Midst Famous Quotes

There are no footnotes or endnotes in this translation. If any explanations or clarifications are required, they are embedded in the body of the text, so as not to interrupt the flow of the words. After all, as Noel Coward once famously remarked, “Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.

The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous markmen had them. Nevertheless,

In the midst of this culture of openness and sharing, we need to think carefully about the information we're volunteering to the world. Sometimes the world is listening.

And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name.43 Life has left some in the midst of their first struggles, before they could climb up to the height of their ambition; some, when they have crawled up through a thousand indignities to the crowning dignity, have been possessed by the unhappy thought that they have but toiled for an inscription on a tomb;

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

She thought of the famous Arctic explorers crossing flat white lands of ice, and Captain Cook sailing to the Pacific, and the men who had started and fought wars over the centuries, and all that male energy going outward, seeking to conquer, seeking to own. And she had gone inward in a way, into the confines of a neglected old house, not even truly a home anymore. She had seen the thing right under everyone's eyes, and she hadn't let it go or been subsumed by the rigours of daily life. She had made space for that discover in the midst of a most contained life, the life that the world seemed bent on handing her.

From insomnia and as a result of the intense struggle against mounting weakness, something strange is happening to me. In the midst of a lecture, tears suddenly choke me, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel a passionate, hysterical desire to stretch my arms out and complain loudly. I want to cry in a loud voice that fate has sentenced me, a famous man, to capital punishment, and that in six months or so another man will be master of this auditorium. I want to cry out that I've been poisoned; new thoughts such as I have never known before have poisoned the last days of my life and go on stinging my brain like mosquitoes. And at such times my situation seems so terrible that I want all my listeners to be horrified, to jump up from their seats and, in panic fear, rush for the exit with a desperate cry. It is not easy to live through such moments.

Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession. Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have been famous. People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood. That would have been a relief, to say the least.

Saturday evening, on a quiet lazy afternoon, I went to watch a bullfight in Las Ventas, one of Madrid's most famous bullrings. I went there out of curiosity. I had long been haunted by the image of the matador with its custom made torero suit, embroidered with golden threads, looking spectacular in his "suit of light" or traje de luces as they call it in Spain. I was curious to see the dance of death unfold in front of me, to test my humanity in the midst of blood and gold, and to see in which state my soul will come out of the arena, whether it will be shaken and stirred, furious and angry, or a little bit aware of the life embedded in every death. Being an avid fan of Hemingway, and a proponent of his famous sentence "About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” I went there willingly to test myself. I had heard atrocities about bullfighting yet I had this immense desire to be part of what I partially had an inclination to call a bloody piece of cultural experience. As I sat there, in front of the empty arena, I felt a grandiose feeling of belonging to something bigger than anything I experienced during my stay in Spain. Few minutes and I'll be witnessing a painting being carefully drawn in front of me, few minutes and I will be part of an art form deeply entrenched in the Spanish cultural heritage: the art of defying death. But to sit there, and to watch the bull enter the arena… To watch one bull surrounded by a matador and his six assistants. To watch the matador confronting the bull with the capote, performing a series of passes, just before the picador on a horse stabs the bull's neck, weakening the neck muscles and leading to the animal's first loss of blood... Starting a game with only one side having decided fully to engage in while making sure all the odds will be in the favor of him being a predetermined winner. It was this moment precisely that made me feel part of something immoral. The unfair rules of the game. The indifferent bull being begged to react, being pushed to the edge of fury. The bull, tired and peaceful. The bull, being teased relentlessly. The bull being pushed to a game he isn't interested in. And the matador getting credits for an unfair game he set. As I left the arena, people looked at me with mocking eyes. Yes, I went to watch a bull fight and yes the play of colors is marvelous. The matador’s costume is breathtaking and to be sitting in an arena fills your lungs with the sands of time. But to see the amount of claps the spill of blood is getting was beyond what I can endure. To hear the amount of claps injustice brings is astonishing. You understand a lot about human nature, about the wars taking place every day, about poverty and starvation. You understand a lot about racial discrimination and abuse (verbal and physical), sex trafficking, and everything that stirs the wounds of this world wide open. You understand a lot about humans’ thirst for injustice and violence as a way to empower hidden insecurities. Replace the bull and replace the matador. And the arena will still be there. And you'll hear the claps. You've been hearing them ever since you opened your eyes.

And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life.  They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name. Life has left some in the midst of their first struggles, before they could climb up to the height of their ambition; some, when they have crawled up through a thousand indignities to the crowning indignity, have been possessed by the unhappy thought that they have but toiled for an inscription on a tomb; some who have come to extreme old age, while they adjusted it to new hopes as if it were youth, have had it fail from sheer weakness in the midst of their great and shameless endeavors.

How do I know anything about the world around me? By the use of my senses. But I can be deceived by my senses, A straight stick looks bent when it is dipped into water. How do I even know that I am awake, that the whole of reality is not a dream? How can I tell it is not a fabric of delusion woven by some malicious cunning demon simply to deceive me? By a process of persistent and comprehensive questioning it is possible to place in doubt the entire fabric of my existence and the world around me, Nothing remains certain. But in the midst of all this there is nevertheless one thing which does remain certain. No matter how deluded I may be in my thoughts about myself and the world, I still know that I am thinking, This alone proves me my existence, In the most famous remark in philosophy, Descartes concludes: 'Cogito ergo sum'-'I think, therefore I am.

Four thousand miles away in France, the old boys from the Haute-Loire Resistance wrote to each other to share the devastating news. They had enjoyed nearly forty years of freedom since spending a mere couple of months in Virginia’s presence in 1944. But the warrior they called La Madone had shown them hope, comradeship, courage, and the way to be the best version of themselves, and they had never forgotten. In the midst of hardship and fear, she had shared with them a fleeting but glorious state of happiness and the most vivid moment of their lives. The last of those famous Diane Irregulars—the ever-boyish Gabriel Eyraud, her chouchou—passed away in 2017 while I was researching Virginia’s story. Until the end of his days, he and the others who had known Virginia on the plateau liked to pause now and then to think of the woman in khaki who never, ever gave up on freedom. When they talked with awe and affection of her incredible exploits, they smiled and looked up at the wide, open skies with “les étoiles dans les yeux.

Leonardo da Vinci, was brought to the Vatican in 1513 by the new pope, Leo X, and given a list of commissions to create for the greater glory of the pope and his family. After three years of living in the papal palace and exploring Rome, the great Leonardo had produced almost nothing. The furious Pope Leo decided to have a surprise showdown with the capricious artist and intimidate him into completing some of his commissions. In the middle of the night, surrounded by several imposing Swiss Guardsmen, the pope burst through the door to Leonardo’s private palace chambers, thinking to shake him out of a sound sleep. Instead, he was horrified to find Leonardo wide awake, with a pair of grave robbers, in the midst of dissecting a freshly stolen corpse—right under the pope’s own roof. Pope Leo let out a nonregal scream and had the Swiss soldiers immediately pack up Leonardo’s belongings and throw them and the divine Leonardo himself outside the fortress wall of the Vatican, never to return again. Shortly afterward, Leonardo decided it was probably healthier to get out of Italy and move to France, where he spent the rest of his days. This, by the way, is why the great Italian genius’s most famous oil paintings, including the Mona Lisa, are all in Paris, in the Louvre museum.

God took His time to carve out the perfect place, Sam remembered her grandma always saying. Indeed, the hilltop was akin to a real cherry on top of a stunningly picturesque sundae. Bayview Point was home to two of northern Michigan's most popular orchards and tourist stops: Very Cherry Orchards and her family's Orchard and Pie Pantry. The first half of the hill was dense with rows of tart cherry trees, and the limbs of the small, bushy trees were bursting with cherries, red arms waving at Sam as if to greet her home. In the spring, these trees were filled with white blossoms that slowly turned as pink as a perfect rosé, their beauty so tender that it used to make Sam's heart ache when she would run through the orchards as part of her high school cross-country training. Often, when Sam ran, the spring winds would tear at the tender flowers and make it look as though it were snowing in the midst of a beautiful warm day. Like every good native, Sam knew cherries had a long history in northern Michigan. French settlers had cherry trees in their gardens, and a missionary planted the very first cherry trees on Old Mission Peninsula. Very Cherry Orchards grew nearly 100 acres of Montmorency tart cherries in addition to Balaton cherries, black sweet cherries, plums, and nectarines. They sold their fruit to U-Pickers as well as large companies that made pies, but they had also become famous for their tart cherry juice concentrate, now sold at grocery and health food stores across the United States. People loved it for its natural health benefits, rich in antioxidants.

We must first understand what the purport of society and the aim of government is held to be. If it be your intention to confer a certain elevation upon the human mind, and to teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantage, to give birth to living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations, nor unprepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be the result of its efforts, will leave a name forever famous in time—if you believe such to be the principal object of society, you must avoid the government of democracy, which would be a very uncertain guide to the end you have in view. But if you hold it to be expedient to divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and to the acquirement of the necessaries of life; if a clear understanding be more profitable to man than genius; if your object be not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but to create habits of peace; if you had rather witness vices than crimes and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offences be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant state of society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of opinion that the principal object of a Government is not to confer the greatest possible share of power and of glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest degree of enjoyment and the least degree of misery to each of the individuals who compose it—if such be your desires, you can have no surer means of satisfying them than by equalizing the conditions of men, and establishing democratic institutions.

When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of the current and past century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty. Yet today, in this hour of human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and potentially more deadly than ever before, the single figure who has raised the highest flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see. But there is a movement—a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be true to themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our lifetime. We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit to and embrace the lies by which that power lives. What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been silenced? Its strength is art. Art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of untruth. Few combinations in all of history have demonstrated the power of the pen coupled with the courage of free men’s minds. We need that power desperately today. We need it to teach the new and forgetful generations in our midst what it means to be free. Freedom is not an abstraction, neither is the absence of freedom. Art is a unique gift. It cannot be transmuted to another. But let us pray that this courage is contagious. We need echoes of this voice. We need to hear echoes in the White House. We need to hear the echoes in Congress and in the State Department and in the universities and media. The American ethos, from its conception to the contemporary, has been dedicated to the firm, unyielding belief in freedom. Freedom for all mankind, as well as for ourselves. It is in this spirit that we live our lives.

I have often said that loneliness is the predominant attitude in our culture. A person can be lonely in the midst of a party; he can be lonely in a crowd. Loneliness may be experienced by the rich and famous or the poor and unknown.

Here are the six things that I learned about Job: Job was a historical figure, thus the Book of Job should be read historically. The Book of Job is a single, internally consistent narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Job was a patient fellow. The Book of Job fits logically with the narrative arc of the Old Testament and with the other Standard Works. In the midst of his great suffering, Job occasionally, and for no apparent reason, prophesied of Christ with famous words like “I know that my Redeemer lives.” The Book of Job ultimately shows that, if we just wait long enough, God will reward our good behavior with material prosperity.

Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself… and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.

An Image of Disorder Consider the consequences of disorder, and you will be strengthened in choosing order in your life. The Torah gives us a direct teaching in this regard in the famous story of the Tower of Babel.16 The Hebrew word for sin, averah—like its English counterpart transgression—means “straying across a boundary.” The tower builders’ efforts to reach out to touch heaven were sinful because they transgressed the limits and constraints that are laid into the deep structure of the universe. Stretching for heaven, they failed to honor the distinction between the human and the divine. Since they flaunted order, their punishment was to suffer disorder, as represented by their inability to communicate with one another. Failure to honor the need for order brings on chaos. This cautionary tale applies to our lives, too. How much time, energy, emotion, and life is diverted into the channels that spring from disorder? Where are the Haggadot for the Seder? Where is my tallis? Who forgot to set the clock? Why didn’t you take the soup out of the freezer? Why would I buy milk if it wasn’t on the list? It’s in here somewhere. I almost got there. How many relationships are challenged or even destroyed by lack of attention to order? Without order, you are bound to be wasting something—whether time, resources, things themselves that get lost, relationships, and so on. Not wasting is a Jewish ethical principle.17 Any management consultant will tell you that you have to get organized if you want to be effective, but our concern goes far beyond that. Our concern is how living in chaos throws up impediments to being attentive to the divine will. And isn’t a life at the other end of the spectrum, which would be obsessively rigid, every bit as much an obstacle to spiritual living? Picture chaos, with stuff flying and piles of junk and cluttered thinking and a clanging ruckus: who could possibly hear the fragile voice of truth whispering in the midst of the tornado? And in contrast, but equally disabling, where order has been taken to the point of extreme inflexibility, even if you heard the divine will, would there be anything you could do to meld your own personal will to the will of God, so unbending would your ways have become?

The new empirico-mathematical method seemed to offer a model for analysing everything in secular terms: ethics as well as politics and society, and religion itself. Indeed, religion was first identified (and weakened) in the eighteenth century as yet another human activity, to be examined alongside philosophy and the economy. The European sense of time changed, too: belief in divine providence – ​Second Coming or Final Days – ​gave way to a conviction, also intensely religious, in human progress in the here and now. A youthful Turgot asserted in a famous speech at the Sorbonne in 1750 that: Self-interest, ambition, and vainglory continually change the world scene and inundate the earth with blood; yet in the midst of their ravages manners are softened, the human mind becomes more enlightened . . . and the whole human race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing,

It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time,—they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishing to me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings and blunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did. It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them—as I did—and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones—which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe. I had a greedy relish for a few volumes of Voyages and Travels—I forget what, now—that were on those shelves; and for days and days I can remember to have gone about my region of our house, armed with the centre-piece out of an old set of boot-trees—the perfect realization of Captain Somebody, of the Royal British Navy, in danger of being beset by savages, and resolved to sell his life at a great price. The Captain never lost dignity, from having his ears boxed with the Latin Grammar. I did; but the Captain was a Captain and a hero, in despite of all the grammars of all the languages in the world, dead or alive. This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. Every barn in the neighbourhood, every stone in the church, and every foot of the churchyard, had some association of its own, in my mind, connected with these books, and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Pipes go climbing up the church-steeple; I have watched Strap, with the knapsack on his back, stopping to rest himself upon the wicket-gate; and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle, in the parlour of our little village alehouse.

The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day. ― Henry David Thoreau

As a Capitol Hill staffer for Texas representative Michael McCaul, Miles Taylor saw Trump from the perspective of a committed Republican. Later, after serving in senior positions in the administration, Taylor became so disaffected with Trump that he wrote the famous “Anonymous” critique of the president that ran on the op-ed page of the New York Times. But long before Trump was even a candidate, he had an inkling there would be trouble: “In the middle of the 2016 race, I was working on Capitol Hill at the time, on the House side, as the policy director on the House Homeland Security Committee. Michael McCaul was chairman, Paul Ryan was Speaker. And we were in the midst of developing something for Paul Ryan called the Better Way agenda. Ryan wanted to put out an optimistic center-right vision for America’s future. Very policy oriented, but also a brand that Republicans could run on for years. He wanted this to be enduring. And I think, frankly, and had it been successful, he would have seen it as the centerpiece of his time as Speaker.

The subject’s relationship to death undergoes a substantive transformation in the turn from a society of prohibition to a society of enjoyment. Despite the latter’s reduction of everything to immanence, the one transcendent moment that no amount of communication would seem to be able to eliminate is that of death. Death is a moment that transcends the immanence of life, indicating a radically inaccessible beyond (even if this beyond is nothingness itself ). It acts as a barrier that every subject must endure, and it is the necessity of this barrier that, for Heidegger, confirms our being-in-the-world. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees the inevitability of death as the one nonrelational moment within existence. That is to say, unlike every other moment of life, universal communication cannot reduce death to the level of the ordinary; it proves an insurmountable barrier. As Heidegger famously puts it, “The non- relational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence. It reveals the fact that any being-together-with what is taken care of and any being-with the others fails when one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being is at stake.” Death provides the subject with an experience of necessity—a necessary barrier—that constitutes the subject as such and that cannot be communicated or relativized. As such, it represents the moment of transcendence in the midst of immanence, a moment that universal immanence cannot include. Subjects experience their own death as a fundamental limit. However, at a time, as Baudrillard says, “when everything is available” and all distance evaporates, even the necessity of death disappears. Death becomes something contingent, not constitutive. One might encounter it—and then again one might not. The controlling idea in a world without distance is not that death doesn’t exist—one is confronted with it all the time in undeniable forms—but that it is avoidable. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes at length this attitude toward death (an attitude he of course labels “inauthentic”). According to Heidegger, “characteristic talk speaks about death as a constantly occurring ‘case.’ It treats it as something always already ‘real,’ and veils its character of possibility and concomitantly the two factors belonging to it, that it is nonrelational and cannot-be-bypassed.” We experience death as the result of “errors” in human calculation or behavior, rather than a moment constitutive for human existence proper. When death is just a “case” or the result of certain “behavior patterns,” I can focus entirely on my behavior that might prevent it—diet, exercise, “healthy living” in general—and not on the possibility that “cannot-be-bypassed,” the necessity that cannot be evaded. In this way, the idea of an insurmountable barrier disappears.

began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that would make him famous. In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called “autotelic experiences”—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.

EUREKA! THE OLDEST SPIRITUAL ENTITY IN CREATION IS 42 YEARS AS THE LONGEST SERVING LIVING PERFECT MASTER ON EARTH IS 74 YEARS IN OUR MIDST. THE GOLDEN BIRTH THAT GAVE MEANING TO LIFE In the beginning was The Word, The Word was MAHARAJ JI. On Saturday, December 20, 1947 Maharaj Ji took a Nigerian Body as Satguru Maharaj Ji to dwell among men. This Divine evolutionary process, which occurred in the Gold-mining town of Tutuka, Obuasi, Ghana was heralded by the mid-afternoon Eclipse of the Sun 74 years ago and bore fruits 33 years later in faraway London as the Golden Boy, Mohammed Sahib Akanji Akinbami Ajirobatan Dan Ibrahim, on January 1, 1980 out of Divine Providence, be came the Divine Chosen ONE to carry the baton of Mastership as Satguru Maharaj Ji to save the world from peril. This is in fulfillment of the scriptures as well as prediction of the Sages of Our Time that: i. "For you yourselves to know very well that the Lord will come just like a thief in the night." (Thess 5:2). ii. Dr T. Lobsang Rampa, the famous Tibetan mystic, known for numerous predictions on world issues in one of his books "Chapters of Life" made it clear that at the turn of the millennium, the next Living Perfect Master/World Leader to save the world, whose manifestation would bring the Golden Age of Life. All that is needed is for our brothers and sisters who are facing disasters beyond human control to extend their search, since that is the essence of the Master's manifestation. in. Shri Prempal Singh Rawat's "Peace Bomb" Divine Lecture. He said, "there is no doubt and why should there be any doubt about it? There is a Greater Soul coming Who MOHAMMED SAHIB you will understand better. If you listen to Him, you will be greater than now, Right from the most thickly populated Black Nation in the world, Nigeria, Africa, where civilization started." …. on July 17, 1976 at the University of Pennsylvania, State of Pennsylvania, USA. Since the hen comes first before the egg, the spiritual birth of Satguru Maharaj Ji, The Christ/Mahdi of Our Time on January 1, 1980 could have been a mirage if the physical birth of Mohammed Sahib Akanji Akinbami Ajirobatan Dan Ibrahim did not occur 74 years ago. Come and join the commemorative party that gave meaning to humanity's isolated existence. Today, mankind will neither suffer nor die again. Like the warm embrace between the Sun and Moon that welcome Maharaj Ji's birth, it is profoundly significant for all races to embrace one another as children of the same Almighty Universal Father, MAHARAJ JI. Eureka, the world is saved because The Satguru has successfully and firmly anchored the world on its two feet (Black and White). Happy Celebrations!

At twelve o’clock we went below, and had just got through dinner, when the cook put his head down the scuttle and told us to come on deck and see the finest sight that we had ever seen. “Where away, cook?” asked the first man who was up. “On the larboard bow.” And there lay, floating in the ocean, several miles off, an immense, irregular mass, its top and points covered with snow, and its center of a deep indigo color. This was an iceberg, and of the largest size, as one of our men said who had been in the Northern ocean. As far as the eye could reach, the sea in every direction was of a deep blue color, the waves running high and fresh, and sparkling in the light, and in the midst lay this immense mountain-island, its cavities and valleys thrown into deep shade, and its points and pinnacles glittering in the sun.

There’s a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART. We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they’d find when they started treatment. As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.

In the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville recorded his famous observations on America, he noted a “strange melancholy that haunts the inhabitants . . . in the midst of abundance.”2 Americans believed that prosperity could quench their yearning for happiness, but such a hope was illusory, because, de Tocqueville added, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart.

Douglass fashioned a withering chastisement of American self-centeredness that would match any modern complaint about the culture’s hyperindividualism. “Millions of a foreign race may be stolen from their homes, and reduced to hopeless and inhuman bondage among us,” he complained, “and we either approve the deed, or protest as gently as ‘sucking doves.’ ” His “wickedly selfish” Americans loved to celebrate their “own heritage, and on this condition are content to see others crushed in our midst.” They lived by the “philosophy of Cain,” ready with their bluntly evil answer to the famous question “Am I my brother’s keeper?

My evening was a perfect demonstration of how hard it is for one side to really understand the other. I think Hollywood feels more comfortable welcoming directors who are convicted pedophiles, famous actresses who are also thieves, boxers who are convicted rapists, directors who push cocaine, rappers who sell heroin, singers who solicit prostitutes, and actors who beat up their woman than a Republican in their midst. In fact, the people who fit into those categories still enjoy the professional adoration of their peers in Hollywood, even amidst the suspicion and guilt. It's like the only that can really ruin your reputation as a celebrity is to come out as a Republican.