Keen To Learn Quotes

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

The curse of mortality. You spend the first portion of your life learning, growing stronger, more capable. And then, through no fault of your own, your body begins to fail. You regress. Strong limbs become feeble, keen senses grow dull, hardy constitutions deteriorate. Beauty withers. Organs quit. You remember yourself in your prime, and wonder where that person went. As your wisdom and experience are peaking, your traitorous body becomes a prison.

The ignorant learn from none, the simple learn from some, the intelligent learn from many, but enlightened learn from all. The arrogant learn from none, the gracious learn from some, the patient learn from many, but the humble learn from all. The disinterested learn from none, the curious learn from some, the keen learn from many, but the disciplined learn from all.

If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.

truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?

And your people tried to kill my best friend, so you'll forgive me if I'm not overly keen on learning the secret handshake." She shook her head sadly. "You should be going on dates and hanging out at the mall. Not wearing stakes on your belt." I shrugged one shoulder. "The mall sucks.

The most important thing we've learned, So far as children are concerned, Is never, NEVER, NEVER let Them near your television set -- Or better still, just don't install The idiotic thing at all. In almost every house we've been, We've watched them gaping at the screen. They loll and slop and lounge about, And stare until their eyes pop out. (Last week in someone's place we saw A dozen eyeballs on the floor.) They sit and stare and stare and sit Until they're hypnotised by it, Until they're absolutely drunk With all that shocking ghastly junk. Oh yes, we know it keeps them still, They don't climb out the window sill, They never fight or kick or punch, They leave you free to cook the lunch And wash the dishes in the sink -- But did you ever stop to think, To wonder just exactly what This does to your beloved tot? IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND! HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE! HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES! 'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say, 'But if we take the set away, What shall we do to entertain Our darling children? Please explain!' We'll answer this by asking you, 'What used the darling ones to do? 'How used they keep themselves contented Before this monster was invented?' Have you forgotten? Don't you know? We'll say it very loud and slow: THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ, AND READ and READ, and then proceed To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks! One half their lives was reading books! The nursery shelves held books galore! Books cluttered up the nursery floor! And in the bedroom, by the bed, More books were waiting to be read! Such wondrous, fine, fantastic tales Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales And treasure isles, and distant shores Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars, And pirates wearing purple pants, And sailing ships and elephants, And cannibals crouching 'round the pot, Stirring away at something hot. (It smells so good, what can it be? Good gracious, it's Penelope.) The younger ones had Beatrix Potter With Mr. Tod, the dirty rotter, And Squirrel Nutkin, Pigling Bland, And Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and- Just How The Camel Got His Hump, And How the Monkey Lost His Rump, And Mr. Toad, and bless my soul, There's Mr. Rat and Mr. Mole- Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books, Ignoring all the dirty looks, The screams and yells, the bites and kicks, And children hitting you with sticks- Fear not, because we promise you That, in about a week or two Of having nothing else to do, They'll now begin to feel the need Of having something to read. And once they start -- oh boy, oh boy! You watch the slowly growing joy That fills their hearts. They'll grow so keen They'll wonder what they'd ever seen In that ridiculous machine, That nauseating, foul, unclean, Repulsive television screen! And later, each and every kid Will love you more for what you did.

Yes, such has been my lot since childhood. Everyone read signs of non-existent evil traits in my features. But since they were expected to be there, they did make their appearance. Because I was reserved, they said I was sly, so I grew reticent. I was keenly aware of good and evil, but instead of being indulged I was insulted and so I became spiteful. I was sulky while other children were merry and talkative, but though I felt superior to them I was considered inferior. So I grew envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate. My cheerless youth passed in conflict with myself and society, and fearing ridicule I buried my finest feelings deep in my heart, and there they died. I spoke the truth, but nobody believed me, so I began to practice duplicity. Having come to know society and its mainsprings, I became versed in the art of living and saw how others were happy without that proficiency, enjoying for free the favors I had so painfully striven for. It was then that despair was born in my heart--not the despair that is cured with a pistol, but a cold, impotent desperation, concealed under a polite exterior and a good-natured smile. I became a moral cripple; I had lost one half of my soul, for it had shriveled, dried up and died, and I had cut it off and cast it away, while the other half stirred and lived, adapted to serve every comer. No one noticed this, because no one suspected there had been another half. Now, however, you have awakened memories of it in me, and what I have just done is to read its epitaph to you. Many regard all epitaphs as ridiculous, but I do not, particularly when I remember what rests beneath them.

The psyche cannot tolerate a vacuum of love. In the severely abused or deprived child, pain, dis-ease, and violance rush in to fill the void. In the average person in our culture, who has been only "normally" deprived of touch, anxiety and an insatiable hunger for posessions replace the missing eros. The child lacking a sense of welcome, joyous belonging, gratuitous security, will learn to hoard the limited supply of affection. According to the law of psychic compensation, not being held leads to holding on, grasping, addiction, posessiveness. Gradually, things replace people as a source of pleasure and security. When the gift of belonging with is denied, the child learns that love means belongin to. To the degree we are arrested at this stage of development, the needy child will dominate our motivations. Other people and things (and there is fundamentally no difference) will be seen as existing solely for the purpose of "my" survival and satisfaction. "Mine" will become the most important word.

Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

But the summer had been a very happy one, too -- a time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in which she had learned to live more nobly, to work more patiently, to play more heartily.

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.... Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don't think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.

I am not a gifted person. I had only three assets: I was keenly interested, I accepted every challenge and every opportunity to learn more, and I had great energy and discipline.

If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency.

People who possess a thirst for knowledge, are keen observers, and possess a compassionate heart, hold the requisite key for learning and sharing their knowledge with other people.

I try to explain in my own words, and I gesture to his chest. “It's in your bones; it's what keeps you alive. The foundation of your body. To suck out all the marrow of life... I think about how Thoreau went into the woods and stripped life to the barest necessities. To learn what life is really made of, the feeling of water slipping between fingers, the chilled glass in my hand, the wind that rustles your damn hair. And I think about how I feel these barest things every day with you. To live life at its most essential level so as to fully live.

Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for—ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake—for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread of argument slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.

Now consider the tortoise and the eagle. The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat. And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger. And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And then the eagle lets go. And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises. But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory.

But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.

An exploring mind is the most precious gift in life and it's very keen to learn without any judgmental eye.

Daddy didn’t say anything for a minute or so, and then he reached up and caught a firefly as it glowed beside him. “See this light?” he asked me when the firefly lit up his hand. “Yes’r.” “That light is bright enough to light up a little speck of the night sky so a man can see it a ways away. That’s what God expects us to do. We’re to be lights in the dark, cold days that are this world. Like fireflies in December.” “Time meandered on without Gemma’s momma and daddy, and it meandered on without Cy fuller and Walt Blevins. . . but those of us left behind viewed life more dearly, felt it more keenly. I’d learned a bit more about God and I’d seen His powerful hands at work. As I was growing, my heart was changing. And the way I figured it, there were lessons learned in those dark days that would help me for years to come.” “As I sat on the porch on that December day . . . I leaned my head against the rail and sighed deeply. The way I figured it just then, my summer may have been full of bad luck, but my life wasn’t. I figured as far as family went, I was one of the luckiest girls alive.

George learned from the woman’s daughter that she was having her midday meal and a rest in her room upstairs. “But Mother will be down in a little while,” she said. “Would you like to wait?

I had come to Charleston as a young boy, a lonely visitor slouching through its well-tended streets, a young boy, lean and grassy, who grew fluent in his devotion and appreciation of that city's inestimable charm. I was a boy there and saw things through the eyes of a boy for the last time. The boy was dying and I wanted to leave him in the silent lanes South of Broad.I would leave him with no regrets except that I had not stopped to honor his passing. I had not thanked the boy for his capacity for astonishment, for curiosity, and for survival. I was indebted to that boy. I owed him my respect and my thanks. I owed him my remembrance of the lessons he learned so keenly and so ominously.

Learning never ends, therefore, have a keen eye for learning and studying how successful business and people run the little things that business people might overlook but they are key to their success.

Understand: as an individual you cannot stop the tide of fantasy and escapism sweeping a culture. But you can stand as an individual bulwark to this trend and create power for yourself. You were born with the greatest weapon in all of nature—the rational, conscious mind. It has the power to expand your vision far and wide, giving you the unique capacity to distinguish patterns in events, learn from the past, glimpse into the future, see through appearances. Circumstances are conspiring to dull that weapon and render it useless by turning you inward and making you afraid of reality. Consider it war. You must fight this tendency as best you can and move in the opposite direction. You must turn outward and become a keen observer of all that is around you. You are doing battle against all the fantasies that are thrown at you. You are tightening your connection to the environment. You want clarity, not escape and confusion. Moving in this direction will instantly bring you power among so many dreamers.

My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children's program puppet, he would say: "You're a dog! You're a dog! Where are you? You're a dog!" and the dog's tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening. After a few hours of this, I said, "Jesus Grandpa, I get it, he's a dog," not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.

Kevin watched him work with a distant gaze. ​“When did you learn how to cook?” he asked. ​ “Cat is teaching me,” Jean said. He could have left it at that, but after a beat, he admitted, “I like it. It makes everything else go away for a while.” ​ He’d never hesitated to join Cat in the kitchen, but this was the first time he’d offered such an unguarded opinion of it. The smile that curved Cat’s lips was gentle; the look Laila sent Jean was fond. Kevin studied Jean like he wasn’t quite sure who he was looking at: not with any trepidation, but quietly reevaluating a man he’d known for so many years. For a moment Jeremy felt the history between them and was dizzy; in another he was keenly aware there was too much there for him to ever understand. ​ Kevin offered Jean a second arepa, waited for Jean to reach for it, and said, “I’m glad.

But those of us left behind viewed life more dearly, felt it more keenly. I'd learned a bit more about God, and I'd seen His powerful hands at work. As I was growing, my heart was changing, and the way I figured it, there were lessons learned in those dark days that would help me for years to come. In fact, they were lessons that would help us all in years to come.

Don't mistake keen, honest observations as complaints. When you receive a help, a donation or a favour, never forget to be grateful and thankful for the ones who have been there for you. Learn to respect the space of people whose hearts have been treated like a doormat but they have answered more important priorities which all contribute towards the best of the welfare of the recipients of their generous and humble commitment among their choices and decisions for whom and with whom to reach out for." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from my novel, If I Could Tell You

Beyond thy lectures learn’d professor, Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics ... The entities of entities, eidólons. Unfix’d yet fix’d, Ever shall be, ever have been and are, Sweeping the present to the infinite future, Eidólons, eidólons, eidólons.

Speaking truth to bullshit and practicing civility start with knowing ourselves and knowing the behaviors and issues that both push into our own BS or get in the way of being civil. If we go back to BRAVING and our trust checklist, these situations require a keen eye on: 1. Boundaries. What’s okay in a discussion and what’s not? How do you set a boundary when you realize you’re knee-deep in BS? 2. Reliability. Bullshitting is the abandonment of reliability. It’s hard to trust or be trusted when we BS too often. 3. Accountability. How do we hold ourself and others accountable for less BS and more honest debate? Less off-loading of emotion and more civility? 4. Vault. Civility honors confidentiality. BS ignores truth and opens the door to violations of confidentiality. 5. Integrity. How do we stay in our integrity when confronted with BS, and how do we stop in the midst of our own emotional moment to say, “You know what, I’m not sure this conversation is productive” or “I need to learn more about this issue”? 6. Nonjudgment. How do we stay out of judgment toward ourselves when the right thing to do is say, “I actually don’t know much about this. Tell me what you know and why it’s important to you.” How do we not go into “winner/loser” mode and instead see an opportunity for connection when someone says to us, “I don’t know anything about that issue”? 7. Generosity. What’s the most generous assumption we can make about the people around us? What boundaries have to be in place for us to be kinder and more tolerant? I know that the practice of speaking truth to bullshit while being civil feels like a paradox, but both are profoundly important parts of true belonging.

He had a favor to ask of her. Estella’s curiosity was so keen that his promise eventually to share with her everything he had learned was all that she needed to grant his request.

Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies, and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.

Winning and Learning

On a hunch she asked whose signature Claude Aubert had forged. The group was astounded to learn it was that of Charles Leblanc! The “frightened financier”!

Still, when your truthful eyes, your keen, attentive stare, endow the vacuous slut with royalty, when you match her soul to her shimmering hair, what can she do but rise to your imagined throne? And what can I, but see beyond the world that is, when, faithful, you insist I have the golden key-- and learn from you once more the terror and the bliss, the world as it might be?

On coming to America I had the same hopes as have most European immigrants and the same disillusionment, though the latter affected me more keenly and more deeply. The immigrant without money and without connections is not permitted to cherish the comforting illusion that America is a benevolent uncle who assumes a tender and impartial guardianship of nephews and nieces. I soon learned that in a republic there are myriad ways by which the strong, the cunning, the rich can seize power and hold it. I saw the many work for small wages which kept them always on the borderline of want for the few who made huge profits. I saw the courts, the halls of legislation, the press, and the schools--in fact every avenue of education and protection--effectively used as an instrument for the safeguarding of a minority, while the masses were denied every right. I found that the politicians knew how to befog every issue, how to control public opinion and manipulate votes to their own advantage and to that of their financial and industrial allies. This was the picture of democracy I soon discovered on my arrival in the United States. Fundamentally there have been few changes since that time.

Imagine a reader you can trust. This sounds like a simple imperative. But the difference between writing for the reader implicit in your education And writing for one you trust is the difference between writing clumsily, Using all the grappling hooks of transition and false logic, And writing well, able to move briskly and freely, Going anywhere from anywhere almost instantly. All your life you’ve been reading books that trusted you, Trusted your intelligence, your keenness, Your ability to feel an invisible wink, To follow any trail, Even while you were learning in school not to trust the reader.

You told me," I said, "that I should turn this house into a boardinghouse for students. Well, there are better things I could do with it. I could turn it into a haven for beggars. I could run a soup kitchen and a dormitory. But I don't. Why not? Because the spirit of charity has perished in this country. Because those who accept charity despise it, while those who give give with a despairing heart. What is the point of charity when it does not go from heart to heart? What do you think charity is? Soup? Money? Charity: from the Latin word for the heart. It is as hard to receive as to give. it takes as much effort. I wish you would learn that. I wish you would learn something instead of just lying around." A lie: charity, caritas, has nothing to do with the heart. But what does it matter if my sermons rest on false etymologies? He barely listens when i speak to him. Perhaps, despite those keen bird-eyes, he is more befuddled with drink than I know. Or perhaps, finally, he does not care. Care: the true root of charity. I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care

We are constantly being fed harmful ideas that we adopt and learn to believe in, thinking they are all right, and so we ignorantly follow. This is done without our knowing that a keen, sharp, unscrupulous mind is seeking to control us.

It is not that Black women shed each other's psychic blood so easily, but that we have ourselves bled so often, the pain of bloodshed becomes almost commonplace. If I have learned to eat my own flesh in the forest - starving, keening, learning the lesson of the she-wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind - if I must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon my breast and I weep for your going, oh my sister, I grieve for our gone.

I suspect that if aliens did come to Earth, it would be as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.

He wanted suddenly to stand up and shout, telling them that he had killed a rich white girl, a girl whose family was known to all of them. Yes; if he did that a look of startled horror would come over their faces. But, no. He would not do that, even though the satisfaction would be keen. He was so greatly outnumbered that he would be arrested, tried, and executed. He wanted the keen thrill of startling them, but felt that the cost was too great. He wished that he had the power to say what he had done without fear of being arrested; he wished that he could be an idea in their minds; that his black face and the image of smothering Mary and cutting off her head and burning her could hover before their eyes as a terrible picture of reality which they could see and feel and yet not destroy. He was not satisfied with the way things stood now; he was a man who had come in sight of a goal, then had won it, and in winning it had seen just within his grasp another goal, higher, greater. He had learned to shout and had shouted and no ear had heard him (114).

Love. You can learn all the math in the ’verse, but you take a boat in the air you don’t love, she’ll shake you off just as sure as the turning of worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughtta fall down, tells you she’s hurting ’fore she keens. Makes her a home.

But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a "Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.

I didn't sleep that night. I cried. I wasn't frightened for myself; I was indignant; it was the wickedness of it that broke me. The war came to an end and I went home. I'd always been keen on mechanics, and if there was nothing doing in aviation, I'd intended to get into an automobile factory. I'd been wounded and had to take it easy for a while. Then they wanted me to go to work. I couldn't do the sort of work they wanted me to do. It seemed futile. I'd had a lot of time to think. I kept on asking myself what life was for. After all it was only by luck that I was alive; I wanted to make something of my life, but I didn't know what. I'd never thought much about God. I began to think about Him now. I couldn't understand why there was evil in the world. I knew I was very ignorant; I didn't know anyone I could turn to and I wanted to learn, so I began to read at haphazard.

I am keenly aware that the security we enjoy is frail, and could easily be disrupted. Secretly, a nagging fear gnaws at me: what has really been learned from the lessons of Auschwitz and the Third Reich? Do we really understand what happened there and how we might prevent such events in future?

intelligence and intuition are heightened when we learn to listen more deeply to our own heart. It’s through learning how to decipher the messages we receive from our heart that we gain the keen perception needed to effectively manage our emotions in the midst of life’s situations and challenges.

Capacity for keen observation • Exceptional ability to predict and foresee problems and trends • Special problem-solving resources; extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity; fascination with dichotomous puzzles • Preference for original thinking and creative solutions • Excitability, enthusiasm, expressiveness, and renewable energy • Heightened sensitivity, intense emotion, and compassion • Playful attitude and childlike sense of wonder throughout life • Extra perceptivity, powerful intuition, persistent curiosity, potential for deep insight, early spiritual experiences • Ability to learn rapidly, concentrate for long periods of time, comprehend readily, and retain what is learned; development of more than one area of expertise • Exceptional verbal ability; love of subtleties of written and spoken words, new information, theory, and discussion • Tendency to set own standards and evaluate own efforts • Unusual sense of humor, not always understood by others • Experience of feeling inherently different or odd • History of being misunderstood and undersupported • Deep concerns about universal issues and nature, and reverence for the interconnectedness of all things • Powerful sense of justice and intolerance for unfairness • Strong sense of independence and willingness to challenge authority • Awareness of an inner force that “pulls” for meaning, fulfillment, and excellence • Feelings of urgency about personal destiny and a yearning at a spiritual level for answers to existential puzzles

When children play, they exercise their senses, their intellect, their emotions, their imagination—keenly and energetically.… To play is to explore, to discover and to experiment. Playing helps children develop ideas and gain experience. It gives them a wealth of knowledge and information about the world in which they live—and about themselves. So to play is also to learn. Play is fun for children. But it’s much more than that—it’s good for them, and it’s necessary. … Play gives children the opportunity to develop and use the many talents they were born with. Instruction sheet in Lego® toys (1985) CENTRAL

Mr. Troy was not only a man of learning and experience in his profession—he was also a man who had seen something of society at home and abroad. He possessed a keen eye for character, a quaint humour, and a kindly nature which had not been deteriorated even by a lawyer's professional experience of mankind. With

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.... Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don't think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.

Though we may make the points of our weapons as sharp as needles and edges as sharp as razors, there is only one man who can haul us out of this mire, the very man who, lanterned like the Marsh Spite, has led us into it – Jason, son of Aeson. Hercules himself chose him as our captain, and obeyed him faithfully as long as he was with us. Now why was this? Jason is a skilled archer, but not the equal of Phalerus or Atalanta; he throws the javelin well, but not so well as Atalanta or Meleager or even myself; he can use a spear, but not with the art or courage of Idas; he is ignorant of music, except that of drum and pipe; he cannot swim; he cannot box; he has learned to pull well at the oar but he is no seaman; he is no painter; he is no wizard; his sight is not keen above the ordinary; in eloquence he is below anyone else here, except Idas, and perhaps myself; he is hasty-tempered, faithless, sulky and young. Yet Hercules chose him as our captain and obeyed him. I ask again: why was this?

I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation. The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers. Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence. Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses! And I was all of them and yet all were not me. I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards. I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power. The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens. Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen. ("Thirty Three Abominations")

Sometimes, we get too keen and in a haste to make new relationships, learn new things, stumble upon new ideas . . . . Always tending to the unknown and easily excited by the mysterious, that we lose value for and forget to appreciate the things and people that have brought and kept us going this far. Keep the things and people which are sure, else they, too, become mysterious and unknown.

Our sons not only receive a name but a legacy. With keen eyes they watch and learn. At their core, they are shaped by the very things we say and don’t say; and by what we do and don’t do. They may cling to what is noble, they may emulate our flaws or reject them all together but a legacy will be formed nonetheless. It’s a huge undertaking but one I know the Lord will see me through. ~Jason Versey

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect. The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

When Dotty learned of Keen’s advent she was desolate, but in her own fashion. Dotty’s emotions were in rational balance and larded with enough humor to keep them from sticking to the pan. The insistence that humor is the core of the soul, even in the middle of trial and tragedy, stayed with Dotty through all the months that followed, which were filled with shock after shock. She tried to fight back with prayer, patience, exposition, common sense, murder, flight, but also with humor. Always with humor.

Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.

To get he had tried, yet his store was still meager. To a wise man he cried, in a voice keen and eager; Pray tell me how I may successfully live? And the wise man replied, "To get you must give." As to giving he said, "What have I to give?" I've scarce enough bread, and of course one must live; But I would partake of Life's bountiful store. Came the wise man's response; "Then you must give more." The lesson he learned; to get was forgotten, Toward mankind he turned with a love new begotten. As he gave of himself in useful living, Then joy crowned his days, for he grew rich in giving.

2 · Three O’Clock For pity, more than any other feeling, is a “learned” emotion; a child will have it least of all. Pity comes from the infinite accumulations of man’s memory, from the anguish, pain, and suffering of life, from the full deposit of experience, from the forgotten faces, the lost men, and from the million strange and haunting visages of time. Pity comes upon the nick of time and stabs us like a knife. Its face is thin and dark and burning, and it has come before we know it, gone before we can grasp or capture it; it leaves a shrewd, deep wound, but a bitter, subtle one, and it always comes most keenly from a little thing. 2 . Три часа стр. 81 Защото състраданието повече от всяко друго чувство „се учи“ и затова у детето го има най-малко. Състраданието идва от безкрайното напластяване на спомените, от терзанието и болката, от мъченичеството в живота, от целия натрупан опит, от забравените лица, загубените хора, от милионите непознати и натрапчиви образи на времето. Състраданието идва в миг и пронизва като нож. Лицето му е слабо, мрачно и трескаво, то се появява, преди да сме разбрали, и си отива, преди да сме успели да го уловим и задържим, то оставя дълбоки, мъчителни и коварни рани и винаги се усеща най-остро в дребните неща.

Perhaps the similarity between their position and her own created a disagreeable impression for her. There was also the fact that they were soured bluestockings who sought, through the number of theatrical entertainments they hosted, to delude themselves that they kept a salon, and there was a rivalry between them, which the considerable erosion of their fortunes in the course of their rather unruly lives, by obliging them to watch their purse strings and to rely on the charity of the actors they used, transformed into a sort of life struggle. And, again, the lady with the Marie-Antoinette coiffure, whenever she set eyes on Mme de Villeparisis, could not help being reminded of the fact that the Duchesse de Guermantes did not come to her own Friday receptions. She was consoled by the unfailing presence at these Fridays of hers of her dutiful relation, the Princesse de Poix, her own special Guermantes, who never went near Mme de Villeparisis, despite the fact that she was an intimate friend of the Duchesse. Nevertheless, from the mansion on the Quai Malaquais to the salons of the rue de Tournon, the rue de la Chaise, and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a bond as strong as it was hateful united these three fallen divinities, and I would have been keen to learn, from the pages of some dictionary of society mythology, what amorous adventure, what

Evil is seductive; you will have to remain strong and not fall prey to its temptations.” He stood in front of Carlos first and placed a hand on his head. “Carlos de Vil, you possess a keen intellect; however, do not let your head rule your heart. Learn to see what is truly in front of you.” Evie was next, and Yen Sid did the same, resting a hand above her dark blue locks. “Evie, remember that when you believe you are alone in the world, you are far from friendless.” Jay bowed down and removed his beanie so the good professor could lay his hand on his head too. “Jay of Agrabah, a boy of many talents, open your eyes and discover that the riches of the world are all around you.

This long letter is because I'm writing before breakfast. Oh, the beautiful vine leaves! The house is covered with a vine. I looked out earlier, and Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden. No wonder she sometimes looks tired. She was watching the large red poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday - I suppose for rabbits or something, as she kept on smelling it. The air here is delicious. Later on I heard the noise of croquet balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox practising; they are keen on all games. Presently he started sneezing and had to stop. Then I hear more clicketing, and it is Mr. Wilcox practising, and then, "a-tissue, a-tissue": he has to stop too. Then Evie comes out, and does some calisthenic exercises on a machine that is tacked to a greengage-tree - they put everything to use - and then she says "a-tissue," and in she goes. And finally Mrs. Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers. I inflict all this on you because once you said that life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which, and up to now I have always put that down as "Meg's clever nonsense.

Bees have a keen and precise sense of place. When they fly out of their hives, they commit to their memories an exact picture of all the significant landmarks near it. It is such a careful picture that if their hive is moved even ten feet away, their home is as good as lost to the returning foragers. And because their map of a foraging area—perhaps five square miles—is so accurate, a beekeeper who wants to relocate a given beeyard in the same general area must first move the bees at least ten or fifteen miles away and leave them for a week or so until they forget the map of the original location by learning a new one. After that, he can move them back to a spot he prefers near the old location.

As a girl, it had been firmly set down that one ought never speak until one was spoken to, and when one did, one ought not speak of anything that might provoke or worry. One referred to the limb of the table, not the leg, the white meat on the chicken, not the breast. Good manners were the foundations of civilization. One knew precisely with whom one sat in a room based entirely on how well they behaved, and in what manner. Forks and knives were placed at the ten-twenty on one's plate when one was finished eating, One ought to walk straight and keep one's hands to oneself when one s poke, least one be taken for an Italian or Jew. A woman was meant to tend a child, a garden, or a conversation. A woman ought to know how to mind the temperature in a room, adding a little heat in a well-timed question, or cool a warm temper with the suggestion of another drink, a bowl of nuts, and a smile. What Kitty had learned at Miss Porter's School---handed down from Sarah Porter through the spinsters teaching there, themselves the sisters of Yale men who handed down the great words, Truth. Verity. Honor--was that your brothers and your husbands and your sons will lead, and you will tend., You will watch and suggest, guide and protect. You will carry the torch forward, and all to the good. There was the world. And one fixed an eye keenly on it. One learned its history; one understood the causes of its wars. One debated and, gradually, a picture emerged of mankind over the centuries; on understood the difference between what was good and what was right. On understood that men could be led to evil, against the judgment of their better selves. Debauchery. Poverty of spirit. This was the explanation for so many unfortunate ills--slavery, for instance. The was the reason. Men, individual men, were not at fault. They had to be taught. Led. Shown by example what was best. Unfairness, unkindness could be addressed. Queitly. Patiently.. Without a lot of noisy attention. Noise was for the poorly bred. If one worried, if one were afraid, if one doubted--one kept it to oneself. One looked for the good, and one found it. The woman found it, the woman pointed it out, and the man tucked it in his pocket, heartened. These were the rules.

But among this people there can be no doubt about the rights of women, because, as I have before said, the Gy, physically speaking, is bigger and stronger than the An; and her will being also more resolute than his, and will being essential to the direction of the vril force, she can bring to bear upon him, more potently than he on herself, the mystical agency which art can extract from the occult properties of nature. Therefore all that our female philosophers above ground contend for as to rights of women, is conceded as a matter of course in this happy commonwealth. Besides such physical powers, the Gy-ei have (at least in youth) a keen desire for accomplishments and learning which exceeds that of the male; and thus they are the scholars, the professors—the learned portion, in short, of the community.

Gracie Allen wasn’t as dumb as she seemed on the air. She proved that in 1939, appearing on the intellectual quiz show Information, Please, and holding her own with the experts. It takes a keen intelligence to play a dumb role that long and well, but Gracie had more than that. From the beginning, she had a singular ability to make audiences love her. “The audience found her, I didn’t,” said George Burns in a Playboy interview years after her death. The crowds they played to in the early ’20s, when they were “just a lousy small-time act,” defined what Gracie Allen was and would be for the next 35 years. The audience wouldn’t stand for it if her lines required sarcasm or spite. Burns learned that if he blew a puff of cigar smoke in Gracie’s direction, “the audience would hate me.” As he told the interviewer: “She was too dainty, too ladylike,” for malice or mean humor. “She was a beautiful little girl, like a little doll, a little Irish doll.

His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril. He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it a night in advance. No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug. And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. p21

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had learned still another new, consolatory truth—that nothing in this world is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores—his footgear having long since fallen to pieces.

Speaking truth to bullshit and practicing civility start with knowing ourselves and knowing the behaviors and issues that both push into our own BS or get in the way of being civil. If we go back to BRAVING and our trust checklist, these situations require a keen eye on: 1. Boundaries. What’s okay in a discussion and what’s not? How do you set a boundary when you realize you’re knee-deep in BS? 2. Reliability. Bullshitting is the abandonment of reliability. It’s hard to trust or be trusted when we BS too often. 3. Accountability. How do we hold ourself and others accountable for less BS and more honest debate? Less off-loading of emotion and more civility? 4. Vault. Civility honors confidentiality. BS ignores truth and opens the door to violations of confidentiality. 5. Integrity. How do we stay in our integrity when confronted with BS, and how do we stop in the midst of our own emotional moment to say, “You know what, I’m not sure this conversation is productive” or “I need to learn more about this issue”? 6. Nonjudgment. How do we stay out of judgment toward ourselves when the right thing to do is say, “I actually don’t know much about this. Tell me what you know and why it’s important to you.” How do we not go into “winner/loser” mode and instead see an opportunity for connection when someone says to us, “I don’t know anything about that issue”? 7. Generosity. What’s the most generous assumption we can make about the people around us? What boundaries have to be in place for us to be kinder and more tolerant? I know that the practice of speaking truth to bullshit while being civil feels like a paradox, but both are profoundly important parts of true belonging. Carl Jung wrote, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don’t reflect our fullness. Yet when we don’t risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnection and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters the most.

The Cistercian monks built simple and harmonious buildings out of the local limestone, with plain colours and few ornaments. The plans involved regular repetitions: the doors, windows and roof vaults wouldn’t vary much, so that the eye would easily find points of reference. Everything felt solid and enduring. Our natural human frailty was to contrast with the immemorial tone of the masonry. The monks were particularly keen on cloisters: covered walkways opening onto a quiet central square around which one could take de-stressing walks even on a rainy afternoon. The abbey at Cîteaux was just one of thousands built with similar intentions over a period of hundreds of years. It’s not an accident that architecture that sets out to create a contemplative and serene atmosphere can easily get labelled ‘monastic’, though in truth there’s nothing inherently religious or Christian about the pursuit of calm. The longing for serenity is a continuing, widespread human need, although the overtly religious background to abbeys and monasteries has an unfortunate association: making calm places erroneously seem as if they were inherently connected to a belief in Jesus. We need to rediscover the search for calm as a fundamental ambition of all architecture, not least for the buildings of our own harried times.

They all succeed at changing both their mindset (the meaning-making system that shapes thoughts and feelings) and their behavior; rather than changing only mindset or behavior, and hoping the other will eventually follow. • They all become keen and focused observers of their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and they learn to use these as information. They see the agenda that is driving them, not just the agenda they are driving. • Changes to their mindsets are always in the direction of seeing and feeling more possibilities: Spaces people had previously thought they could not or should not enter (because they were out of reach or too dangerous) are now fully accessible. • They take focused risks and build a new set of muscles and metrics around assumptions based on actual, rather than imagined, data about the consequences of their new actions. Their anxiety around the initial adaptive challenge is reduced, if not eliminated, while their experiences of pleasure significantly increase. • They experience increased mastery, more options, wider control, and greater degrees of freedom. They make progress on, or even accomplish, their column 1 commitment, and, more often than not, their accomplishments extend considerably beyond the initial aspiration. Because they have developed new mental capabilities—not just a new solution to a single problem—they can bring these capabilities to other challenges and other venues, in their work and in their personal lives.

He stared down at her for a moment, wanting to heal every cut on her soft skin. But he couldn’t, not yet. He needed to get her, and her car, far from this place so neither he nor Kate would be implicated in any way with the gruesome murder site. It also meant he would have to drive. In all his years, he had never driven an automobile. The closest he had come was watching various assistants through the years as they chauffeured him. He wasn’t sure he could even remember how to start the car, but right now he had no choice. Grudgingly, he got into the driver’s seat, and finding the lever underneath, he pushed it back so he sat comfortably behind the wheel. After trying three different keys, he found one that slipped into the ignition. From what he had seen over the past hundred years, driving was not a complex operation, and he was an immortal with reflexes far more keen than a human man. How difficult could it be? He turned the key and nearly jerked the wheel off the steering column when the car surprised him by lurching forward. The car went silent. The engine wasn’t running. What was he doing wrong? He stared at the gearshift, wondering if he should move it. His frustration reared up, but his agitation would not make the car drive itself. He had to keep a cool head. Not knowing what else to try, he pushed one of the pedals at his feet to the floor and turned the key again. This time the car didn’t move, and it roared to life. Grasping the gearshift, he jammed it into the first position and glanced over at Kate. Why couldn’t she have owned a car with an automatic transmission? Shaking his head, he put some pressure on the gas pedal and slowly released the clutch. Thankfully the car rolled a few feet, but without warning it jumped forward. He pressed the clutch back to the floor before the engine lost power again. Calisto slammed his hand against the wheel, muttering under his breath in Spanish. At this rate it would take him all night to drive her home. The faded yellow convertible pitched forward again, threatening to stall as he continued out of the parking lot, thankful it was late. The streets were fairly empty. At least he wouldn’t get into an accident with another car. Her car staggered ahead, lurching each time he tried to release the clutch, bouncing and jostling them both until Kate finally stirred and woke up. § “Are we out of gas or something?” Calisto watched her with a tight smile. “Not exactly.” Kate winced in pain when she laughed. “You can’t drive a stickshift, can you?” “Does it show?” Calisto pulled over, finally allowing the engine to stall. She nodded her head slowly to avoid more pain. “Just a little. What happened?” “You don’t remember?” “I remember being mugged. And I remember seeing you, but everything after that is blank.” She watched his eyes as Calisto reached over to brush her hair back from her face, and his touch sent shivers through her body. This wasn’t how she had hoped she would run into him, but she learned a long time ago fate didn’t always work out the way you expected.

The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me. — And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears! ... To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans? — All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably — that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road, — the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready: — and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves — for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies — that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge — all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as “German” culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct — in short, as reality ....

In his attempt to discover own self, the client typically uses the relationship to explore, to examine the various aspects of his own experience, to recognize and face up to the deep contradictions which he often discovers. He learns how much of his behavior, even how much of the feeling he experiences, is not real, is not something which flows from the genuine reactions of his organism but is a facade, a front, behind which he has been hiding. He discovers how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is. Often he discovers that he exists only in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying to think, and feel, and behave in the way that others believe he ought to think, and feel and behave. In this connection I have been astonished to find how accurately the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, pictured the dilemma of the individual more than a century ago, with keen psychological insight. He points out that the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose "to be another than himself." On the other hand "to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair," and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man. As I read some of his writings I almost feel that he must have listened in on the statements made by our clients as they search and explore for the reality of self--often a painful and troubling search. This exploration becomes even more disturbing when they find themselves involved in removing the false faces which they had not known were false face. They begin to engage in the frightening task of exploring the turbulent and sometimes violent feelings within themselves. To remove a mask which you had thought was part of your real self can be a deeply disturbing experience, yet when there is freedom to think and feel and be, the individual moves toward such a goal.

When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?” The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her. “They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful. “When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.” Her blood chilled. “How did you trap such a thing?” Cassian tapped a spot on his neck where a scar slashed beneath his ear. “I quickly learned I could never beat him in combat or magic. Still have the scar here to prove it.” Cassian smiled faintly. “So I used his arrogance against him. Flattered and taunted him into trapping himself in a mirror bound with ash wood. I bet him the mirror would contain him—and Lanthys bet wrong. He got out of the mirror, of course, but by that time, I’d dumped his miserable self into the Prison.

Magic,” Yennefer continued after a while, “is, in some people’s opinion, art. Great, elitist art, capable of creating beautiful and extraordinary things. Magic is a talent granted to only a chosen few. Others, deprived of talent, can only look at the results of the artists’ works with admiration and envy, can admire the finished work while feeling that without these creations and without this talent the world would be a poorer place. The fact that, following the Conjunction of the Spheres, some chosen few discovered talent and magic within themselves, the fact that they found Art within themselves, is the blessing of beauty. And that’s how it is. Those who believe that magic is art are also right.” On the long bare hill which protruded from the heath like the back of some lurking predator lay an enormous boulder supported by a few smaller stones. The magician guided her horse in its direction without pausing her lecture. “There are also those according to whom magic is a science. In order to master it, talent and innate ability alone are not enough. Years of keen study and arduous work are essential; endurance and self-discipline are necessary. Magic acquired like this is knowledge, learning, the limits of which are constantly stretched by enlightened and vigorous minds, by experience, experiments and practice. Magic acquired in such a way is progress. It is the plough, the loom, the watermill, the smelting furnace, the winch and the pulley. It is progress, evolution, change. It is constant movement. Upwards. Towards improvement. Towards the stars. The fact that following the Conjunction of the Spheres we discovered magic will, one day, allow us to reach the stars. Dismount, Ciri.” Yennefer approached the monolith, placed her palm on the coarse surface of the stone and carefully brushed away the dust and dry leaves. “Those who consider magic to be a science,” she continued, “are also right. Remember that, Ciri. And now come here, to me.” The girl swallowed and came closer. The enchantress put her arm around her. “Remember,” she repeated, “magic is Chaos, Art and Science. It is a curse, a blessing and progress. It all depends on who uses magic, how they use it, and to what purpose. And magic is everywhere. All around us. Easily accessible. It is enough to stretch out one’s hand. See? I’m stretching out my hand.

Socrates: So now you won't acknowledge any gods except the ones we do--Chaos, the Clouds, the Tongue--just these three? Strepsiades: Absolutely-- I'd refuse to talk to any other gods, if I ran into them--and I decline to sacrifice or pour libations to them. I'll not provide them any incense... I want to twist all legal verdicts in my favor, to evade my creditors. Chorus Leader: You'll get that, just what you desire. For what you want is nothing special. So be confident--give yourself over to our agents here. Strepsiades: I'll do that--I'll place my trust in you. Necessity is weighing me down--the horses, those thoroughbreds, my marriage--all that has worn me out. So now, this body of mine I'll give to them, with no strings attached, to do with as they like--to suffer blows, go without food and drink, live like a pig, to freeze or have my skin flayed for a pouch-- if I can just get out of all my debt and make men think of me as bold and glib, as fearless, impudent, detestable, one who cobbles lies together, makes up words, a practiced legal rogue, a statute book, a chattering fox, sly and needle sharp, a slippery fraud, a sticky rascal, foul whipping boy or twisted villain, troublemaker, or idly prattling fool. If they can make those who run into me call me these names, they can do what they want--no questions asked. If, by Demeter, they're keen, they can convert me into sausages and serve me up to men who think deep thoughts. Chorus: Here's a man whose mind's now smart, no holding back--prepared to start. When you have learned all this from me you know your glory will arise among all men to heaven's skies. Strepsiades: And what will I get out of this? Chorus: For all time, you'll live with me a life most people truly envy. Strepsiades: You mean one day I'll really see that? Chorus: Hordes will sit outside your door wanting your advice and more-- to talk, to place their trust in you for their affairs and lawsuits, too, things which merit your great mind. They'll leave you lots of cash behind. Chorus Leader: [to Socrates] So get started with this old man's lessons, what you intend to teach him first of all--rouse his mind, test his intellectual powers. Socrates: Come on then, tell me the sort of man you are--once I know that, I can bring to bear on you my latest batteries with full effect. Strepsiades: What's that? By god, are you assaulting me? Socrates: No--I want to learn some things from you. What about your memory? Strepsiades: To tell the truth, it works two ways. If someone owes me something, I remember really well. But if it's poor me that owes the money, I forget a lot. Socrates: Do you have a natural gift for speech? Strepsiades: Not for speaking--only for evading debt. Socrates: ... Now, what do you do if someone hits you? Strepsiades: If I get hit, I wait around a while, then find witnesses, hang around some more, then go to court.

His was not a story of superhuman heroism. Lincoln’s journey was one of learning by doing, ongoing commitment to bettering himself, keen intelligence harnessed to equally acute emotional awareness, and the moral seriousness into which he grew as he attained immense power. It was also an all-too-human path marked by setbacks, derailments, and disappointments.

The trainers at Uberversity, where new employees underwent a three-day initiation, began schooling everyone on this scenario: a rival company is launching a carpooling service in four weeks. It’s impossible for Uber to beat them to market with a reliable carpool service of its own. What should the company do? The correct answer at Uberversity—and what Uber actually did when it learned about Lyft Line—was “Rig up a makeshift solution that we pretend is totally ready to go so we can beat the competitor to market.” (Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where I work, invested in Lyft and I am on its board, so I was keenly aware of the dynamic between the companies—and I am decidedly biased.) Those, including the company’s legal team, who proposed taking the time to come up with a workable product, one far better than Uber Pool 1.0, were told “That’s not the Uber way.” The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win. This competitiveness issue also came up when Uber began to challenge Didi Chuxing, the Chinese market leader in ride-sharing. To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers. Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.

Nobody had ever explained to me that working with, and through, others is by far the most effective way to do things - assuming, of course, that they understand what you want and are keen to follow. I gradually began to understand that this is the difference between management and leadership.

Being properly dressed and groomed for a meeting is the first step in demonstrating that you not only care about your own credibility, but you are keenly aware of how you could be perceived by others. Above all, you understand that you are, in fact, the face of your institution.

An excellent current day example of online executive presence is Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony to the Senate Health Committee on Tuesday May 12th, 2020. Providing his testimony virtually, Dr. Fauci was well groomed and dressed in a coat and tie, just as he would on a normal work day. His suit clearly was not a $8000 Brioni. Rather, it reflected a senior government official with a simpler taste who is more focused on the weightier issues of public health currently afflicting the US and the world. As the face of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his suit not only signals deference to the institution he leads, but reflects a keen awareness for how his appearance could be perceived by everyone online. Even from home, the message in his persona was “I know my job, I’m prepared, and I take it seriously.” Rhetorically, imagine if he had appeared in a bathrobe looking like he had just gotten out of bed.

Interestingly enough, we found, the habit of regularly expressing our gratitude and our concerns to God actually made us more grateful and more determined to act generously on behalf of others. I think that’s because regular prayer helps cultivate awareness, and awareness is key to both gratitude and generosity. We must learn how to nourish a heart that is keenly aware both of God’s abundance as it comes to us and the needs of the world around us.

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty... Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don't think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.

Kemper astutely explains how the highly integrated music industry created, developed, and eventually abandoned the Monkees." -- Library Journal "A keenly incisive---and, at times, refreshingly objective and even-handed---analysis of the entertainment machinery of the era, and the manner in which radio, television, and other areas worked together to manufacture The Monkees seemingly out of thin air." -- Musoscribe "I spent the entire summer of 1987 on the road opening up for The Monkees, and I didn't learn 1% as much about them as I learned from this thorough and remarkable book by Tom Kemper." -- "Weird Al" Yankovic "The Monkees gets into the vast machinery that goes on behind the scenes of producing perfect pop - still relevant today even if the names and corporations have changed - and does it with a lot of fun." -- Chris Shiflett, Foo Fighters "Kemper's book clarifies so much that is misunderstood in the Monkees story." -- Susanna Hoffs, The Bangles "A knowledgeable and incisive portrait of the popular music industry." -- Paul Hirsch, Northwestern University "Fascinating and witty . . .The book is full of interesting insights . . . [and] Kemper is impressive in unpacking particular songs . . . a fresh and engaging take on an oft-told story." ― Shindig! " Valuable, interesting, well-argued, and built on a pile of documented evidence. " - Psychobabble "Belittled at the time of their creation in the mid-Sixties, as made-for-TV Help-era Beatles clones, The Monkees' music has stood the test of time, and then some. Tom Kemper suggests, in his excellent book, that the initial snobbery surrounding the group, at least in elevated critical circles, came about because of the rise of a new rock culture based on authenticity, individual expression and idealism." - Pick of the Week, Choice "Kemper helps us understand what it is that continues to make the Monkees phenomenon 'compelling, fascinating and divisive." - The Spectator

We take off our shoes, or we turn on our ears. We press our hands together in a gesture of prayer, or we remember the full extent of our lungs. Perhaps we even arrange ourselves cross-legged on the ground, or perhaps we dance or walk or swim instead. When we want to escape the surface, we activate our bodies, and they show us a different intelligence, pointing to a mind that resides not just in the head. Our knowing is diffused throughout all of us, distributed through muscle and bone, pulsing through organs and conveyed in the blood. We put our feet to the ground to listen with all of it. Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it--sometimes I think the vast majority--is somatic, the concern of the body. I learned this most keenly when Bert was a baby, and I used to reach towards him in the back seat on long car journeys and feel his foot press into my palm in reply. There was communication there far beyond words, and far more soothing to both of us. When I used to sit him on my lap and kiss his soft head, I was aware that information was being exchanged between us, transmitted through my lips and received through my nose. I could not even tell you what it said. Our bodies have answers to questions that we don't know how to ask.

Nobody imagined what was really in store, but already in the 1920s almost everyone knew deep down that there was no future for the Jews either with Stalin or in Poland or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and so the pull of Palestine became stronger and stronger. Not with everyone, naturally. The religious Jews were very much against it, and so were the Bundists, the Yiddishists, the Communists, and the assimilated Jews who thought they were already more Polish than Paderewski or Wojciechowski. But many ordinary Jews in Rovno in the 1920s were keen that their children should learn Hebrew and go to Tarbuth. Those who had enough money sent their children to study in Haifa, at the Technion, or at the Tel Aviv gymnasium, or the agricultural colleges in Palestine, and the echoes that came back to us from the Land were simply wonderful—the young people were just waiting, when would your turn come? Meanwhile everyone read newspapers in Hebrew, argued, sang songs from the Land of Israel, recited Bialik and Tchernikhowsky, split up into rival factions and parties, ran up uniforms and banners, there was a kind of tremendous excitement about everything national. It was very similar to what you see here today with the Palestinians, only without their penchant for bloodshed. Among us Jews you hardly see such nationalism nowadays.

The limitations we sense in the photograph - of the actual and of time - are felt keenly by those who use a camera, in ways that are simply not realized by the painter or the poet or anyone else. Strangely, we can never seem to get enough of these particular limitations.

The Fearful-Avoidant is often a very present and charming partner in the early stages of a relationship. They are dialed into human behavior and know what their partner is looking for. It is not uncommon for the Fearful-Avoidant to morph into what they believe their partner wants as a strategy to feel accepted and worthy of love. As discussed in chapter 1, it is quite common for a Fearful-Avoidant to have grown up in a home where they experienced significant distress. To adapt, this individual is a keen observer and becomes hypervigilant, especially about human behavior. They will quickly and without trying notice microexpressions, body language, and changes in intonation. The Fearful-Avoidant learns this hyperawareness to protect themselves from potential conflict. The highs are that a Secure and Fearful-Avoidant can share a great capacity for seeing, hearing, and understanding one another. They have a need for deep conversation and discussing their fears, concerns, and secrets. The lows for the Secure partner are that when a Fearful-Avoidant begins to develop stronger feelings, they will tend to push their partner away. They believe that this relationship is too good to be true and don’t trust such a stable and safe partnership. In a friendship or family relationship, the same patterns are maintained. However, the Fearful-Avoidant will usually be less emotionally volatile and less vulnerable at the root level. The fear of powerlessness is not as strong, and therefore the Fearful-Avoidant experiences less of a roller coaster in their nonromantic relationships.

Then,” said the second instructor, “it’s time that you learned the Outward Bound motto.” “Oh, keen,” I thought. “I’m about to die, and she’s going to give me a motto!” But then she shouted ten words I hope never to forget, words whose impact and meaning I can still feel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” I had long believed in the concept of “the word become flesh” but until that moment I had not experienced it. My teacher spoke words so compelling that they bypassed my mind, went into my flesh, and animated my legs and feet. No helicopter would come to rescue me; the instructor on the cliff would not pull me up with the rope; there was no parachute in my backpack to float me to the ground. There was no way out of my dilemma except to get into it—so my feet started to move and in a few minutes I made it safely down. Why would anyone want to embark on the daunting inner journey about which Annie Dillard writes? Because there is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through.

Among the first to befriend Mira was Mahadev Desai. Always keen to expand his knowledge, Mahadev began to take lessons in French from the well-bred Englishwoman. When Gandhi learnt of this, he asked Mahadev to discontinue the classes, because in his view much of the best French literature was available in English translation, and because when he toured with Gandhi the lessons would be interrupted anyway. When ‘we are engaged in a life and death struggle’, asked Gandhi of his secretary, ‘how could you think of learning French? You may read as much French as you like after swaraj.' Gandhi suggested that Mahadev instead teach Mira Hindustani to ease her transition into life in India.

To adapt, this individual is a keen observer and becomes hypervigilant, especially about human behavior. They will quickly and without trying notice microexpressions, body language, and changes in intonation. The Fearful-Avoidant learns this hyperawareness to protect themselves from potential conflict.

It’s not just Israel exporting its occupation expertise. Some Americans are keen to learn on the ground in the Jewish state itself before taking it back to their home countries.

Paz smiled, and answered the way Hero would learn she always answered: rather than lying, or even dodging the question, she preferred to speak the supposedly shameful truth as if it were something to be proud of. Of course not, she said, her voice sweet and direct. We're too poor to have anything like a car. She made it sound like it was desirable not to have a car, ridiculous to even want one. Hero had been impressed, not least of all because even she'd gotten in the habit of leaving a room whenever Tita Ticay entered it, terrified of her venomous tongue, her keen eyes, the ease with which she spotted weakness, and the please with which she toyed with it.

I have seen, there, In the moonlit space of self, where the ego glides, Its silvery essence, a mirror upon life’s tides. Shaped by the ebb and flow of journey’s dance, Reflecting beliefs, in life’s intricate, ever-changing stance. This luminary, a learned guide in identity’s play, Casts shadows, illusions in its luminous display. A sculptor, artful, in societal norms it trusts, Chiseling character with life’s whims and cultural dust. The ego, in its carnival, spins tales so keen, Crafting who we ought to be in expectations unseen. In costumes of roles and societal dreams it dresses, Creating our outward selves in myriad, intricate presses. In stark contrast, behold the inner sun, our essence so bright, A steadfast flame, in the core of our being, burning with pure light. Unfiltered, unwavering, unlike the moon’s fickle gleam, A constant force, our authentic self, a deep, untouched stream. This essence, our unchanging truth, in the heart it resides, A whisper of eternity, beyond masks, where true self abides. Beyond roles, beyond transient ego’s elaborate dance, Lies this truth, unswayed by the external world’s fleeting glance. In the quest for self, twixt these luminaries, discernment is key, Traversing the self’s tangle, understanding what must be. Though ego’s voice echoes loud, in desires and fears it plays, It’s the essence’s silent light that guides through life’s stormy bays. Through recognition, understanding, transformation’s alchemy begins, Turning life unexamined into enlightened existence’s wins. A celestial voyage, within us, between sun and moon’s embrace, Ego teaches, grows us, in our worldly place. The essence, radiant and wise, to eternity connects, Offering authenticity, a path that perfects. Yin and yang, in our existence, they intertwine, In their dance, our soul’s rhythm, in harmony, divine. In moon’s reflection and sun’s light, a balance we find, Understanding their interplay, the rhythm of humankind.

There Are Five Hallmark Symptoms of ADD Short attention span, for regular, routine, everyday tasks. People with ADD have a difficult time with boring tasks and need stimulation or excitement in order to stay engaged. Many people with ADD can pay attention just fine for things that are new, novel, interesting, highly stimulating, or frightening. Distractibility. People with ADD tend to notice more in their environment than others, which makes them easily distracted by outside stimuli, such as light, sounds, smells, certain tastes, or even the clothes they wear. Their keen sensitivity causes them to get easily off task. Disorganization. Most people with ADD tend to struggle with organization of time and space. They tend to be late and have trouble completing tasks on time. Many things get done at the last moment or even later. They also tend to struggle keeping their spaces tidy, especially their rooms, book bags, filing cabinets, drawers, closets, and paperwork. Procrastination. Tasks and duties get put off until the last moment. Things tend not to get done until there are deadlines or someone else is mad at them for not doing it. Poor internal supervision. Many people with ADD have issues with judgment and impulse control, and struggle not to say or do things without fully thinking them through. They also have a harder time learning from their mistakes.