Lesser Known Quotes

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining.

If Emma didn’t keep his attention focused on her, he would see Alexandra, and this already uncomfortable scene would enter . . . well, not quite the ninth circle of Hell, but Dante’s lesser known invention: the sixth octagon of awkward.

And yet not every sense of what's good and right can be trusted, for what else is war but two sides going to battle over what each thinks is right?

There is a law of the natural worlds (the spiritual and the physical) and this is something I have understood: that for every genuine existence, for every real manifestation and occurrence, there are are ten thousand falsities. Before you meet what or who is genuine, you will first have met, or known of, what is fake; and ten thousand times so! There is no need to feel disappointments, any number below ten thousand deceptions renders you a lucky person! And you ask why is there a need for this to happen? Well, if you have not known what is false first, there is no way to understand what then comes which is truth. What is lesser is so afraid of what is genuine, that it finds it necessary to imitate and duplicate that imitation ten thousand times over, for fear that you will finally meet what is real. The more important that one existence is, the more imitations there are in the world.

If isolation is the furnace of transformation, I could be ashes by now.

I took a big dose of Tylenol the original, since I didn't have my Tylenol 3 or its lesser-known, short-lived cousin, Tylenol Two: The Pain Strikes Back.

Ajungi să cunoști bine oamenii abia după ce te-ai certat cu ei o dată. Abia atunci poți să le judeci caracterul!

Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

Please, God, don't be out of battery, you piece of shit, please, God." One of the lesser-known prayers. You heard it around, sure, but only if you stuck it out to the end of the rosary.

Give and you shall receive, much more than you ever thought possible. Give and give again. Keep hoping, keep trying, keep giving! People who give will never be poor!

Căci în mod fundamental tinerețea este mai solitară decât bătrânețea.

Everyone is born equal; we will all die and shed our earthly glory. Riches, power and fame last for only a few short years. Why do we cling so desperately to these fleeting things? Why can't people who have more than enough for their own needs give the rest to their fellow human beings? Why should anyone have to have such a hard life for those few short years on earth?

Sunt obișnuită să nu fiu luată în serios.

O conștiință împăcată te face puternic.

There is eternal charm in being a lesser known person, one who can rest, relax, appreciate and enjoy a finer life as it exists.

Dimineața suntem normali, după-amiaza cam tot așa, cu unele excepții, dar seara dorința de peste zi, fericirea și deliciile tuturor dăților precedente redevin vii și nu mai facem altceva decât să ne gândim unul la celălalt.

And now I have a question for you. 'Do you also put clothes on the flowers you've picked and refuse to talk about their delicate parts?' I don't think there's a very big difference between people and nature, and since we're also a part of nature, why should we be ashamed of the way nature made us?

Chipul lui mi-a revenit așa de limpede în memorie, încât acum știu că nimeni altcineva nu va putea rămâne atât de prezent în mine.

Câtă vreme te poți uita fără teamă la cer, vei ști că lăuntric ești pur și că, orice-ar fi, îți vei regăsi fericirea.

I brought you a fern!” Ireland glanced up from the file folders that covered her desk and smiled at the new arrival beaming from the doorway. “That’s a lesser known form of greeting, however, in this particular office, completely acceptable.

Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having “Communist” support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country.

Îmi dau seama că o etapă din ea s-a încheiat definitiv: perioada fără griji și necazuri a anilor de școală nu se mai întoarce niciodată. Nici măcar n-o regret, am depășit stadiul ăsta, nu pot să fac doar tâmpenii, o părticică din mine își păstrează mereu gravitatea.

Nu sunt bogată în bani sau bunuri materiale, nu sunt frumoasă, inteligentă, superdotată, dar sunt și voi fi fericită! Am o fire veselă, iubesc oamenii, nu sunt suspicioasă și vreau să-i văd pe toți fericiți odată cu mine.

of her favorites was John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”: . . . all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. Kya recalled a poem written by a lesser-known poet, Amanda Hamilton, published recently in the local newspaper she’d bought at the Piggly Wiggly: Trapped inside, Love is a caged beast, Eating its own flesh. Love must be free to wander, To land upon its chosen shore And breathe.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People

Avea părul negru și niște ochi căprui minunați, obrajii arămii și un nas ascuțit. mai ales râsul lui îmi plăcea la nebunie, și mai avea și un aer așa de ștrengăresc și obraznic!

Nu știu ce să citesc, ce să scriu, ce să fac, nu știu decât că mi-e dor...

Trăgeam aerul în piept, ne uitam afară și simțeam că era vorba de ceva ce nu trebuia întrerupt de cuvinte.

Nu degeaba se spune despre mine că sunt un mănunchi de contradicții!

Pentru orice om căruia îi este frică, care e singur sau nefericit, remediul cel mai bun este în mod cert să iasă afară.

Sigur, eu sunt un clovn amuzant pentru o după-amiază, după care toți se satură de mine pentru o lună întreagă.

Sunt exact ce este un film de dragoste pentru oamenii profunzi, o simplă distracție, un divertisment ocazional, ceva ce se uită repede, nu ceva prost, dar nici neapărat bun.

Azi-dimineață am înțeles că nu s-a schimbat nimic, dimpotrivă, în timp ce am crescut și m-am maturizat, a crescut și iubirea din mine.

Nu-i așa că sunt groaznică fiindcă sunt preocupată tot timpul de mine însămi?

Dacă nu scrii tu însuți, n-ai cum să știi ce minunat e să scrii.

Vreau să continui să trăiesc, chiar și după ce am murit.

Mi-e teamă de mine însămi, mi-e teamă ca, în dorința mea, să nu mă dăruiesc prea repede.

Întotdeauna există inima și rațiunea, fiecare trebuie să vorbească la timpul său.

De cele mai multe ori, oamenii proști nu pot suporta gândul că alții fac ceva mai bine ca ei.

În orice reproș e și ceva adevărat.

Femeile sunt niște soldați care luptă și suferă pentru supraviețuirea omenirii, mult mai viteji, mult mai curajoși decât numeroșii eroi ai libertății cu gura lor mare.

Sincer vorbind, nu pot să-mi imaginez prea bine cum poate cineva să spună “Sunt slab” și să continue să rămână slab.

Plânsul poate să-ți aducă o mare ușurare, dar numai dacă ai pe cineva lângă tine.

Cu toată iubirea multora din jur, un om poate să se simtă singur atunci când nu e pentru nimeni “cel mai drag”.

Niciodată imaginea lui nu mi-a apărut atât de limpede. Nu-mi trebuie nici o fotografie de-a lui, îl văd așa de bine, așa de bine.

Să meriți fericirea înseamnă să muncești pentru ea.

Îl iubeam așa de tare, încât n-am vrut să privesc adevărul în față și m-am ținut scai de el.

Uneori mi se pare foarte trist că nu putem mărturisi nimănui, nici măcar oamenilor care ne sunt cei mai apropiați, ce avem pe suflet.

We have become who we think we need to be and not who we want to be.

E un mare miracol că n-am renunțat la toate speranțele mele, căci ele par absurde și irealizabile. Cu toate astea, eu țin la ele, fiindcă tot mai cred în bunătatea interioară a oamenilor.

Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long and often. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tol¬stoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several such passages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filled with cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinc¬tive hand. And in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered in the bus, McCand¬less circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corol¬lary of a personality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, mis¬fits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.

Aș fi vrut să-l rog: povestește-mi ceva despre tine. Nu lua în seamă limbuția mea nefastă! Mi-am dat seama însă că-i mai ușor să-ți formulezi pentru tine astfel de rugăminți decât să le adresezi altcuiva.

Nu există decât o singură regulă de care trebuie să ții seama: să râzi de toate și să nu-ți pese de nimeni! Pare egoist, dar, în realitate, ăsta e singurul remediu pentru cei care-și plâng singuri de milă.

One of the lesser-known contributions of the great Harriet Tubman was the devotion of her life after the war to a similar project. The woman who personally led three hundred slaves to freedom, who was a spy and “general” for the Union, spent her final years trying to establish the John Brown Home for the Aged. When the government refused to give her a full veteran’s pension, the former general sold fruit and had a biography published to raise money for the institution.

honestly i don't understand the rousing of romance all that well. i used to believe in this thing called fate, or destiny. a romantic romeo and juliet, monet and veronica, etc. but now i feel jaded, maybe agnostic to the idea. but choice used to seem so unromantic, as if some mystic force was not behind the meeting of 2 beautiful individuals. but now i think choice is the greater of the two simply for this fact: by choosing someone you are saying that out of all the people in the entire world i have decided that i want you apart of my life in perpetuum, for the rest of my life, and no one else. no haphazard circumstance, no chance meetings where distant planets align. it's simply two rational individuals who make a choice and an effort to remain together.

It is only through an altered state of consciousness that a lesser being can see into the invisible and the immaterial. In our understanding, middling, certain substances are known to alter the manner a choice has been made. Some drugs will make one decide things one normally would not.’ ‘And choices are our domain,’ explained another Master. ‘The fabric of reality is stringed together by the unseen Threads of choice and consequence. As actors, storytellers and audience of reality, we cannot afford reality to unwire.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life. The limbs divided into great branches, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was young, budding twigs; and this connection of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few have left living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.

So far, all those who have tried to impose their version of what's right on others have failed. After a few years, or even longer, people always want their freedom and their own rights back. This is because having to obey one concept of right is inherently unjust. God has given each of us a unique sense of right, so when we are forced to live under someone else's for years and years, we run the risk of losing our own. But not everyone can be crushed. Sooner or later the longing for freedom is bound to assert itself. “Without realizing it, I've gone from justice to freedom, but I believe that it is only when these two are combined that something great will happen. “Who knows, perhaps one day people will listen more to that ‘little bit of God—known as a conscience—than to their own desires!

the men went downstairs to see if the outside door was still locked, but all was well! Of course, we gave the entire office staff a blow-by-blow account of the incident, which had been far from pleasant. It’s much easier to laugh at these kinds of things after they’ve happened, and Bep was the only one who took us seriously.

...What is it that he was? Was the idea he had for himself of lesser validity or of greater validity than someone else's idea of what he was supposed to be? Can such things even be known? But the concept of life as something whose purpose is concealed, of custom as something that may not allow for thought, of society as dedicated to a picture of itself that may be badly flawed, of an individual as real apart and beyond the social determinants defining him, which may indeed be what to him seem most unreal--in short, every perplexity pumping the human imagination seemed to lie somewhat outside her own unswerving allegiance to a canon of time-honored rules.

When I got older, I noticed that not all questions can be asked and that many whys can never be answered. As a result, I tried to work things out for myself by mulling over my own questions. And I came to the important discovery that questions which you either can't or shouldn't ask in public, or questions which you can't put into words, can easily be solved in your own head. So the word “why” not only taught me to ask, but also to think. And thinking has never hurt anyone. On the contrary, it does us all a world of good.

Friday, December 10, 1942

Wednesday, July 7, 1943

Miss Biegel of Biology (gone are the days when it was called Natural History):

I thanked the interesting old lady and I now know that so-called interesting men owe their reputation to their looks alone.

After that I was free to enjoy the rest of my unforgettable vacation, and now that I had seen the life of the stars up close, I was cured once and for all of my delusions of fame.

Everyone is born equal; we all come into the world helpless and innocent. We all breathe the same air, and many of us believe in the same God. And yet … and yet, to many people this one small difference is a huge one! It's huge because many people have never realized what the difference is, for if they had they would have discovered long ago that there's actually no difference at all!

Anne Frank is best known as the writer of her world-famous diary, though she tried her hand at other genres as well. Between September 1943 and May 1944, Anne wrote numerous stories, fairy tales, essays and personal reminiscences in a stiff-backed notebook reserved for that purpose. She did her utmost to make it resemble a real book, copying her stories neatly into the notebook and adding a title page, a table of contents, page numbers and so forth. Her collection of tales is now reproduced here in full, in a new translation, in the exact order in which she wrote them in her notebook.

If the patriarchal system, when compared to primitive systems, seems to represent a “lesser” degree of structuralization, then Western civilization since the decline of the patriarchal system can be said to have been governed by a principle of decreasing structuralization or destructuralization during the whole of its historical course—a tendency that can almost be seen as an ultimate aim. A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern.

One adult can be lured into pretend, can taste the tea in our toy cup, hear the voice on the toy phone. One adult could have seen what we saw and carried it quietly within her forever. But not four. Four adults have to agree on what happened, agree on the rules. Four adults can talk to each other until reality straightens, until doubt is crushed, until their memories unstitch and reform. Four adults never see a miracle at once.

Now that the war has long been over, I know why my fear vanished beneath that spacious sky. You see, once I was alone with nature I realized, without actually being aware of it, that fear doesn't help, that it doesn't get you anywhere. Anyone who's as frightened as I was should look to nature and realize that God is much closer than most people think. From that moment on, though countless bombs fell close by, I was never truly afraid again.

A ceremony then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly known as a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast that evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the other have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Dont look away. We are not speaking of mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?

It is now time for us to ask the personal question put to Jesus Christ by Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, ‘What shall I do Lord?’ or the similar question asked by the Philippian jailer, ’What must I do to be saved?’ Clearly we must do something. Christianity is no mere passive acquiescence in a series of propositions, however true. We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation, but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord … At its simplest Christ’s call was “Follow me.” He asked men and women for their personal allegiance. He invited them to learn from him, to obey his words and to identify themselves with his cause … Now there can be no following without a previous forsaking. To follow Christ is to renounce all lesser loyalties … let me be more explicit about the forsaking which cannot be separated from the following of Jesus Christ. First, there must be a renunciation of sin. This, in a word, is repentance. It is the first part of Christian conversion. It can in no circumstances be bypassed. Repentance and faith belong together. We cannot follow Christ without forsaking sin … Repentance is a definite turn from every thought, word, deed, and habit which is known to be wrong … There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we could ever renounce, but we must be willing to let them go as we cry to God for deliverance from them. If you are in doubt regarding what is right and what is wrong, do not be too greatly influenced by the customs and conventions of Christians you may know. Go by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the path of righteousness. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be some association or recreation, some literature we read, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or an unforgiving spirit. Jesus told his followers to pluck out their eye and cut off their hand or foot if it caused them to sin. We are not to obey this with dead literalism, of course, and mutilate our bodies. It is a figure of speech for dealing ruthlessly with the avenues along which temptation comes to us.

Take a look,” I said. “If you want to find inner happiness, go outside on a nice day with lots of sun and blue sky. Even if you stand at a window and look out over the city at the cloudless sky, like we're doing now, you'll eventually find happiness.

Yes, in the sense that I felt a certain contentment. Not always, mind you. I moaned and groaned from time to time. But I was never downright depressed again, probably because I realized that sadness comes from feeling sorry for yourself and happiness from joy.

Grothendieck transformed modern mathematics. However, much of the credit for this transformation should go to a lesser-known forerunner of his, Emmy Noether. It was Noether, born in Bavaria in 1882, who largely created the abstract approach that inspired category theory.1 Yet as a woman in a male academic world, she was barred from holding a professorship in Göttingen, and the classicists and historians on the faculty even tried to block her from giving unpaid lectures—leading David Hilbert, the dean of German mathematics, to comment, “I see no reason why her sex should be an impediment to her appointment. After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse.” Noether, who was Jewish, fled to the United States when the Nazis took power, teaching at Bryn Mawr until her death from a sudden infection in 1935.

But the secrets of such a book are not perpetual. Once they are known, they become relegated to a lesser sphere, which is that of the knower. Having lost the prestige they once enjoyed, these former secrets now function as tools in the excavation of still deeper ones which, in turn, will suffer the same corrosive fate. And this is the fate of all the secrets of the universe. Eventually the seeker of a recondite knowledge may conclude—either through insight or sheer exhaustion—that this ruthless process is never-ending, that the mortification of one mystery after another has no terminus beyond that of the seeker's own extinction. And how many still remain susceptible to the search? How many pursue it to the end of their days with undying hope of some ultimate revelation? Better not to think in precise terms just how few the faithful are.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

You aime lots of stupid crap." While Hassan worked to make God hates baguettes Colin's mind raced like this: (1) baguettes (2) Katherine XIX (3) the ruby necklace he'd bought her five months and seventeen days before (4) most rubies come from India, which (5) used to be under control of the United Kingdom, of which (6) Winston Churchill was the prime minister, and (7) isn't it interesting how a lot of good politicians, like Churchill and also Gandhi, were bald while (8) a lot of evil dictators, like Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein, were mustachoied? But (9) Mussolini only wore a mustache sometimes, and (10) lost of good scientists had mustaches, like the Italian Ruggero Oddi, who (11) discovered (and named for himself) the intestinal tract's spinchter of Oddi, which is just one of several lesser-known sphicnters like (12) the pupillary spinchter.

In the old days, when I was a little girl, Pim used to tell me stories about “Der bösen Paula.”* He had a whole collection of Paula stories, and I adored them all. Now, whenever I go to him for comfort in the middle of the night, he's started telling me Paula stories again, so I've written down the latest one.

Most people are blinded by the outer glow. If they'd been allowed to vote, very few people would have picked the rose. The rose is majestic and beautiful, and just as in the real world, no one asks the flowers whether a bloom which is outwardly less pretty might actually be inwardly more beautiful and more fit to rule.

All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immortality, to keep them ahead of the extinction that would ensue in a few generations if the species did not replenish itself. This is the implicit, and most pestiferous, rationale for propagation: to become fully integrated into a society, one must offer it fresh blood. Naturally, the average set of parents does not conceive of their conception as a sacrificial act. These are civilized human beings we are talking about, and thus they are quite able to fill their heads with a panoply of less barbaric rationales for reproduction, among them being the consolidation of a spousal relationship; the expectation of new and enjoyable experiences in the parental role; the hope that one will pass the test as a mother or father; the pleasing of one’s own parents, not to forget their parents and possibly a great-grandparent still loitering about; the serenity of taking one’s place in the seemingly deathless lineage of a familial enterprise; the creation of individuals who will care for their paternal and maternal selves in their dotage; the quelling of a sense of guilt or selfishness for not having done their duty as human beings; and the squelching of that faint pathos that is associated with the childless. Such are some of the overpowering pressures upon those who would fertilize the future. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and must be released, just as everyone must evacuate their bowels or fall victim to a fecal impaction. And who, if they could help it, would suffer a building, painful fecal impaction? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure. Quite a few people make gardens because they cannot stand the pressure of not making a garden. Others commit murder because they cannot stand the pressure building up to kill someone, either a person known to them or a total stranger. Everything is like that. Our whole lives consist of metaphorical as well as actual bowel movements, one after the other. Releasing these pressures can have greater or lesser consequences in the scheme of our lives. But they are all pressures, all bowel movements of some kind. At a certain age, children are praised for making a bowel movement in the approved manner. Later on, the praise of others dies down for this achievement and our bowel movements become our own business, although we may continue to praise ourselves for them. But overpowering pressures go on governing our lives, and the release of these essentially bowel-movement pressures may once again come up for praise, congratulations, and huzzahs of all kinds.

As Eva grew older, she did a lot of good things for those around her. At the age of sixteen (four years after meeting the elf), she was generally acknowledged to be a friendly, gentle and helpful girl. Every time she did something good, she felt happy and warm inside, and she gradually came to understand what the elf had meant by “the song in her heart.

Do any of those people in their warm and cozy living rooms have any idea what kind of life a beggar leads? Do any of those “good” and “kind” people ever wonder about the lives of so many of the children and adults around them? Granted, everyone has given a coin to a beggar at some time or another, though they usually just shove it into his hand and slam the door.

Actually, what you're hoping to find when you're depressed is happiness. Even if you miss a lot because you have no one to talk to, once you've found your own inner happiness, you'll never lose it. I don't mean this in terms of material things, but in a spiritual sense. I believe that once your own inner happiness has been found, it might go underground for a while, but it will never be lost!

WE THE PEOPLE PULL THE CORD . . . there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. Romans 3:11 The Founding Fathers didn’t think too highly of human nature, so they created three branches of government to keep power-hungry officials in check. They also slipped another “check” on these politicians into the Constitution. Remember learning how the Constitution can be amended through Congress? Well, even better, there’s a lesser-known way to change it when necessary, without Congress or the president stopping “We the People.” Our Founders knew government could grow so drunk on its own power that it wouldn’t ever voluntarily restrict itself, so constitutionalist George Mason allowed for a “Convention of States” in Article V to give the power back to the people. My friend Mark Levin describes this: “By giving the state legislatures the ultimate say on major federal laws, on major federal regulations, on major Supreme Court decisions, should 3/5 of state legislatures act to override them within a two year period, it doesn’t much matter what Washington does or doesn’t do. It matters what you do . . . the goal is to limit the entrenchment of Washington’s ruling class.” Keep educating the people, Mark!

Haunting the library as a kid, reading poetry books when I was not reading bird books, I had been astonished at how often birds were mentioned in British poetry. Songsters like nightingales and Sky Larks appeared in literally dozens of works, going back beyond Shakespeare, back beyond Chaucer. Entire poems dedicated to such birds were written by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many lesser-known poets. I had run across half a dozen British poems just about Sky Larks; Thomas Hardy had even written a poem about Shelley’s poem about the Sky Lark. The love of birds and of the English language were intermingled in British literary history. Somehow we Americans had failed to import this English love of birds along with the language, except in diluted form. But we had imported a few of the English birds themselves — along with birds from practically everywhere else.

First, there's the rose— the queen of the flowers; she's so beautiful and her fragrance is so intoxicating that it goes to everyone's head, most of all her own. The rose is beautiful, sweet-smelling and elegant, but if things aren't going her way, she shows her thorns. She's like a spoiled child—beautiful, elegant and seemingly nice as can be, but if you touch her or talk to someone else so that she's no longer the center of attention, out come her claws.

... I was flipping through a National Geographic magazine and I came across an article with this headline: "Women Created Most of the Oldest Known Cave Art Paintings, Suggests a New Analysis of Ancient Handprints. Most Scholars Had Assumed These Ancient Artists Were Predominantly Men, So the Finding Overturns Decades of Archaeological Dogma."... According to the article, Snow "analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. 'There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time,' said Snow... 'People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."' But Snow suggested that women were involved in every aspect of prehistoric life-from the hunt to the hearth to religious ritual. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around," he said." Leaving the Cave - pg. 93

I believe that God speaks ‘through me’ because He gives each person a little bit of Himself before sending them into the world. It's this part of us that distinguishes between good and evil and answers our questions. This little bit of God is just as much a part of nature as the blossoming of flowers and the singing of birds. “But God has also given people passions and desires, and these desires are in conflict with goodness and justice. As Hans said, Our sense of what's good and right also comes from God.

FOR YEARS I have carried in my head a thought tossed out by Aldo Leopold. In the early 20th century, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Eastern Arizona, and he killed a wolf to protect the cattle and increase the deer. He went on to become a pioneer in wildlife management and a leading conservationist. He wrote an essay about that killing. He’d decided that when he’d pulled the trigger and helped remove the wolf from the Southwest, he’d made the mountain a lesser place. He said we had to learn to think like a mountain. I stare into the gate of rock framing the entrance to Pima Canyon. The mesquite leaves hang listless in the heat. Underfoot, a broken field of granite spreads out. Past that stone gate, the freedom of the Pusch Ridge Wilderness begins. The place feels wanting without bighorns watching me. I can’t prove this. But I’ve known it since I was a boy. That’s why we look at the mountains and crave to be near them. Maybe we can’t think like a mountain. But we can do better than we have. We can bring the bighorns back where they belong. Counting sheep, An Essay by

She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.

Indeed," Arthur said. "But ... no one has said I'll be a good king. It would be a relief to know I don't go mad or bad before the end." Alex sighed, but with a smile. She knew Arthur was prying information out of her just to tease her, but two could play this game. "You're a good king, don't worry," she said, and then looked sadly to the ground. "At least you are once you heal from ... the incident." "What incident?" Arthur asked. Alex shook her head somberly. "Well, if Merlin hasn't told you, then I probably shouldn't." "Oh, right - the incident," he said, pretending to know. "Old Merlin's told me about that plenty of times." "Good," Alex said. "So you know all about the leeches." Arthur gulped. "Yes ... I do," he said nervously. "Luckily by then you've already been captured by the Saxons and your legs have been ripped off," Alex said. "So there aren't too many leech wounds." Arthur gulped. "It's the definition of luck," he said. "It's a shame you lose both your arms in the battle before you get captured," Alex said. "But you aren't known as Arthur the Limbless for nothing." "Arthur the Limbless? " "Oh, yes," Alex said. "A lesser king would have let the title belittle him, but you still manage to instill fear in all your enemies. Then again, that could be because of your future wife, Queen Girtha. Of course, Merlin has told you about her ..." "Naturally," Arthur said. "She's that nasty woman, right? So hideous, people are afraid to look at her. Now remind me, how many terrible children do we have?" "Just the one," Alex said. "And who would have expected you to die during childbirth?" "I die in childbirth?" Arthur asked with a quiver in his voice. "How is that possible?" "Isn't that obvious?" Alex asked. "That's why they call your wife Girtha the Strong Handed. Did you never make that connection?" "Oh, that's right," Arthur said. "I made that connection once before, but I forgot about it." "I don't blame you," Alex said. "I would have blocked it out of my mind, too.

At last she's through, her baskets are full. In the meantime the sun has set. Krista lies down in the grass, with her hands cupped behind her head and her eyes open, and looks at what's left of the pale-blue sky. This is the finest fifteen minutes of her day. You mustn't think that the little flower girl, who's worked so hard, is unhappy. She's never unhappy, and as long as she has these few moments every day, she never will be. There in the meadow, among the flowers and the grass, beneath the wide-open sky, Krista is content. Gone is her exhaustion, gone are the market and the people; she thinks and dreams only of the present. If only she can have this every day, a whole fifteen minutes of doing nothing, alone with God and nature.

This bluebell is simple and kind. It brings joy to the world. It chimes for flowers, just as church bells chime for people. It helps lots of flowers and is a comfort to them. The bluebell is never lonely; there's music in its heart. It's a much happier creature than the rose. The bluebell isn't interested in the praise of others. The rose lives and thrives on admiration. When that's missing, the rose has nothing to make her happy. Her outward appearance is for other people, but her heart is empty and therefore cheerless. The bluebell, on the other hand, may not be as beautiful, but she has ‘real’ friends who value her melodies; those friends live in the flower's heart.” “But the bluebell is also a pretty flower, isn't it?” “Yes, but not as eye-catching as the rose. Unfortunately, most people only notice the most obvious things.

Or when you keep a sex-addiction meeting under surveillance because they’re the best places to pick up chicks.” Serge looked around the room at suspicious eyes. “Okay, maybe that last one’s just me. But you should try it. They keep the men’s and women’s meetings separate for obvious reasons. And there are so many more opportunities today because the whole country’s wallowing in this whiny new sex-rehab craze after some golfer diddled every pancake waitress on the seaboard. That’s not a disease; that’s cheating. He should have been sent to confession or marriage counseling after his wife finished chasing him around Orlando with a pitching wedge. But today, the nation is into humiliation, tearing down a lifetime of achievement by labeling some guy a damaged little dick weasel. The upside is the meetings. So what you do is wait on the sidewalk for the women to get out, pretending like you’re loitering. And because of the nature of the sessions they just left, there’s no need for idle chatter or lame pickup lines. You get right to business: ‘What’s your hang-up?’ And she answers, and you say, ‘What a coincidence. Me, too.’ Then, hang on to your hat! It’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. Most people are aware of the obvious, like foot fetish or leather. But there are more than five hundred lesser-known but clinically documented paraphilia that make no sexual sense. Those are my favorites . . .” Serge began counting off on his fingers. “This one woman had Ursusagalmatophilia, which meant she got off on teddy bears—that was easily my weirdest three-way. And nasophilia, which meant she was completely into my nose, and she phoned a friend with mucophilia, which is mucus. The details on that one are a little disgusting. And formicophilia, which is being crawled on by insects, so the babe bought an ant farm. And symphorophilia—that’s staging car accidents, which means you have to time the air bags perfectly

I've been thinking about God quite a bit lately, though I've never told anyone before. When I was a little girl, my parents taught me to say a prayer every night before I went to bed. It became a habit, like brushing my teeth. I took God for granted. I mean, I never thought about Him, because all my wants and needs were taken care of. Now that I've had this accident and I'm often alone, I've had more than enough time to ponder all kinds of things. One of the first nights I was here, I got halfway through my prayers and realized that my mind was on very different matters. So I did something I'd never done before. I started thinking about the underlying meaning of the words and discovered that there's much more to this supposedly simple child's prayer than I ever suspected. Since that night, I've been saying other prayers, things that I myself thought were beautiful, not just a standard prayer. But a few weeks ago, I was halfway through my prayers again when a thought struck me like a bolt of lightning: ‘Why should God help me now, in my hour of need, when I all but ignored Him in better days?’ This question kept haunting me, because I knew that it would only be fair if God were to ignore my prayers in return.

SWEETEST IN THE GALE by Michelle Valois After Emily Dickinson You won’t lose your hair, I heard at the start of treatment, and though I didn’t, I lost a litany of other lesser and greater luxuries—saliva, stamina, taste buds, my voice—but my hair, during that chilly sojourn in the land of extremity to which I had sailed on a strange and stormy sea, my hair was not taken from me. Had it been, I would have perched one of those 18th century wigs on my head, such as those worn by the French aristocracy, measuring three, four, even five feet high and stuffed, as they were known to be, with all sorts of things: ribbons, pearls, jewels, flowers, tunes without words, reproductions of great sailing vessels, my soul inside a little bird cage—ornaments selected to satisfy a theme: the signs of the Zodiac (à la Zodiaque) or the discovery of a new vaccine (à l’inoculation) or, as was the case in June of 1782, the first successful hot air balloon flight by the brothers Michel and Etienne Montgolfier. Regarde, I exclaim to my ladies in waiting, pointing to the sky on that bright afternoon as the balloon, made of linen and paper, rises some 6,000 feet. Later, a duck, then a sheep, and finally a human is carried away. I watch, inspired, hopeful, whispering, lest my doctors overhear: when the storm turns sore, and that little bird escapes her little bird cage and is abashed without reckoning, I will sail away in my balloon, prepared, if it fails me, to pluck a few ostrich feathers from the high hair of the Queen of France herself; they and hope (which never asked for a crumb) will carry me beyond disease for as long as I have left to choose between futility and flight.