Niche Quotes

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He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it; Who has left the world better than he found it, Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; Whose life was an inspiration; Whose memory a benediction.
Bessie Anderson Stanley (More Heart Throbs Volume Two in Prose and Verse Dear to the American People And by them contributed as a Supplement to the original $10,000 Prize Book HEART THROBS)
You were talking to that niche in the wall again, Gwyneth. I saw you." "Yes, but it's my favorite bit of wall, Gordon. I'd hurt its feelings if I didn't stop and talk to it.
Kerstin Gier (Ruby Red (Precious Stone Trilogy, #1))
Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.
Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.
V.S. Naipaul
Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience--that of half the global population, after all--is seen as, well, niche.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place – well then, game over.
Richard Siken
Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.
Rich Mullins
Himmlisch ist's wenn ich bezwungen Meine irdische Begier; Aber doch wenn's nich gelungen Hatt' ich auch recht huebsch Plaisir! Loosely translated: It is heavenly, when I overcome My earthly desires But nevertheless, when I'm not successful, It can also be quite pleasurable.
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)
Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
Be a King. Dare to be Different, dare to manifest your greatness.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
Whether you try too hard to fit in or you try too hard to stand out, it is of equal consequence: you exhaust your significance.
Criss Jami (Healology)
Niches set back in the walls contained polished marble statues of entwined bodies. Will looked away from them hastily, and then back. It wasn't as if Magnus seemed to be paying attention to what Will was doing, and he'd honestly never imagined two people could get themselves into a position like that, much less make it look artistic.
Cassandra Clare
I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
God is never tired of bringing the sun out every morning, taking it in the evenings and bringing out the moon.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
Frank Herbert (Dune (Dune, #1))
A confident woman wears a smile and has this air of comfortability and pleasantness about her.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
Men love women who are courageous for it means they can go all the way with him in his pursuit of his good dreams and intentions.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Your words are powerful so what you say goes a long way to either establish or destroy you; this is why you should say things that God has said concerning you, not things that situations or circumstances say.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.
David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications)
Don't die without fulfilling your purpose.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
How do you curb envy? First, stop comparing yourself to others. Second, find your “circle of competence” and fill it on your own. Create a niche where you are the best. It doesn’t matter how small your area of mastery is. The main thing is that you are king of the castle.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.
Criss Jami (Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile)
I led me by the hand, as if to fill the niches in the memories in my oozing brain fluid. Without even a destination, we kept walking. Disgusting clouds were floating in the sky. I already know what will happen to me the next time I wake up.
Sui Ishida
Somewhere in that database my name sat in its own little niche, the name of a reject, undisciplined and worthless. Just the way I liked it.
Ilona Andrews (Magic Bites (Kate Daniels, #1))
Fenworth owned a world-famous library. More rooms held books than beds. Pillows stuffed in niches and comfortable chairs scattered throughout each room offered abundant paces to curl up and read.
Donita K. Paul (DragonQuest (DragonKeeper Chronicles, #2))
Dare to be different. Represent your maker well and you will forever abide in the beautiful embrace of his loving arms.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
You can change any status quo, stand out, walk by faith and not by sight and things will definitely go well with you.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
You should look for your niche: all those people who will love your product because their needs and your product benefits match. we should try to reach a stage where our potential customer base is just perfect in size for us - not too big and not too little.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet--you've not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don't shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this--it would be a really great life-work, Stephen.
Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness)
Restorative niche' is Professor Little's term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self. It can be a physical place, like the path beside the Richelieu River, or a temporal one, like the quiet breaks you plan between sales calls.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
No matter how great a technical expert you are, you will never be able to create something useful until you know what people want.
Prem Jagyasi
We must consider the building not as an object but as a collaborative system tightly linked to it's natural environment; an ecological niche.
Neri Oxman
You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation. ~ The Well of Loneliness, 1928
Radclyffe Hall
An average man is egoistic, proud and has strong self esteem. They always require partners who massage their ego not those who will drag their ego to the mud.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)
An intelligent woman is a goldmine! She has the ability to learn, reason and understand things better and faster than her contemporaries. She is competent, alert and can reason out stuffs easily.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
Don't call yourself discouraged anymore;it's no longer your name.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
Girls, New Girl, 2 Broke Girls. What do they all have in common? The universal gender classification, “girl,” is white. In all three of these successful series, a default girl (or two) is implied and she is white. That is the norm and that is what is acceptable. Anything else is niche.
Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
Don't let any situation intimidate you anymore, don't accept defeat anymore.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
- Ha - zaciekawił się Jaskier, który właśnie zbliżył się do nich. - Więc to są słynne tajne runy krasnoludów? Co głosi ten napis? - “Na pohybel skurwysynom!
Andrzej Sapkowski (Chrzest ognia (Saga o Wiedźminie, #3))
The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.
Howard Pyle
To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
Iain Banks
The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it — once you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know’, then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
Robert A. Heinlein (The Cat Who Walks Through Walls)
As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
Don't just float through life; don't just agree to anything and everything, have a course you are known for at all times.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
What are the ways by which we can reorient architecture to consider materials not as consumables, but as outputs of valuable and increasingly scarce ecological niches.
Neri Oxman (Neri Oxman: Material Ecology)
There's no such thing as 'no market'. Some books are just niche orientated that's all.
Jo Linsdell
Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
The coldest most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one's stomach.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
Lierre Keith (Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet)
Dominate in your domain; You can do it.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
A confident woman knows her worth and so doesn’t fret when her man is highly placed or is often found amidst other women in the course of his business or assignment.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
Patience is a virtue not a vice.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
I know what life I'm supposed to live; I have Pinterest. Obviously, this isn't it.
Natalie Sue (I Hope This Finds You Well)
A man I briefly dated tried to win arguments with me by telling me I was blinded by ideology. I couldn’t see the world objectively, he said, or rationally, because I was a feminist and I saw everything through feminist eyes. When I pointed out that this was true for him too (he identified as a libertarian) he demurred. No. That was just objective, common sense – de Beauvoir’s ‘absolute truth’. For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism – seeing the world from a female perspective – was niche. Ideological.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Don't say negative things about your spouse and children.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
Weigh whatever you are about to say; what will it do to your hearer - encouragement, edification, disappointment or fear? What will it do to your life - glorify, edify, beautify or weigh you down? Speak well and things will go well.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
It’s about being treated as a thing, isn’t it. Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value, or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine/organic intelligence. You’re a thing, and there is no safety.
Martha Wells (Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (The Murderbot Diaries, #4.5))
You are not permitted to suffer what others suffer, you are not permitted to fail or die young.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
When we are connected to the source, we will not be afraid of any task set before us.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
Accept responsibilities for all your actions. Learn from your past and your mistakes.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
You want to be ‘the guy’ who services ‘this type of person’ or solves ‘this type of problem.’ And even more niched ‘I solve this type of problem for this specific type of person in this unique counter-intuitive way that reverses their deepest fear.
Alex Hormozi ($100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No)
You recreate your world to your taste with God's Word in your mouth.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
In the world I lived in, the world of human people, there were ties and debts and consequences and good deeds. That was what bound people to society; maybe that was what constituted society. And I tried to live in my little niche in it the best way I could.
Charlaine Harris (Dead as a Doornail (Sookie Stackhouse, #5))
The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.
Steven Pinker
Your true power is not in your difference, but in your consistency of being different. The world will always adjust to consistency, yet struggle with change.
Shannon L. Alder
God rewards every act of obedience to His Will.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
Yes, sir, but the Librarian likes bananas, sir." "Very nourishin' fruit, Mr Stibbons." "Yes, sir. Although, funnily enough it's not actually a fruit, sir." "Really?" "Yes, sir. Botanically, it's a type of fish, sir. According to my theory it's cladistically associated with the Krullian pipefish, sir, which of course is also yellow and goes around in bunches or shoals." "And lives in trees?" "Well, not usually, sir. The banana is obviously exploiting a new niche." "Good heavens, really? It's a funny thing, but I've never much liked bananas and I've always been a bit suspicious of fish, too. That'd explain it.
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4))
When a man finds this kind of woman, he will go all out for her knowing that she will not be a letdown.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
He was not dead yet, not exactly— parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting for something to happen, something grand, but it isn't always about me, he keeps saying, though he's talking about the only heart he knows— He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There's a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place— well then, game over.
Richard Siken (Crush)
A woman that is patient has the ability to endure provocation, pain, annoyance etc, with much calm and strength.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
You may not attain the highest height with one leap but my dear; you will reach your destination.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey (The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating)
Was Fergus Urvill anywhere, still? Apart from the body - whatever was left of him physically, down there in that dark, cold pressure - was there anything else? Was his personality intact somehow, somewhere? I found that I couldn't believe that it was. Neither was dad's, neither was Rory's, nor Aunt Fiona's, nor Darren Watt's. There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn't. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
Iain Banks (The Crow Road)
Your mouth is not given to you for feeding alone; it is given to you to programme events and circumstance around you.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu (The Prince and the Pauper)
In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden—a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants.
Diane Ackerman (The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds)
Eventually, you will hit upon a particular field, niche, or opportunity that suits you perfectly. You will recognize it when you find it because it will spark that childlike sense of wonder and excitement; it will feel right. Once found, everything will fall into place. You will learn more quickly and more deeply . your skills level will reach a point where you will be able to claim your independence from within the group you work for and move out on your own. you will determine your circumstances. As your own Master, you will no longer be subject to the whims of tyrannical bosses or scheming peers.
Robert Greene
You’ll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You’re frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age. I hover behind you, peering over your shoulder: your muse, your unseen inspiration, urging you on. You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often come to feel for their subjects.
Margaret Atwood (The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2))
In fact, as time goes by, it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms, not merely because the algorithms are getting smarter, but also because humans are professionalising. Ancient hunter-gatherers mastered a very wide variety of skills in order to survive, which is why it would be immensely difficult to design a robotic hunter-gatherer. Such a robot would have to know how to prepare spear points from flint stones, how to find edible mushrooms in a forest, how to use medicinal herbs to bandage a wound, how to track down a mammoth and how to coordinate a charge with a dozen other hunters. However, over the last few thousand years we humans have been specialising. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specialises in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life. The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.
Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1))
The presumption that what is male is universal is a direct consequence of the gender data gap. Whiteness and maleness can only go without saying because most other identities never get said at all. But male universality is also a cause of the gender data gap: because women aren't seen and aren't remembered, because male data makes up the majority of what we know, what is male comes to be seen as universal. It leads to the positioning of women, half the global population, as a minority. With a niche identity and subjective point of view. In such a framing, women are set up to be forgettable. Ignorable. Dispensable - from culture, from history, a from data. And so, women become invisible.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Moderately fast growers (20 to 25 percent) in nongrowth industries are ideal investments. • Look for companies with niches. • When purchasing depressed stocks in troubled companies, seek out the ones with the superior financial positions and avoid the ones with loads of bank debt. • Companies that have no debt can’t go bankrupt. • Managerial ability may be important, but it’s quite difficult to assess. Base your purchases on the company’s prospects, not on the president’s resume or speaking ability. • A lot of money can be made when a troubled company turns around. • Carefully consider the price-earnings ratio. If the stock is grossly overpriced, even if everything else goes right, you won’t make any money. • Find a story line to follow as a way of monitoring a company’s progress. • Look for companies that consistently buy back their own shares.
Peter Lynch (One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In)
golden rules for career success 1 Specialize in a very small niche; develop a core skill 2 Choose a niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming an acknowledged leader 3 Realize that knowledge is power 4 Identify your market and your core customers and serve them best 5 Identify where 20 percent of effort gives 80 percent of returns 6 Learn from the best 7 Become self-employed early in your career 8 Employ as many net value creators as possible 9 Use outside contractors for everything but your core skill 10 Exploit capital leverage
Richard Koch (The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less)
A third group of people see the highest felicity in the abundance of property and the extension of ease. After all, property is an instrument to achieve the object of appetite. Through it, the human being attains the ability to achieve wishes. Hence, these people aspire to gather property; to increase estates, land, valuable horses, cattle, and farmland, and to hoard dinars in the earth. Hence, you will see one of them striving throughout life --- embarking on great dangers in the deserts, on journeys, and in the oceans to gather possessions with which he is niggardly toward himself, to say nothing of others. These are the ones meant by the words of The Prophet: "The slave of the dirham is miserable: the slave of the dinar is miserable." What darkness is greater than that which deceives the human being? Gold and silver are two stones that are not desired in themselves. When wishes are not achieved through them and they are not spent, then they are just like pebbles, and pebbles are just like them.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (The Niche of Lights (Brigham Young University - Islamic Translation Series))
2. If you are one of my own Dead (and if your Spirit passes through this Vestibule and reads this paper) then I hope you already know that I visit your Niche or Plinth regularly to talk with you and bring you offerings of food and drink. 3. If you are dead – but not one of my own Dead – then please know that I travel far and wide in the World. If ever I find your remains I will bring you offerings of food and drink. If it seems to me that no one living is caring for you then I will gather up your bones and bring them to my own Halls. I will put you in good order and lay you with my own Dead. Then you will not be alone.
Susanna Clarke (Piranesi)
A fourth group of people climbs from ignorance and pretends to possess the rational faculty. They suppose that the highest felicity is the expansion of honor and fame, the spread of reputation, a multiplicity of followers, and the influence of the command that is obeyed. Hence, you see that their only concern is eye service and cultivation of the things upon which observers cast their glance. One of them may go hungry in his house and suffer harm so that he can spend his wealth on clothes with which to adorn himself so that no one will look at him with the eye of contempt when he goes out. The types of these people are beyond count. All of them are veiled from Allah by the sheer darkness that is their own dark souls.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (The Niche of Lights (Brigham Young University - Islamic Translation Series))
Consider the person who insists that everything is right in her life. She avoids conflict, and smiles, and does what she is asked to do. She finds a niche and hides in it. She does not question authority or put her own ideas forward, and does not complain when mistreated. She strives for invisibility, like a fish in the centre of a swarming school. But a secret unrest gnaws at her heart. She is still suffering, because life is suffering. She is lonesome and isolated and unfulfilled. But her obedience and self-obliteration eliminate all the meaning from her life. She has become nothing but a slave, a tool for others to exploit. She does not get what she wants, or needs, because doing so would mean speaking her mind. So, there is nothing of value in her existence to counter-balance life’s troubles. And that makes her sick.
Jordan B. Peterson (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos)
I’d found my niche. Since I belonged to no group I learned to move seamlessly between groups. I floated. I was a chameleon, still, a cultural chameleon. I learned how to blend. I could play sports with the jocks. I could talk computers with the nerds. I could jump in the circle and dance with the township kids. I popped around to everyone, working, chatting, telling jokes, making deliveries. I was like a weed dealer, but of food. The weed guy is always welcome at the party. He’s not a part of the circle, but he’s invited into the circle temporarily because of what he can offer. That’s who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share. For me it was humor. I learned that even though I didn’t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing. I’d drop in, pass out the snacks, tell a few jokes. I’d perform for them. I’d catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood)
Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material. The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
It was knock or go home and die. Rase knocked. The door opened with such alacrity that Rase wondered whether Gabriel had been standing on the other side, drawn to the door by the same uncanny instinct that had inspired him to torment Rase. "You said anytime," Rase said, before Gabriel could say anything. "I did." Gabriel seemed unperturbed at having his employer show up at his door. He stepped back to let Rase in. Rase had been expecting something in keeping with the rest of the building. Instead, Gabriel's apartment was shabby but spotless. It was one main room with a niche for the kitchen and a tiny bathroom that Rase could see through a narrow door that stood ajar. He walked to the center of the room and found himself only feet from Gabriel's bed, a sizable bed with a heavy iron frame. That stopped him in his tracks, and he stood there, wondering what to do with himself. "Beer?" Gabriel was so close that Rase could feel Gabriel's breath on his hair. "This isn't a social call," Rase said, not even trying to keep his voice steady. "Then why are your clothes still on?
Anah Crow (Uneven)
Or no—let us say you are not quite such a person. You are ambitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you. As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not having more. It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voice that inhibits others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.
Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door)
I personally believe mavericks are people who write their own rulebook. They are the ones who act first and talk later. They are fiercely independent thinkers who know how to fight the lizard brain (to use Seth Godin’s term). I don’t believe many are born, rather they are products of an environment, or their experiences. They are usually the people that find the accepted norm does not meet their requirements and have the self-confidence, appetite, independence, degree of self reliance and sufficient desire to carve out their own niche in life. I believe a maverick thinker can take a new idea, champion it, and push it beyond the ability of a normal person to do so. I also believe the best mavericks can build a team, can motivate with their vision, their passion, and can pull together others to accomplish great things. A wise maverick knows that they need others to give full form to their views and can gather these necessary contributors around them. Mavericks, in my experience, fall into various categories – a/ the totally off-the-wall, uncontrollable genius who won’t listen to anyone; b/ the person who thinks that they have the ONLY solution to a challenge but prepared to consider others’ views on how to conquer the world &, finally, the person who thinks laterally to overcome problems considered to be irresolvable. I like in particular the third category. The upside is that mavericks, because of their different outlook on life, often sees opportunities and solutions that others cannot. But the downside is that often, because in life there is always some degree of luck in success (i.e. being in the right place at the right time), mavericks that fail are often ridiculed for their unorthodox approach. However when they succeed they are acclaimed for their inspiration. It is indeed a fine line they walk in life.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)