Indirectly Miss You Quotes

The missing piece is that you usually don’t get paid for your hobby itself; you get paid for helping other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it.

When he entered the anteroom, two women looked up at him. One was Miss Robertson, the governor's secretary; the other he did not recognize till she smiled and said his name in a gentle voice. She was Mrs. Freeman, the wife of the bishop; he saluted her and went to Miss Robertson. 'Will you tell them I'm here?' he said. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Haffner, they don't even want me to take minutes right now.' 'Well, just go tell them I'm out of the running.' There was not so much as a flicker in her eyes. 'They locked the door,' she said, 'and besides, I don't think they'll accept your withdrawal.' 'Won't they though. Just give them my message, Miss Robertson. I'm leaving.' 'Oh, Mr. Haffner, I know they'll want to see you. It's very important.' 'They will, huh. I'll give them half an hour.' He sat down beside her to talk. It was not that he liked Miss Robertson particularly. Her soul had been for a long time smoothed out and hobbled by girdles and high heels as her body; her personality was as blank and brown as her gabardine suit; her mind was exactly good enough to take down 140 any sort of words a minute without error, without boredom, without wincing. But she could talk idly in a bare room like this well enough; he remembered that she liked science-fiction; he drew her out. Besides, she was not Mrs. Freeman. Mrs. Freeman was a good woman; that is, she did good, and did not resent those who did bad but pitied them. For example, now: she was knitting alone while the other two talked, neither trying to join them nor, as John actively knew, making them uncomfortable for not having included her; and she was waiting for the bishop, who for reasons no one understood, hated to drive at night without her. John liked good people—no, he respected them above everyone else, above the powerful or beautiful or rich, whom he knew well, the gifted or learned or even the wise; indeed, he was rather in awe of the good, but their actual sweet presence made him uncomfortable. Mrs. Freeman there: with her hair drawn back straight to a bun, she sat in a steel-tube, leatherette chair, against a beige, fire-resistant, sound-absorbent wall, knitting in that ambient, indirect light socks for the mad; he knew quite well that if he should go over beside her she would talk with him in her gentle voice about whatever he wished to talk about, that she would have firm views which, however, she would never declare harshly against his should they differ, that she would tell him, if he asked about her work with the insane, what she had accomplished and what failed to accomplish, that she would make him acutely uncomfortable. He felt himself deficient not to be living, as people like Mrs. Freeman seemed to live, in an altogether moral world, but more especially he was reluctant to come near such people because he did not want to know more than he could help knowing of their motives; he did not trust motives; he was a lawyer. Therefore, though it was all but rude of him, he sat with Miss Robertson till the door opened.

At the moment, the kind of indirect control that agents exercise over their beliefs,11 is neither efficient nor reliable. Instead, it is very much a hit-or-miss affair. We change our beliefs in this indirect way12 by the kinds of means that Pascal recommended to the person who wanted to bring about belief in God: associate with believers, immerse yourself in religious writings, try to think and act like a believer; eventually, perhaps via the mechanisms of cognitive dissonance reduction, you may find yourself with the correlative belief. If and when that happens, you will not forget that you have the belief via a process of self-manipulation, but you will find yourself with a different take on the evidence. From your perspective, it will seem to you that you have manipulated yourself into holding a belief that is independently warranted.

In the finance sector, the annual bonus is calculated from a complex series of interconnecting variables, ranging from snappiness of suit, garishness of tie, and pointitude of shoe, to number of small businesses destroyed, quantity of third-world children indirectly starved, and number of puffs of cigar smoke blown in waitresses’ eyes during business lunches in titty bars with dubious Russian billionaires. For high-ranking executives, bonuses should be big enough to amaze and appal the watching world, but small enough not to bankrupt the entire company.22 For maximum satisfaction, any bonus over £250,000 should be presented as a suitcase full of used £10 notes, handed over by a large Eastern European or Colombian man in sunglasses, while a colleague in an overcoat brandishes a gun smiles and nods cockishly. Though such rewards are beyond the reach, comprehension and calculators of most ordinary people, there is no reason to miss out on the Age Of The Ludicrous Pay-Off: you simply need to declare yourself self-employed, and then award yourself an extravagantly gargantuan Christmas bonus.

You will have agriculture,” he declared. “Making flowers and trees grow pretty, making seeds turn into plants for me to smell and trees to bear fruits for me to eat. You will have the laborious work of harvest, hard and tiring.” I smiled at him. He was so arrogant. He missed completely that he indirectly made me the Goddess of Food, one of the most vital elements of life.

Do not waste another’s time and energy or your own patience by suggesting even indirectly that there is more than one course of action, if there is only one which will get the result you require. The work to be done takes half the time if the attention is undivided and so is free to go on to the next demand quickly. Have you ever been in an office where, let us say, a worker who considers herself rather too well-bred for the position she fills is one of your co-workers? “Oh, Mr. Robinson,” she will say, elaborately, “if you have just a moment to spare, will you go over those reports on your desk some time soon? I hate to trouble such a busy man, but Mr. Smith wants them.” Now, deplorable or not, it is just plain ornery human nature to wish you hadn’t just a moment to spare, to cast around you almost automatically for something else you might be doing which would make you far too busy to get to that request right away. Yet probably going over those reports is the next thing on your program, anyway; if you succumb to the temptation to hold up the work and teach the ex-countess a lesson, you hold up the whole work of the office and get into trouble with your superior officers. Now, wasn’t your time and energy wasted by the unfortunate way that simple request was made? Yet the chances are that you yourself say, “Miss Thomas, will you get me the Drummond correspondence, if you aren’t too busy?” when it is Miss Thomas’ function to get the correspondence at your request whether she is otherwise busy or not; when she will have to say “Certainly,” and pretend that she is free to refuse if she likes. It would be just as simple to say “Miss Thomas, I need the Drummond correspondence”—which would release her to go straight to the task, feeling that she was not receiving a consideration more than half-patronizing, and not even needing to make a perfunctory reply. If the tone of the simpler sentence is courteous and considerate you have not only left her feelings unwounded, you have treated her as your willing co-worker and given her cause not to think of herself as a touchy subordinate who must be mollified.