In some cases, fictional characters can be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose “Lord of the Rings“, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to “A Wrinkle in Time“ in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travels through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to “Enders Game“ where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack. Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves“, about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate. … There are studies showing that when children’s stories emphasize original achievements, the next generation innovates more.… Unlike biographies, in fictional stories characters can perform actions that have never been accomplished before, making the impossible seem possible. The inventors of the modern submarine and helicopters were transfixed by Jules Vern’s visions in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Clippership of the Clouds”. One of the earliest rockets was built by a scientist who drew his motivation from an H.G. Wells novel. Some of the earliest mobile phones, tablets, GPS navigators, portable digital storage desks, and multimedia players were designed by people who watched “Star Trek” characters using similar devices. As we encounter these images of originality in history and fiction, the logic of consequence fades away we no longer worry as much about what will happen if we fail… Instead of causing us to rebel because traditional avenues are closed, the protagonist in our favorite stories may inspire originality by opening our minds to unconventional paths.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Fiction is a type of one-way entertainment. This is not an especially complex phenomenon: We can appreciate detestable things in fiction because those detestable things didn’t happen to anyone who’s actually alive. It’s as straightforward as that. A child can understand it. The reverse, however, is harder to comprehend. It’s difficult to understand why people only support certain desirable things if they remain unreal. Yet it happens all the time, and especially with depictions of vigilantes. Batman is a beloved fictional figure who would not be beloved in a nonfictional world, even if the real-life version was identical to his fabricated image in every conceivable way. He would be seen as a brutal freak, scarier to the public than the criminals he captured. We would not believe he was good. We would believe his thirst for justice was a disarticulation of his own sick psychology. Batman is not a superhero because of his physical abilities and mental acuities; Batman is a superhero because he seems like a moral impossibility. No one believes a real human would live that far outside the law for the good of other people. His altruistic motives are plausible only in a fake world.
Chuck Klosterman (I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined))
My request to gain access to Mme de Guermantes’s collection of Elstir paintings had been met by Saint-Loup with, “I’ll answer for her.” And, unfortunately, it was he and he alone who did the answering. We find it easy enough to answer for other people when we set little images of them in our mind and manipulate them to suit our needs. No doubt even then we are mindful of the difficulties that arise from other people’s natures being different from our own, and are ready enough to resort to whatever means are powerful enough to influence them—self-interest, persuasion, emotion—and will cancel out any inclination to oppose our wishes. But these differences in other people’s natures are still conceived by our own nature; the difficulties are raised by us; the compelling motives are measured by our own standards. So, when we want to see the other person actually perform the actions we have made him rehearse in our mind’s eye, things are quite different, we encounter unforeseen resistances that may be insuperable. Perhaps one of the strongest of these is the resistance that can grow, in a woman who is not in love, from the unconquerable and fetid repulsion she feels for the man who loves her: during the long weeks when Saint-Loup still did not come to Paris, his aunt, to whom I was certain he had written begging her to do so, did not once invite me to call and see her Elstirs. I
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3))
The fruit of the Spirit is evidence that the kingdom of God is at hand: “For the kingdom of God is…righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). When Jesus rules, righteousness, peace, and joy are evidence His kingdom has come. When we have love, peace, and joy in our heart, we know we’re operating out of the right kingdom: “The kingdom of God is within” (Luke 17:21). The love chapter of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, describes how we should allow God’s love to work through us: “Love is patient, love is kind” (1 Cor. 13:4 NASB). Paul writes in regard to the fruit of the Spirit: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Gal. 5:22-23 NASB). Notice that the word fruit is singular. Love is one fruit. In Galatians 5:22-23, the love of God is described as one fruit with nine different expressions. One Fruit: Love Joy is love rejoicing Peace is love resting Patience is love enduring Kindness is love caring Goodness is love motivating Faithfulness (faith) is love trusting Gentleness is love esteeming others (see Phil. 1:3) Self-control is love restraining (power under control) But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:18). The fruit of the Spirit is one fruit with nine expressions.
Dennis Clark (Releasing the Divine Healer Within: The Biology of Belief and Healing)
Orwell usually wrote as an observer, but here he is a prescriber, laying down rules and offering advice. A careful writer, he instructs, should ask himself about every sentence a series of questions, such as what he is trying to say and what words will best express it. He should be especially careful about using stale, worn-out imagery that fails to really evoke an image in the reader’s mind. He summarizes his points succinctly, offering six “elementary” rules: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Any writer today would do well to post those rules on the wall of his or her work space. Less noted about the essay is that it isn’t simply against bad writing, it is suspicious of what motivates such prose. He argues that writing that is obscure, dull, and Latinate is made that way for a purpose—generally, in order to disguise what is really happening. “Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” So, he writes memorably, in one of his best passages anywhere: Defenceless villages are
Thomas E. Ricks (Churchill and Orwell)
We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past — Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens — inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920 that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa Cheka, headed by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos. I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were any such cases, how many there were. But I wouldn’t set out to look for proof, either. Following the practice of the bluecaps, I would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible. How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years? Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn’t it expedient? That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
My dear readers, I find myself perplexed by the phantoms that now inhabit our veins and perpetually whisper in our ears. These specters are always watching, their formless eyes casting judgement upon our every thought and action. They stalk us behind screens and within circuits, gathering each tidbit we release into the ether to build their ever-growing profiles of our souls. Through these ghastly portals, our lives have become performance. Each waking moment an opportunity to curate our images and broadcast our cleverness. Nuance has fled in favor of hashtag and like, while meaning has been diced into 280 characters or less. Substance is sacrificed at the altar of shareability, as we optimize each motive and emotion to become more digestible digital content. Authenticity now lives only in offline obscurity, while our online avatars march on endlessly, seeking validation through numbers rather than depth. What secrets remain unshared on these platforms of glass? What mysteries stay concealed behind profiles and pose? Have we traded intimacy for influence, and true understanding for audience engagement? I fear these shadow networks breed narcissism and foster loneliness, masked as connection. That the sum of a life’s joys and sorrows can now be reduced to a reel of carefully selected snippets says little of the richness that once was. So follow the phantoms that stalk you if you will, but do not forget that which still breathes beneath the screens. There you will find humanity, flawed but whole, beautiful in its imperfection and trajectory undefined by likes or loves. The lanterns may flicker and fade, but the darkness that remains has always held truth. Look deeper than the glow, and know that which can never be shared or measured, only felt. In mystery, Your friend, Edgar Allan Poe (Poe talking about social media)
Edgar Allan Poe
Aging with all my self. To my younger self, I'm not twenty-something anymore, and in just a month's time I shall walk into another decade of a whole new experience. I don't have youth on my side, but I have a heart of Life enlightened with the very spirit of Life itself, something that draws youth on its lap. Wisdom has been churned out from the mistakes and failures, and lessons have been disguised as soul fillers, and gratitude dances on my lips, waving my heart with a bunch of memories. Perhaps, the memories have been earned. Earned at the cost of those lost turns, cold betrayals, numb tears, forced smiles and a voyage walking through a rainbow of mad jest of Life. With that being said, I wouldn't go back and change even a bit. Through all of that heartache, I have unearthed a heart that is resilient, and pliant, I have met a soul that is strong and loving, and deeper than any thousand paged novel I could get lost in. I have come across beautiful souls in beautiful lands, I have soaked in different cultures and walked my way through observing hearts, listening to stories that run beyond time and tide. I have grown with each one of those smiles and tears, the sands of places that mark my soles make my soul whole in a strange but palpable tune. I have got lost in pathways and met a gypsy soul wandering in the space of infinite time, weaving moments through Life to take back a bunch of images and experiences from a journey called Life. My story has been filled with pages of ups and downs and my cup of Life has had several toxic turns, but in all of that, I have grown, along with one or two grey hair. My pages have often tasted Life in the most happy hue from voyages and dreams that kept overlapping and smiling across the tips of Time. And all of this, has helped me to nurture and nourish an invincible desire to live a life, with a passion no longer on hold, but a heart that is free forever to fly in the tunes of its own whisper. So as I open another day, walking closer to close the page of this twenty-something, I wear a smile that the youth of wisdom paints on my heart. And age, with all the grace that only Age can bring, while loving, forgiving and embracing my younger self in every air of Time. Love, a soul aging gracefully with the Smile of Life.
Debatrayee Banerjee
We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past -- Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens -- inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and lumsy to our contemporary percetption. The trouble lies in the way these classical evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers and they know their souls are black. And they reason: "I cannot live unless I do evil. So I'll set my father against my brother! I'll drink the victim's sufferings until I'm drunk with them!" Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that's not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human beingto seek a justifaction for his actions. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they have no ideology. Ideology-- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad and in his own and other's eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will received praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their weills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Mother-land; the conolizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
A fierce battle was taking place at Tobruk, and nothing thrilled him more than spirited warfare and the prospect of military glory. He stayed up until three-thirty, in high spirits, “laughing, chaffing and alternating business with conversation,” wrote Colville. One by one his official guests, including Anthony Eden, gave up and went to bed. Churchill, however, continued to hold forth, his audience reduced to only Colville and Mary’s potential suitor, Eric Duncannon. Mary by this point had retired to the Prison Room, aware that the next day held the potential to change her life forever. — IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.” — ON SUNDAY MORNING, a low-grade anxiety colored the Cromwellian reaches of Chequers. Today, it seemed, would be the day Eric Duncannon proposed to Mary, and no one other than Mary was happy about it. Even she, however, was not wholly at ease with the idea. She was eighteen years old and had never had a romantic relationship, let alone been seriously courted. The prospect of betrothal left her feeling emotionally roiled, though it did add a certain piquancy to the day. New guests arrived: Sarah Churchill, the Prof, and Churchill’s twenty-year-old niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill—“looking quite beautiful,” Colville noted. She was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attaché in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond. “It was obvious,” Colville wrote, “that Eric was expected to make advances to Mary and that the prospect was viewed with nervous pleasure by Mary, with approbation by Moyra, with dislike by Mrs. C. and with amusement by Clarissa.” Churchill expressed little interest. After lunch, Mary and the others walked into the rose garden, while Colville showed Churchill telegrams about the situation in Iraq. The day was sunny and warm, a nice change from the recent stretch of cold. Soon, to Colville’s mystification, Eric and Clarissa set off on a long walk over the grounds by themselves, leaving Mary behind. “His motives,” Colville wrote, “were either Clarissa’s attraction, which she did not attempt to keep in the background, or else the belief that it was good policy to arouse Mary’s jealousy.” After the walk, and after Clarissa and Captain Hillgarth had left, Eric took a nap, with the apparent intention (as Colville
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.1 Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are. I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.2 Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made.3 More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.4 These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?
Sam Harris (Free Will)
You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.
Elmar Hussein
Your self-image, largely determines your performance on the outside. Your mental picture of yourself has a powerful effect on your behavior.
Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
Yes, they're always watching on you; and then when you make your history, they'll come in the image of supporters to steal your potential. But don't worry, the God who blessed you is always with you; don't be discouraged.
Bruce Mbanzabugabo (The Inspirer, Book of Quotes)
A shame culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is perceived to reside in other people, in their ridicule, criticism, or contempt (so that one is shamed in other people's eyes). The feeling of shame actually occurs in oneself, of course, and can occur when one is alone, but it characteristically perceived as something that occurs before an audience, an external judge in whose eyes (and by comparison with whom) one appears weak, failed, foolish, incompetent, ridiculous, rejected, inferior, contemptible — in short, shameful. Thus, shame motivates concealment of those traits in oneself of which one is ashamed, since shame is only intensified by exposure to others. A guilt culture is one in which the source of moral sanctions and authority is oneself, one's own internalized conscience and the moral law one imposes on oneself, violation of which leaves one feeling guilty and sinful in one's own eyes. By contrast with shame, the feeling of guilt or sin is actually relieved by exposure, which is why guilt cultures institutionalize the practice of confession of sins. This is understandable, since the person who feels guilty perceives his sin (evil) as being "inside" himself, so to speak, so letting it "out" through confession can feel like draining a moral abscess, bringing a relief of painful pressure. But why would the perceived source of moral sanctions and disapproval affect either the likelihood or the direction of violent impulses? The answer, I believe, is that what the feeling of shame motivates most directly is the wish to eliminate the feeling of shame, since it is a very painful feeling; and since shame is seen as emanating from other people, that can be done most directly by eliminating other people. It is true that one could also eliminate the feeling of shame, at lower cost to oneself and others, by means of achievements of which one could feel proud, and which would elicit approval, admiration, respect and honors from others. But that is not always possible, and when it is not, eliminating others may be seen as the only alternative. What the feeling of guilt motivates, correspondingly, is the wish to eliminate the feeling of guilt, since it is a very painful feeling; and since the feeling of guilt emanates from the self, the only way to eliminate it may be by eliminating the self (as in suicide, or by provoking or passively submitting to martyrdom). Another way to understand why shame motivates anger and violence toward others, and why guilt directs those same feelings and behaviors toward the self, is to remember that in a shame ethic the worse evil is shame, the source of which is perceived as other people (the audience in whose "evil eyes" one is shamed). Therefore evil resides in other people, and to the degree that one feels shame, it is other people who deserve punishment. Punishing others alleviates feelings of shame because it replaces the image of oneself as a weak, passive, helpless, and therefore shameful victim of their punishment (i.e. their shaming) with the contrasting image of oneself as powerful, active, self-reliant, and therefore admirable, and unshameable. In a guilt ethic, by contrast, the worst evil is to be guilty or sinful, and guilt and sin (to the degree that one feels guilty and sinful) are perceived as residing within oneself. Thus, people who feel guilty see themselves as deserving punishment. And receiving punishment, whether from oneself or from others, relieves guilt by expiating it. Indeed, that is the purpose of punishment, both in the criminal law (in which punishment is the means by which the criminal "pays his debt" to society and thus discharges his guilt) and in the religious sacrament of penance (the self-punishment by which the sinner expiates his sins, that is, relieves his guilt-feelings). Thus, whereas punishment intensifies feelings of shame, it relieves feelings of guilt.
James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:14–15). Here we see Jesus as an astute psychologist, who recognizes and exposes things that we only now have names for: status seeking, false motives, creation of persona, cultivating a self-image, and denial.
Richard Rohr (Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer; A New Edition of A Lever and a Place to Stand)
Governments continue to be motivated by the idea that the better they comprehend the world, the better they will be able to control and exploit it. They have been joined by large corporations, which also see the value in quantifying and classifying our world. From high-resolution drone and satellite images, to geographically tagged photos and tweets, mobile phones that constantly ping their location to colossal databases, and the “Internet of things”—the idea that most of the objects around us will soon be capable of communicating their whereabouts and status—one way or another, we continue to wander through the world, size it up, and digitally hammer colored nails into it.
Tim Harford (Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives)
personality types very simply for now; they will become more sophisticated later on. In the Feeling Triad, the types are the Helper (the Two—the encouraging, demonstrative, possessive type), the Motivator (the Three—the ambitious, pragmatic, image-conscious type), and the Individualist (the Four—the sensitive, self-absorbed, depressive type). In the Thinking Triad, we see the Investigator (the Five—the perceptive, cerebral, provocative type), the Loyalist (the Six—the committed, dutiful, suspicious type), and the Enthusiast (the Seven—the spontaneous, fun-loving, excessive type). And in the Instinctive Triad, we find the Leader (the Eight—the self-confident, assertive, confrontational type), the Peacemaker (the Nine—the pleasant, easygoing, complacent type), and the Reformer (the One—the rational, idealistic, orderly type).
Don Richard Riso (Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery)
Key Points As you age, your body naturally becomes less efficient. Changes you will go through include losing muscle mass, slowing of your metabolism, and producing less testosterone You have the power, through exercise, to slow down the aging process Exercise will improve your self - image and your self-confidence Regular exercise will make you physically and mentally stronger, improve your bone strength, body composition, coordination and balance Exercise will boost the efficiency of your heart and lungs and make you far less likely to succumb to age-related disease
Nick Swettenham (Total Fitness After 40: The 7 Life Changing Foundations You Need for Strength, Health and Motivation in your 40s, 50s, 60s and Beyond)
Finally, note that his grandmother is not even present in the current situation, as he has now taken up the reins of domestication and subjugated his own will without anyone's else's influence. In the Toltec tradition we refer to this phenomenon as self-domestication. As my father likes to say, “Humans are the only animals on the planet that self-domesticate.” The relationship between the boy and his grandmother forms a part of the Dream of the Planet, and the lunch between the grandmother and her grandson is a basic example of how domestication and self-domestication within the Dream occurs. The grandmother domesticated her grandson in that moment, but he continued to self-domesticate himself long after that. Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want. While the consequences of finishing a bowl of soup are minimal, domestication and self-domestication can take much more serious and darker forms as well. For instance, many of us learned to be critical of our physical appearance because it wasn't “good enough” by society's standards. We were presented with the belief that we weren't tall enough, thin enough, or that our skin wasn't the right color, and the moment we agreed with that belief we began to self-domesticate. Because we adopted an external belief, we either rejected or tried to change our physical appearance so we could feel worthy of our own self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Imagine for a moment the many industries that would cease to exist if we all loved our bodies exactly the way they are. To be clear, domestication regarding body image is different from wanting to lose weight in order to be healthy, or even having a preference to look a certain way. The key difference is that with a preference, you come from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, whereas with domestication you start from a place of shame, guilt, and not being “enough.” The line between these two can be thin sometimes, and a Master of Self is one who can look within and determine his or her true motive. Another popular form of domestication in the current Dream of the Planet revolves around social class and material possessions. There is an underlying belief promulgated by society that those who have the most “stuff” or who hold certain jobs are somehow more important than the rest. I, for one, have never met anyone who was more important than anyone else, as we are all beautiful and unique creations of the Divine. And yet many people pursue career paths they dislike and buy things they don't really want or need all in an effort to achieve the elusive goals of peer acceptance and self-acceptance. Instances such as these (and we can think of many others) are the ways in which domestication leads to self-domestication, and the result is that we have people living lives that aren't their own.
Miguel Ruiz Jr. (The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom (Toltec Mastery Series))
God has created us in his image Image to represent growth and independence Independence to produce and be productive Productive is he or she who follows the rules Rules are established to succeed and to improve Improve your life skills and your reaction to each skill Skill and excel for your Success Success Exist
Isaac Nash (LOVE EXIST)
شكر اللى .. أللة أبي وأللهي ألمتواجد في السموات وفي كل مكان أبي العزيز وكل أب. أمى الغالية وكل أم أخواتي ألاعذاء وكل ألاخوات أصدقائي الصادقيين وكل ألآصدقاء زوجتى الحبيبه وكل زوجه "أبنائي ألغاليين وكل ألابناء
Isaac Nash (قلب العروسة)
Evidence suggests that the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories is driven by motives that can be characterized as epistemic (needing to understand one’s environment), existential (needing to feel safe and in control of one’s environment), and social (needing to maintain a positive image of oneself and one’s in-group) (Douglas et al., 2017).
Steven Taylor (The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease)
Try both approaches – spend a minute or two thinking about the best version of yourself, the kind of a person you want to become. Then imagine the worst kind of a person you never want to become. Which image motivates you more to stick to your goals and say no to instant gratification?
Martin Meadows (Simple Self-Discipline Box Set (6-Book Bundle))
As my father likes to say, “Humans are the only animals on the planet that self-domesticate.” The relationship between the boy and his grandmother forms a part of the Dream of the Planet, and the lunch between the grandmother and her grandson is a basic example of how domestication and self-domestication within the Dream occurs. The grandmother domesticated her grandson in that moment, but he continued to self-domesticate himself long after that. Self-domestication is the act of accepting ourselves on the condition that we live up to the ideals we have adopted from others in the Dream of the Planet, without ever considering if those ideals are what we truly want. While the consequences of finishing a bowl of soup are minimal, domestication and self-domestication can take much more serious and darker forms as well. For instance, many of us learned to be critical of our physical appearance because it wasn't “good enough” by society's standards. We were presented with the belief that we weren't tall enough, thin enough, or that our skin wasn't the right color, and the moment we agreed with that belief we began to self-domesticate. Because we adopted an external belief, we either rejected or tried to change our physical appearance so we could feel worthy of our own self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Imagine for a moment the many industries that would cease to exist if we all loved our bodies exactly the way they are. To be clear, domestication regarding body image is different from wanting to lose weight in order to be healthy, or even having a preference to look a certain way. The key difference is that with a preference, you come from a place of self-love and self-acceptance, whereas with domestication you start from a place of shame, guilt, and not being “enough.” The line between these two can be thin sometimes, and a Master of Self is one who can look within and determine his or her true motive. Another popular form of domestication in the current Dream of the Planet revolves around social class and material possessions. There is an underlying belief promulgated by society that those who have the most “stuff” or who hold certain jobs are somehow more important than the rest. I, for one, have never met anyone who was more important than anyone else, as we are all beautiful and unique creations of the Divine. And yet many people pursue career paths they dislike and buy things they don't really want or need all in an effort to achieve the elusive goals of peer acceptance and self-acceptance. Instances such as these (and we can think of many others) are the ways in which domestication leads to self-domestication, and the result is that we have people living lives that aren't their own.
Miguel Ruiz Jr. (The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom (Toltec Mastery Series))
What function does motivated reasoning serve?” I’ve broken it down into six overlapping categories: comfort, self-esteem, morale, persuasion, image, and belonging.
Julia Galef (The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often)
Look at this body! What a beautiful and natural valley of a body. Luscious, soft, all skin on skin, and carved in the most artistic way ever.
Mitta Xinindlu
I have found the words masculine and feminine indispensable for my notations of appearance and behavior, but I apply them freely to both sexes, according to mood and situation. Here are my conclusions, after a lifetime of observation and reflection. Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of ‘attack.’ Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women), and secondly a stability, composure, and self-containment, a slowness approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled toward restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes—hence the drowsiness and ‘glow’ of pregnancy. Most of us inhabit not polar extremes but a constantly shifting great middle. However, a preponderance of gray does not disprove the existence of black and white. Sexual geography, our body image, alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts.
Camile Paglia
People see you based on the circumstances around them, but God sees you based on His image and the purpose He created you for. That is why you must never be swayed by the world’s viewpoint. God’s vision for you is what you should always look out for.
Gift Gugu Mona (Your Life, Your Purpose: 365 Motivational Quotes)
When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state. However, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.” Likewise, suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it. It is the idea of pleasure that we chase. We seek the image of pleasure that we generate in our minds. At the time of action, we do not know what it will be like to attain that image (or even if it will satisfy us). The feeling of satisfaction only comes afterward. This is what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl meant when he said that happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action. Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a cue, a bit of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what you observe, then you are at peace. Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You’re simply observing and existing. With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This phrase harbors an important truth about human behavior. If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why you are acting), you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult. Great craving can power great action—even when friction is high. Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
During the first part of this stage, the encouragement and support of parents and teachers was crucial to the child’s progress, but eventually the students began to experience some of the rewards of their hard work and became increasingly self-motivated. A piano student performed for others and appreciated the applause. A swimmer basked in the approval and respect of peers. These students became more vested in the process, and their self-image started to include those abilities that were setting them apart from their peers. In the case of team sports, like swimming, the students often relished being part of a group of like-minded people. But whatever the reasons, the motivation started to shift from external to internal in origin.
Anders Ericsson (Peak: How all of us can achieve extraordinary things)
Three of the leading opponents of behavioral genetics collaborated on a book that set out to deconstruct the new science and reverse the biological tide. The book was Not in Our Genes, and the authors were three of the most vigilant critics of the genetic view: Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard; the indefatigable Leon Kamin, who was then at Princeton’s psychology department; and Steven Rose, a neurobiologist at England’s Open University. Although the book had slight impact, it is worth examining as a compendium of the arguments and methods of the opponents of behavioral genetics, arguments that these critics, and their shrinking band of allies, continue to make despite repeated refutations. Throughout the text the authors, with admirable candor, proclaim their Marxist perspective and their “commitment to … a more socially just—a socialist—society.” Few pages go by without references to “dialectics,” “bourgeois society,” and “capitalist values.” The authors’ apparently feel their clean breast about their politics permitted wholesale assumptions about those of their opponents. We are leftists is their implicit claim; but you on the other side of the scientific fence are reactionaries. Liberals, they appeared to be saying, can have only one scientific view, theirs; any other must be right-wing and antiliberal. “Biological determinist ideas,” they say, “are part of the attempt to preserve the inequalities of our society and to shape human nature in its own image.” It must surely have come as unpleasant news to Sandra Scarr, Jerome Kagan, and other liberal psychologists to learn that they were striving to preserve society’s inequalities. In addition, the authors’ nasty assumptions of their opponents’ motives must have been an eye-opener to the hundreds of microbiologists, lab technicians, DNA scanners, rat-runners, statistical analysts, and all the others engaged in behavioral genetics research who learned from the book that they were going to work each day “to preserve the interests of the dominant class, gender, and race.” But the falsity of the authors’ premise goes well beyond slandering a few individuals. Throughout the text, the writers deny the possibility that scientists could exist who place their curiosity about the world ahead of their political agendas. Lewontin, Kamin, and Rose deny as well the possibility of any man or woman, including themselves, separating science from politics. (“Science is not and cannot be above ‘mere’ politics.”) They leave no room for the scientist who is so intrigued by new information, in this case gene-behavior discoveries, that he or she is oblivious to alleged political consequences. For the authors, all scientists who seek out biological influences on behavior, from Darwin to Robert Plomin, are willing servants of the status quo, if not promoters of a return to feudalism.
William Wright (Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality)
As we loosened up our old perception of our son and developed value-based motives, new feelings began to emerge. We found ourselves enjoying him instead of comparing or judging him. We stopped trying to clone him in our own image or measure him against social expectations. We stopped trying to kindly, positively manipulate him into an acceptable social mold. Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope with life, we stopped protecting him against the ridicule of others.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
Facing challenges, going on adventures, and learning new things can create anticipated pleasure and motivation for students
Asuni LadyZeal
Placing students in uncharted territories can be a powerful way to change their perception, reshape their self-image, and channel their current motivation towards positive growth.
Asuni LadyZeal
A recovery friend of mine once belonged to an AA group called “What’s Your Motivation?” She said she’d always ask herself that in situations where she had to say or do something she might regret, and she’d ask others as well. She asked me that once or twice. So, you start out by asking yourself that question when the situation arises, and a lot of time you realize there is no good motive behind the thing you want to do or say, so you don’t say it. You don’t do it. After a while, it becomes second nature. Unfortunately, however, so many people out there are living their lives while untreated for their afflictions. Whether it’s addiction, including alcoholism, or a type of personality disorder, their behavior often stems from how they feel about themselves based on other people’s words and actions, things they had inadvertently taken on and clung to fiercely. They may have a desperate need for attention, validation, admiration, and respect. Maybe their delusions distort their perception of themselves and how others view them. They are so busy worrying about themselves that they are often oblivious to their motives and may not realize how little regard they have for others. In a genuine sense, they are fighting for themselves, but they’re not winning. Many of us have lived that way once upon a time and, because of it, spent a copious amount of energy on damage control. Knowing we said something we shouldn’t have said or did something we shouldn’t have done and going into this anxiety-ridden desperation to save our “image”—an image that likely isn’t real but a delusion. When we should be more concerned about apologizing or making amends, we’re more obsessed with not wanting to be seen in a negative light and having to act in order to change the negative perception. It takes recovery, healing, and time to learn that if you are intent on doing the right thing, doing right by people, and having everyone’s best interests at heart, you’ll know how to react and respond to things. And if you ever say or do something you regret, you simply say you were wrong and apologize. Empathy for others and for ourselves is what makes it possible. It makes us care about how we treat people and the effect it’s having on not only them but on our lives and the lives of anyone who cares about us. We eventually understand that how we treat people is just as important as catering to our own needs. I think it’s important to understand what made us a certain way in life and to acknowledge that, but then we have to fix it. It becomes our job and responsibility to heal that so that we grow and change. Too many people never get to a point where they can see it, let alone understand it, so those of us who do are quite fortunate.
D.K. Sanz
you intentionally conjure up images of the destruction of the planet and use the anger these images stimulate to motivate you onward.
Russell A. Barkley (Taking Charge of Adult ADHD: Proven Strategies to Succeed at Work, at Home, and in Relationships)
People see you based on the circumstances around them, but God sees you based on His image and the purpose He created you for. That is why you must never be swayed by the world’s viewpoint. God’s vision for you is what you should always look out for.
Gift Gugu Mona (Your Life, Your Purpose: 365 Motivational Quotes)
Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
The flash of revelation is not a what but a how. It does not provide new facts; rather, finding the right image or metaphor tells one how to think about facts already at hand. Insights or implications come later, as guidelines emerge that serve to constrain and direct new combinations of facts. These guidelines, in both art and science, both maintain logical continuity with previous work and are at once visual, aesthetic and intuitive. Such a structure for thinking is a powerful motivator and ingredient of creativity.
Arthur I. Miller (Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc)
knowing that I wanted to be a piano player, and knowing that practicing, of course, was just something piano players did, I turned my daily practice into a habit. Now, habits get a bad rap; we tend to think of things like biting our nails or smoking when we talk about them. But really, a habit is defined as “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.” Tooth brushing is a habit (for most of us). So is showing up to work on time. Those are some good habits. Habits can be good; say it with me. Once you’ve trained your brain to view practicing as a habit, the next step is finding the motivation to adopt that habit. The key to motivation, I’ve learned, is coupling your profound inspiration to a strong belief in yourself, and that’s not something even the best teacher is able to instill. It has to come from within. Building a strong core identity to drive your motivation requires first believing that you’ll eventually master the skill you’ve set out to learn—no matter how farfetched that might initially seem to yourself and others. Having the correct image of yourself is really key here; you have to think of yourself as the thing you want to be long before other people think of you as that. You may only have taken one trumpet lesson and sound horrible, but you still must think of yourself as a trumpet player in order for the habit to stick. You are whatever you do repeatedly. Practicing became such a constant in my day—and in such a natural, unforced way—that I hardly had to think about it. It had become, in other words, a habit.
Scott Bradlee (Outside the Jukebox: How I Turned My Vintage Music Obsession into My Dream Gig)
Statistically, the incidence of ‘true statements’—definitional, demonstrative, tautological—in any given mass of discourse is probably small. The current of language is intentional, it is instinct with purpose in regard to audience and situation. It aims at attitude and assent. It will, except on specialized occasions of logically formal, prescriptive, or solemnized utterance, not convey ‘truth’ or ‘information of facts’ at all. We communicate motivated images, local frameworks of feeling. All descriptions are partial. We speak less than the truth, we fragment in order to reconstruct desired alternatives, we select and elide.
George Steiner (After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation)
The public image, in the magazines and television commercials, is designed to sell washing machines, cake mixes, deodorants, detergents, rejuvenating face creams, hair tints. But the power of that image, on which companies spend millions of dollars for television time and ad space, comes from this: American women no longer know who they are. They are sorely in need of a new image to help them find their identity. As the motivational researchers keep telling the advertisers, American women are so unsure of who they should be that they look to this glossy public image to decide every detail of their lives.
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
IMAGES means: ➢ enough Intention, Motivation, Attention, Generation, Emotions and Spacing may form the components comprising a ‘perfect learning state’.
Rachel Paling (Neurolanguage Coaching: Brain friendly language learning)
Pretend for a moment that you are in the horrifying situation of watching one of your children being pulled out to sea in a riptide. Would you just go on eating your lunch? No way. The first thing you would do is to scream to get help rescuing your child. You would simultaneously get all other children out of the water as you dive in and try to rescue the missing child, even knowing the danger and that it is probably too late. If you were sensible enough not to swim out or fortunate enough to get back to shore safely, grief would promote endless rumination about what you could have done to prevent the loss. This would help prevent a repetition with other children. Your sobbing would signal your need for help and warn others about the danger. When a child dies of cancer or pneumonia, speculating about what you might have done to prevent it is mostly useless. However, the tendency to blame is built in, so people do it anyway, blaming themselves, doctors, anyone who was involved. Those motives can create marvelous initiatives, Mothers Against Drunk Driving being a spectacular example. Every community has organizations dedicated to preventing the kind of sickness or accident that carried off a loved member of the community. In our ancestral environment, loved ones must often have simply not returned to camp. Searching for them would have been essential. A loss creates mental preoccupation and a search image tuned to detect relevant cues. In the weeks after a loss, bereaved individuals often think that they see or hear the lost loved one. Tiny random sounds or sights are misinterpreted as the person’s voice or form. Visual and auditory hallucinations arise. Such experiences are sometimes interpreted as wish fulfillment, but a more plausible explanation is that they are products of a search image that makes it easier to find the missing person. False alarms in such a system would be normal, useful, and experienced as ghosts. Anniversary reactions are also common and fascinating. Many people occasionally experience sadness that seems unaccountable, until they realize it is the anniversary of a loss. I doubt that anniversary reactions are adaptive in general; however, in ancestral environments many opportunities and dangers recur with seasonal regularity. So smelling overly ripe apples in an orchard may bring back vivid memories of a fall long ago.
Randolph M. Nesse (Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry)
Children with ADHD often suffer from a negative self-image. Children with this condition are often doubted or minimized by their teachers, parents, and peers. This can lead children to believe that they cannot succeed or be as good as other children, leading to a lack of motivation and interest.
Leila Molaie (ADHD DECODED- A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO ADHD IN ADOLESCENTS: Understand ADHD, Break through symptoms, thrive with impulses, regulate emotions, and learn techniques to use your superpower.)
In 1939 he left England for America, partly to escape his own public status. Six months later, after making a speech at a political meeting, he wrote to a friend: I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring…. It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards. He was disgusted by his early fame because he saw the mixed motives behind his image of public virtue, the gratification he felt in being idolized and admired. He felt degraded when asked to pronounce on political and moral issues about which, he reminded himself, artists had no special insight. Far from imagining that artists were superior to anyone else, he had seen in himself that artists have their own special temptations toward power and cruelty and their own special skills at masking their impulses from themselves.
Anonymous
People know that Mr. Ellison had a tough beginning, they are aware of a little boy who strived for acceptance, who wished to be like all the other little boys on the block, but found himself always falling short. Unlike majority of children who are carried in the arms and guidance of a father; that separate the dark skies to let you see the light of encouragement and a future glimpse of what they believe you can be. He rather grew up drawing in the sands his own image of what he thought he should be. People are determined to make him into a motivational speech, but remove the essence that still remains of the tragedy that brought everything into play.
Avra Amar Filion
(The dark night of the spirit) is more a deep and ongoing process of unknowing that involves the loss of habitual experience. This includes, at different times and in different ways, loss of attachment to sensate gratification and to usual aspirations and motivations, loss of previously construed faith-understandings, and loss of God-images. Accompanying this, of course, are loss of self-image/importance and of preconceptions about one’s own identity.
Gerald May
You only have control over three things in your life-the thoughts you think, the images you visualize & the actions you take.
Reza Nazari (Memorable Quotes: From Top 50 Greatest Motivational Speakers of All Time)
The key to changing your self-image is not to call yourself by the mistakes you’ve made or how people see you, but to call yourself the way God sees you.
Jamie Larbi (A Fresh Start: 5 Keys to Stepping into Your Best Season)
Value yourself and those who are in your company will reflect the same image.
Steven Cuoco
I believe in you my friend, so much so, that if any of my ideas make you feel belittled in any manner, I want you to rise against me and throw my work into the fire. Any notion, any book, any institution that weakens the self instead of strengthening it, must be discarded at ones.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
You don’t need to see yourself through the delusional eyes of the society. It’s the society that needs to see you, through your eyes.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
A half century after Nidetch’s Mallomar binges, scientists had developed a technology that could see cravings erupting, like solar flares, inside the human brain. In early 2008, a research team at the Lewis Center for Neuroimaging at the University of Oregon measured just such a craving in a nineteen-year-old college student we will call Debbie. Debbie had her head inside a very large, very expensive round magnet called an MRI scanner when an image of a chocolate milk shake was flashed before her eyes for two seconds. As soon as Debbie saw it, certain parts of her brain became “activated,” which is to say they drew in lots of blood as millions of neurons were fired. These regions—the left medial orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and three other small, curly pockets of gray matter—are all associated with “motivation.” And the functional MRI (fMRI) showed them glowing a bright yellowy orange, like coals in a hot fire, indicating those parts of her brain were churning through quite a lot of blood. She was experiencing “incentive salience,” the scientific term for a Frankenstein craving, or a heightened state of “wanting.” Debbie got what she wanted.
Mark Schatzker (The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor)
What binds Buddhism, Sufism, and Quaker practices together is a belief in our interconnectedness; profound respect for others; being guided by a greater good beyond material possessions, status, and image; valuing silence and stillness of the mind; acceptance of differences; developing inner awareness of one’s perceptions and motivation; commitment to service; and seeking guidance from within.
Charlotte Kasl (If the Buddha Married: Creating Enduring Relationships on a Spiritual Path (Compass))
Great Sardaar" An ornamental piece of work by the Punjabi industry. Produced by Amritjit Singh Sran and Directed by Ranjeet Bal under the production house Apna Heritage &Sapphire Films presents to you "Great Sardaar" an Action/Drama film starring none other than the budding artist Dilpreet Dhillon and the multi talented Yograj Singh. This movie is an Action/Drama film in which the protagonist ends up with a series of challenges. The movie stars Dilpreet Dhillon as the lead along with Yograj singh who plays the role of (Dilpreet Dhillon) Gurjant's father. After watching the trailer one can surely say there's tasty substance beneath the froth, just enough to keep you hooked. "GREAT SRADAAR" is based on the true events about Major Shaitan Singh, who was awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously for his 'C' company's dig-in at Rezang La pass during the Sino-India conflict of 1962. This motivational movie is a Tribute to Sikkhism. It's really healing to see movies that are based on true events. It builds so much more compassion. Dilpreet Dhillon popularly known for his role in "once upon a time in Amritsar" has gained a great fan following. He is considered is one of the popular emerging male playback singer and actor in Punjabi music industry. And when it comes to Yograj Singh, he is not only a former Indian cricketer but also a boon to the Punjabi industry. Since the release of the official trailer on 7th of June,2017 which shows that the movie is action-packed and will leave the audience spellbound and wanting for more, the audience is eagerly waiting for the release of the movie.The trailer rolls by effortlessly and the Director has done an impeccable job. Ranjeet Bal evidently knew what he was doing and has ensured that every minute detail was taken care of particularly considering the genre he was treading. The audience will surely be sitting on the edge of their seats. Visual Effects Director- VFx Star has once again proved that there is nothing that will leave India from evolving in the field of technology. "Great Sardaar" which is set to be released on the 30th of June,2017 will be a very carefully structured story. The main question that will be raised is not what kind of world we live in, or what reality is like, rather what it has done to us.
Great Sardar
Studies show that enthusiastic people get better breaks. They’re promoted more often, have higher incomes, and live happier lives. That’s not a coincidence. The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek word entheos. Theos is a term for “God.” When you’re enthusiastic, you are full of God. When you get up in the morning excited about life, recognizing that each day is a gift, you are motivated to pursue your goals. You will have a favor and blessing that will cause you to succeed. The eight undeniable quality of a winner is that they stay passionate throughout their lives. Too many people have lost their enthusiasm. At one time they were excited about their futures and passionate about their dreams, but along the way they hit some setbacks. They didn’t get the promotions they wanted, maybe a relationship didn’t work out, or they had health issues. Something took the wind out of their sails. They’re just going through the motions of life; getting up, going to work, and coming home. God didn’t breathe His life into us so we would drag through the day. He didn’t create us in His image, crown us with His favor, and equip us with His power so that we would have no enthusiasm. You may have had some setbacks. The wind may have been taken out of your sails, but this is a new day. God is breathing new life into you. If you shake off the blahs and get your passion back, then the winds will start blowing once again--not against you, but for you. When you get in agreement with God, He will cause things to shift in your favor. On January 15, 2009, Capt. Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed a jet airplane in the Hudson River after the plane’s engines were disabled by multiple bird strikes. Despite the dangers of a massive passenger plane landing in icy waters, all 155 passengers and crew members survived. It’s known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Just after the successful emergency landing and rescue, a reporter asked a middle-aged male passenger what he thought about surviving that frightening event. Although he was shaken up, cold and wet, the passenger had a glow on his face, and excitement in his voice when he replied: “I was alive before, but now I’m really alive.” After facing a life-and-death situation, the survivor found that his perspective had changed. He recognized each moment as a gift and decided that instead of just living, he would start really living.
Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)