Livingstone Quotes

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.

You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way".

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.

Overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now.

You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.

He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all

God, send me anywhere, only go with me. Lay any burden on me, only sustain me. And sever any tie in my heart except the tie that binds my heart to Yours.

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

The gull sees farthest who flies highest

Heaven is not a place, and it's not a time. Heaven is being perfect.

You killed a tree?" "It tried to kill me first." "Perhaps you should tell me exactly what happened to you, Princess.

Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect. -And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.

One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin.

You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love.

I will go anywhere, provided it be forward.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!

All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine Book.

No occupation in this world is more trying to soul and body than the care of young children. What patience and wisdom, skill and unlimited love it calls for. God gave the work to mothers and furnished them for it, and they cannot shirk it and be guiltless.

sonny had circled three words in gold ink: i love thee.

Do you stop caring about someone you love - just because they don't feel the same way?

If the map doesn't agree with the ground the map is wrong

Sonny pulled Lucky up short and swung around to face Fennrys. "I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to die surprised. And I swear to all the gods, if the last thought that goes through my mind is 'What the hell was that?' I will hunt you down in the afterlife and punch you in the face throughout eternity.

Believe me, Kelley. If I’m not…it’s because I’m already dead.” He stroked her hair, and she could feel his breath warm on her forehead, like a kiss. “Because anyone that would seek to hurt you would have to kill me first.

Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together. [Letter to Edward Livingston, 10 July 1822 - Writings 9:100--103]

Kelley-"You know that story ends horribly, right?" Sonny-"What did Shakepeare know? He probably would have rewritten that bit if he'd thought about it.

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.

What did the Faerie that attacked you look like?" "Super creepy. Ripped jeans, weird tattoos, bad hair. And, come to think of it, really nice boots..." "Where?" "On his feet." Sonny winced and rubbed his temples. "Where were you attacked, Kelley?" "Okay, see...that was a joke.

If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?

Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.

چرا دشوارترین کار در جهان این است که پرنده ای را متقاعد کنی، آزاد است؟

It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.

There is one safe and happy place, and that is in the will of God.

He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form. "Set aside," came a voice from the multitude, "even if it be the Law of the Flock?" "The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is no other.

Well. I think it's safe to say that, in my absence, the power grabbing and backstabbing and political intrigue has officially reached an all-time Otherworld high.

A moment later Jonathan’s body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. “Don’t let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I’m a seagull. I like to fly, maybe…

Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how to get from shore to food and back again

Why, Jon, why?" his mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can't you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don't you eat? Son, you're bone and feathers!" "I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just want to know.

We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods. And yet paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called 'wounded healers.' " ~ Barney Livingston, M.D. (Doctors, 1989)

You can't choose someone else's destiny for them, Kelley. And you shouldn't let anyone choose yours.

A conversation with Mabh was like playing tag with a grizzly bear.

Kelley. Your name is Kelley, isn't it?" He didn't wait for her confirmation. "Yes. Well. Tell me...that bit just now...was that from Dante's Inferno?" Uh...no," Kelley stammered. Her face felt hot. Really?" I'm in for it. Are you sure?" he continued. "Because it most certainly wasn't from this play. And it bloody well sounded like hell.

Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!

Then she began to mutter to herself and gesture to the empty air. oh. Sonny sighed. Just another central park crazy.

Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.

It is because people live in the things they possess instead of in their relationship to God that God seems at times to be cruel.

She felt his arms tighten around her, as they spiraled up, borne aloft on wings that were dark as the night, bright as a new star.

I will place no value on anything I have or may possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ.

You have to choose your battles. The key is choosing the ones you know you can win.

Are you a weapon or a target? Choose!

He can't die! He's the bloody King of Winter." "Don't be absurd," said Bob, rolling an eye at the wounded Janus. "Just because he's immortal doesn't mean he can't die!

Livingston, if you could read my mind, you would start feeling really shy around me.

Only bad things happen quickly, . . . Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues.

Keep working on love.

Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?

Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.

You mess with my sister, you're messing with me!

It might not have been the destiny you would have asked for, Fennrys," she said quietly. "But I'm starting to think that the only destiny there is...is the one we make for ourselves.

Sully,for shame!" Jonathan said in reproach, " and don't be foolish! What are we trying to practice everyday? If our friendship depends on things like space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?

The best remedy for a sick church is to put it on a missionary diet.

Death holds no fear for me. I shall conquer it as I conquer all things.

I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty –- I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become.

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.

why is there blue stuff on your face? i was partying with the smurfs. i wanted to fit in.

I'm not sure if you just screwed with history or if history just screwed with you.

Sympathy is no substitute for action.

The three components of happiness are something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.

any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least.

Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’ ‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

You're joking. You want to help me?" "We're brothers-in-arms, Sonny." Fennrys stood and paced restlessly. "And, truth is, I'm bored out of my mind in Manhattan. Nothing to do there but jump at shadows and put up with Aaneel's pompous yapping: 'There're crack in the Gate! Remain vigilant! Protect the puny humans! Eek, a mouse!' It's tiresome.

It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, you can’t change yourself. So you have no choice but to be yourself. Fuck everyone who has a problem with it.

to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.

Uri...vinciri...verberari...ferroque necari. I will endure to be burned... to be bound... to be beaten... and to be killed by the sword.

His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.

Rising in Triumph, just like the phoenix

The only law is one which leads to freedom

Le paradis, c'est simplement d'être soi-même parfait.

We were castoffs and slaves, orphans and unwanteds and used-to-be princesses...and we were mighty.

Don't ever say that, Fennrys," she said. "I don't ever want to hear you say that you don't deserve or you aren't worthy. You do. You are.

Great, Kelly thought, a knot of fear tightening her stomach. A mugger with a taste for Shakespeare. This could only happen in Cental Park.

Maybe honor wasn't always something won by a blade. I thought. And maybe it couldn't be so easily stripped away, even in servitude.

There is only forward. Only tomorrow. No yesterday, no going back. And nothing of value is left behind, so nothing is truly lost.

Imagination is an old soul.

For each of them, the most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do...

To begin with, you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.

That hallmark image of cupid as a fat cherub with arrows? I think the real cupid is some kind of psycho juvie with a taser.

Christ alone can save the world, but Christ cannot save the world alone.

There are always two sides to every story, Kelley. Something I learned playing Richard the Third and Macbeth: if you're playing the 'bad guy', you never really think of yourself as bad. It's just that your motives are often...misunderstood by everyone else.

Some things you just have to take on faith and believe in at the risk of getting hurt. It's one of the things that the Fair Folk will never understand, and it's something that sets us apart from them. The fact that each and every time we believe in each other we take a risk. Because we know that it might NOT be the truth. But we also know that it MIGHT be.

What about the whiskey?" Jack said as they ran. "Won't it keep them out?" The Green Maidens don't drink anything but blood." Bob's disembodied voice floated after them. "The whiskey magick won't affect them." Wonderful," the old actor muttered, a tremor of fear in his voice. "I should've poured a Bloody Mary.

I place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of God. If anything will advance the interests of the kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall most promote the glory of Him to whom I owe all my hopes in time or eternity.

The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.

Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need. ...And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for.

Lucky!" she shouted. The creature pulled up and pranced excitedly before her, front hooves pawing at the ground. Laughing with happiness, Kelley flung her arms around the kelpie and buried her face in his mane. Lucky nuzzled her shoulder and head-butted at her in delight. Besides Sonny, Fennrys gestured with his good arm. "Isn't that...?" "The Roan Horse, Harbinger of the Wild Hunt and Fearsome Bringer of Doom. Yeah" Sonny nodded. "Used to be." "Thought so." Lucky kicked up his back hooves like a frolicking colt, and Fennrys snorted is disgust. "Evil really needs to step up its game.

For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. Yet most lives are the same, 95 percent of the time. And most lives aren't extrinsically meaningful, unless you're delusionally self-absorbed or authentically Born Again. So here's where we find the creeping melancholy of modernity: The one thing all people are supposed to inherently deserve- a daily subsistence that's both meaningful and unpredictable-- tends to be an incredibly rare commodity. If it's not already there, we cannot manufacture it.