Outlived Usefulness Quotes

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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Marshall McLuhan
Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness, possesses you. And in this materialistic age, a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.
Peace Pilgrim
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Eventually, computers and robots will run things. Humans will manage those machines, but that doesn't require courage or strength, or any characteristics like those. In fact, men are outliving their usefulness
Robert James Waller (The Bridges of Madison County)
The times do, in fact change. They change relentlessly. Inevitably. Inventively. And as they change, they set into bright relief not only outmoded honorifics and hunting jorns, but silver summoners and mother-of-pearl opera glasses and all manner of carefully crafted things that have outlived their usefulness. Carefully crafted things that have outlived their usefulness, thought the Count. I wonder...
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
Why do you think women are designed to outlive men? Why do we keep going for thirty years after our bodies can no longer reproduce? Do you think nature meant for those years to be useless? No, of course not. Our lives are designed to have three parts. The first is education. The second, creation. And in part three, we put our experience to use and protect those who are weaker.
Kirsten Miller (The Change)
Rules, established with reason and justice, can easily outlive their usefulness as circumstances change, yet can remain in force through inertia. It is then not only right, but useful, to break those rules as a way of advertising the fact that they have become useless—or even actually harmful.
Isaac Asimov (Foundation and Earth (Foundation, #5))
The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
With a head full of fantasies of how I'll flay him alive after he outlives his use, I unzip my pilot coat.
Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow (Iron Widow, #1))
doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
Then disinherit me! The king sends me expensive gifts. I have plenty of money, and I live in the palace. There is nothing you can do to threaten me. You’ve outlived your usefulness, Father. You got me into the palace, and now I can take it from here. In fact, once I win the king’s favor, I’ll make sure you don’t see one penny out of my treasury.
Tricia Levenseller (The Shadows Between Us (The Shadows Between Us, #1))
So this is where stylists go when they’ve outlived their use. To sad theme underwear shops where they wait for death.
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.
James S.A. Corey (Cibola Burn (Expanse, #4))
We whitewash MLK - how fittingly absurd. I mean, we white-wash everything. We have to stop revering MLK for the wrong reasons, sanitized, domesticated, like Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. He was vehemently anti-racism, anti-oppression, anti-war, anti-materialism, pro-union, pro-social-services, anti-capitalism. Yes. MLK believed capitalism had outlived its usefulness and advocated democratic socialism.
Shellen Lubin
I used to read the obituaries to gloat over all the people I've outlived, but now I don't think it matters, we all live for just a moment anyway.
Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold (The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am)
When an entire island is laughing at its colonial governor, it is safe to say that he has outlived his usefulness. It is impossible to subjugate people who are laughing at you.54
Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
A wide array of research shows that people who are delusionally optimistic tend to outlive people with more realistic attitudes.
Shankar Vedantam (Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain)
Has it ever occurred to you that business as you think of it may have outlived its usefulness? Business has made its contribution and the world moves on. Business is just another dodo. . . .
Clifford D. Simak (Time Is the Simplest Thing)
(Resilience) acknowledges from the outset that things will go wrong. All of our solutions will eventually outlive their usefulness. We will make messes, and disruption we do not cause or predict will land on us. This is the drama of being alive.
Krista Tippett (Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living)
The Enlightenment may have indeed outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason's protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason's limitations. O ye of little skepticism, kindly acknowledge your debt to that idiom on which you so glibly heap scorn.
James K. Morrow (The Last Witchfinder)
And when you are dying, you may have a chance to reflect on your life and the legacy you are leaving behind. You created that legacy during the past day. You are creating that legacy at this very moment. What will you leave behind? What will you create that will outlive you? How many hearts and minds will be touched by your deeds? Use your precious moments wisely. Do what you came here to do. “To
Gregg Krech (The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology)
shaking hands I was doing something that I was to do countless times in the years to come: acting in conformity with what others expected of me even though, by the very nature and form of my life, I did not and could not share their spirit. (After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair.
Richard Wright (Black Boy)
Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty, his “eternal” beauty. People thought he was purer, more intelligent, kinder, nobler than he was because they ascribed all these virtues to him. What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic? If they saw him for what he really was – empty-headed, vicieux (how did you translate that? “Riddled with vices?”), narcisse? Used to being indulged and pursued, terrified he’d outlive his fatal appeal and yet longing to be free of it?
Edmund White (Our Young Man)
Then disinherit me! The king sends me expensive gifts. I have plenty of money, and I live in the palace. There is nothing you can do to threaten me. You’ve outlived your usefulness, Father. You got me into the palace, and now I can take it from here. In fact, once I win the king’s favor, I’ll make sure you don’t see one penny out of my treasury.
Tricia Levenseller (The Shadows Between Us (The Shadows Between Us, #1))
A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.
Peter F. Drucker
I have outlived the stillborn. I have outlasted my usefulness. I have become an abysmal ocean sponge, ten millennia old, and just as wise.
Logan Ryan Smith (My Eyes Are Black Holes)
We are one with the stone, and you do not own stone, you do not own something that outlives you, you just get to use it for a while.
Mark Tompkins (The Last Days of Magic)
In the perfect society, there is neither emotion nor mercy; precious space cannot be wasted on those who have outlived their usefulness.
Frank Herbert (Hellstrom's Hive)
until the day it would outlive its usefulness, when I would probably relinquish it with ease.
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
Whatever marijuana did for me was still working, Ruth argued—until the day it would outlive its usefulness, when I would probably relinquish it with ease.
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
Conceptual metaphors generally ‘outlive’ the specific words and expressions that involve them.
Karen Sullivan (Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse)
His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.
Christopher Hitchens
An addiction (a repetitious act) is a ritual to help one through a trying time; its repetition safeguards the passage, it becomes one's talisman, one's touchstone. If it sticks around after having outlived its usefulness, we become "stuck" in it and it takes possession of us. But we need to be arrested. Some past experience or condition has created this need. This stopping is a survival mechanism, but one which must vanish when it's no longer needed if growth is to occur.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza)
The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. . . .The point about the melting pot. . . is that it did not happen.
David L. Sills (Social Science Quotations: Who Said What, When, and Where)
The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring. [...] The truths, the great truths - and most of the lesser ones as well - they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn't matter, as long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to. [...] We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. [...] Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use. Until then, a thousand small lies will do. (from Way of Cross and Dragon)
George R.R. Martin (Dreamsongs, Volume I)
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
Robert Louis Stevenson (Æs Triplex and Other Essays)
For the times do, in fact, change. They change relentlessly. Inevitably. Inventively. And as they change, they set into bright relief not only outmoded honorifics and hunting horns, but silver summoners and mother-of-pearl opera glasses and all manner of carefully crafted things that have outlived their usefulness.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality. An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity. Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.
Karen Armstrong (A Short History of Myth)
The way Lind sees it, the only Western commander who ever mastered third-generation warfare was George Patton. All others remained stuck in second-generation warfare, a blunt, clumsy instrument that had long outlived its usefulness and only worked because of the overwhelming advantage in firepower they enjoyed over Germany.
Martin van Creveld (A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind)
Her grandmother had taught her any number of things, like embroidery and spinning and plain sewing and some basic knitting. She had started to teach her how to use the great loom that stood in the corner, so that someday Gerta could earn her living as a weaver, if she didn’t marry, or if she outlived her husband as her grandmother had done. And Gerta could cook on a stove and clean nearly anything. All good, useful skills. She’d make someone a fine wife some day. Everybody said so. Making someone a fine wife had not included learning how to sleep in the woods without freezing or getting soaked. This struck Gerta as an enormous and unexpected gap in her education.
T. Kingfisher (The Raven and the Reindeer)
Some of the old similes which have outlived their usefulness and should be pensioned off, are "Sweet as sugar," "Bold as a lion," "Strong as an ox," "Quick as a flash," "Cold as ice," "Stiff as a poker," "White as snow," "Busy as a bee," "Pale as a ghost," "Rich as Croesus," "Cross as a bear" and a great many more far too numerous to mention.
Joseph Devlin (How to Speak and Write Correctly)
Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the Civilizing Process. This is the long-term trend of informalization I mentioned earlier, and it leads to what Elias called a “controlled decontrolling of emotional controls” and what Wouters calls third nature.182 If our first nature consists of the evolved motives that govern life in a state of nature, and our second nature consists of the ingrained habits of a civilized society, then our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
I would not have you think me regretful, or melancholy. Life has been good to me—and every age has its gifts for the man who is willing to work for them and use them temperately. And nothing is more ungraceful, more ludicrous, than the spectacle of one who attempts to linger over the pleasures of an age he had outlived, and ignore the advantages of his own time of life.
John D. Swain (A Father to his son. A Letter to an Undergraduate Upon his Entering College)
Studies have found that approximately one-third of those folks who are obese by BMI are actually metabolically healthy, by many of the same parameters used to define the metabolic syndrome (blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, and fasting glucose, among others). At the same time, some studies have found that between 20 and 40 percent of nonobese adults may be metabolically unhealthy, by those same measures
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
It was her grandfather who'd told her the tale of this particular violin, over and over, as if the telling could stave off loss, as if the weight and scope of human history were not found in books or in those mythic universities in Rome and Naples that no one in their village had ever seen but, rather, were encoded in objects like this one, a violin touched by hundreds of hands, loved, used, stroked, pressed, made to outlive its owners, storing their secrets and lies
Carolina De Robertis (The Gods of Tango)
Character has outlived its day. In ancient, primitive times, when biologically weak man struggled against omnipotent nature, character was useful, beneficial; with hideous labor it shoved the heavy stone of human impotence forward. We learned to praise ourselves, to admire character, to prostrate ourselves before it, make a fetish of it. But today no one has the courage to discredit character, although, psychologically speaking, it is now a throwback, simply reactionary.
Tadeusz Konwicki (A Minor Apocalypse)
Hike 1.5 miles on a hilly trail. Get up off the floor under your own power, using a maximum of one arm for support. Pick up a young child from the floor. Carry two five-pound bags of groceries for five blocks. Lift a twenty-pound suitcase into the overhead compartment of a plane. Balance on one leg for thirty seconds, eyes open. (Bonus points: eyes closed, fifteen seconds.) Have sex. Climb four flights of stairs in three minutes. Open a jar. Do thirty consecutive jump-rope skips.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
The way in which I do this, the tools that I use, derive from a school of psychology known as dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, developed in the 1990s by Marsha Linehan. Based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, which seeks to teach patients new ways of thinking about or acting on their problems, DBT was developed to help individuals with more serious and potentially dangerous issues, such as an inability to regulate their emotions and a propensity to harm themselves or even attempt suicide.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
I talked a lot about marijuana in therapy. I wrestled with the idea of giving it up and wondered why the prospect scared me so much. Ruth said that enforcement and constraint never produced anything good, and that, rather than force myself to live without weed, a better starting place might be to acknowledge that I was now dependent on it, and unwilling or unable to abandon it. Whatever marijuana did for me was still working, Ruth argued—until the day it would outlive its usefulness, when I would probably relinquish it with ease.
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
Luc: After hundreds of years I have found the only other terrible prospect who understands me. She's brave and funny, but she thinks she's only valued for what she can do instead of who she is. After a dramatic life event she's convinced I don't want her. I have no useful skills to benefit her, and a job that constantly disrupts my life. I'm also going to outlive her by a hundred years. Elle: Yeah, that's pretty terrible. Luc: Maybe even 200 years. Elle: Don't rub it in. You can join the club. The San Francisco chapter of Terrible Prospects International.
Mia Tsai (Bitter Medicine)
So how do we know,” asked Serena, “when something that has been positive in the past has outlived its usefulness?” Ludo looked over at her with eyes so clear they seemed almost silver. “When it causes us to suffer,” he replied simply. “Suffer comes from a Latin word meaning to carry. And while pain is sometimes unavoidable, suffering is not. For instance, we may have a very happy relationship with someone, and then we lose the person. We feel pain, of course: that’s natural. But when we continue to carry that pain, feeling constantly bereft, that’s suffering.
David Michie (The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Art of Purring (The Dalai Lama's Cat, #2))
WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)
Christopher Hitchens (Mortality)
The spirit of gratitude says thank you. Thank You for giving me the money to take care of my family and put food on the table. Thank You for the ability to buy a decent car and take my wife on a great vacation. Thank You for providing for my needs today and my retirement tomorrow. Thank You for Your principles on how to handle money because using them has allowed me to change my family tree and leave a legacy that will outlive me. At its core, the spirit of gratitude says, God, I’m going to manage this wealth and this stuff Your way—because it’s Yours. Thank You for trusting me to manage it for You.
Dave Ramsey (The Legacy Journey: A Radical View of Biblical Wealth and Generosity)
This is another area where my thinking has changed over time. I used to prioritize nutrition over everything else, but I now consider exercise to be the most potent longevity “drug” in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan. The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention. We also tend to feel better when we exercise, so it probably has some harder-to-measure effect on emotional health as well. My hope is that you will understand not only the how but the why of various types of exercise, so you will be able to formulate a program that fits your own personal goals.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
There are few more striking indications of the changes of manners and customs that two or three hundred years have brought about, than these deserted churches.  Many of them are handsome and costly structures, several of them were designed by WREN, many of them arose from the ashes of the great fire, others of them outlived the plague and the fire too, to die a slow death in these later days.  No one can be sure of the coming time; but it is not too much to say of it that it has no sign in its outsetting tides, of the reflux to these churches of their congregations and uses.  They remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them and around them, Monuments of another age. 
Charles Dickens (The Complete Works of Charles Dickens)
I was dissatisfied with my 1967 manuscript and decided to rewrite the book. It was the first of September, and I said to myself, “If I do not have the finished manuscript in Faber’s hands by September 10, I shall have to kill myself.” And under this threat, I started writing. Within a day or so, the feeling of threat had disappeared, and the joy of writing took over. I was no longer using drugs, but it was a time of extraordinary elation and energy. It seemed to me almost as though the book were being dictated, everything organizing itself swiftly and automatically. I would sleep for just a couple of hours a night. And a day ahead of schedule, on September 9, I took the book to Faber & Faber. Their offices were in Great Russell Street, near the British Museum, and after dropping off the manuscript, I walked over to the museum. Looking at artifacts there — pottery, sculptures, tools, and especially books and manuscripts, which had long outlived their creators — I had the feeling that I, too, had produced something. Something modest, perhaps, but with a reality and existence of its own, something that might live on after I was gone. I have never had such a strong feeling, a feeling of having made something real and of some value, as I did with that first book, which was written in the face of such threats from Friedman and, for that matter, from myself. Returning to New York, I felt a sense of joyousness and almost blessedness. I wanted to shout, “Hallelujah!” but I was too shy. Instead, I went to concerts every night — Mozart operas and Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert — feeling exuberant and alive.
Oliver Sacks
There's no such thing as witches. But there used to be. It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons; they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the summer solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs. But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses. Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be. Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking. Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens — how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard — and our mama died before she could teach us much of anything. But we had Mama Mags, our mother’s mother, and she didn’t fool around with soup-pots and flowers. The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughter’s daughters who poisoned the world with the plague. He says the purges purified the earth and shepherded us into the modern era of Gatling guns and steamboats, and the Indians and Africans ought to be thanking us on their knees for freeing them from their own savage magics. Mama Mags said that was horseshit, and that wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way. She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, bill goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters. There wer ethree of us Eastwood sisters, me and Agnes and Bella, so maybe they'll tell our story like a witch-tale. Once upon a time there were three sisters. Mags would like that, I think — she always said nobody paid enough attention to witch-tales and whatnot, the stories grannies tell their babies, the secret rhymes children chant among themselves, the songs women sing as they work. Or maybe they won't tell our story at all, because it isn't finished yet. Maybe we're just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks. There's still no such thing as witches. But there will be.
Alix E. Harrow (The Once and Future Witches)
Lucilla, though she said nothing about a sphere, was still more or less in that condition of mind which has been so often and so fully described to the British public—when the ripe female intelligence, not having the natural resource of a nursery and a husband to manage, turns inwards, and begins to "make a protest" against the existing order of society, and to call the world to account for giving it no due occupation—and to consume itself. She was not the woman to make protests, nor claim for herself the doubtful honours of a false position; but she felt all the same that at her age she had outlived the occupations that were sufficient for her youth. To be sure, there were still the dinners to attend to, a branch of human affairs worthy of the weightiest consideration, and she had a house of her own, as much as if she had been half a dozen times married; but still there are instincts which go even beyond dinners, and Lucilla had become conscious that her capabilities were greater than her work. She was a Power in Carlingford, and she knew it; but still there is little good in the existence of a Power unless it can be made use of for some worthy end. She
Mrs. Oliphant (The Chronicles of Carlingford (6 Works): Fiction and Literature)
The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other. Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --- indeed, is --- one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings. Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done. To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody. In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular. This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult the Universe.
Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #3))
He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.
Dominic Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos)
Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife)
A brick could be used to attract a potential life partner. Yes indeed, and it’s how I met my ex wife. And the only reason she didn’t become my life partner was because I outlived our relationship, despite her numerous attempts to kill me. I’m 31 years old now, so thank God for modern science enabling me to achieve such longevity. 

Jarod Kintz (Blanket)
Is it necessary to ask which attitude is more Christian, one that longs to return to the ‘unbroken harmony and unity’ of the Middle Ages, or one that wishes to use reason in order to free mankind from pestilence and oppression? But some part at least of the authoritarian Church of the Middle Ages succeeded in branding such practical humanitarianism as ‘worldly’, as characteristic of ‘Epicureanism’, and of men who desire only to ‘fill their bellies like the beasts’. The terms ‘Epicureanism’, ‘materialism’, and ‘empiricism’, that is to say, the philosophy of Democritus, one of the greatest of the Great Generation, became in this way the synonyms of wickedness, and the tribal Idealism of Plato and Aristotle was exalted as a kind of Christianity before Christ. Indeed, this is the source of the immense authority of Plato and Aristotle, even in our own day, that their philosophy was adopted by medieval authoritarianism. But it must not be forgotten that, outside the totalitarian camp, their fame has outlived their practical influence upon our lives. And although the name of Democritus is seldom remembered, his science as well as his morals still live with us.
Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
Brainwashing, a comforting bedtime story that made us all feel better, should have outlived its usefulness years ago. Such was the myth's potency, however, that it didn't. When we were scared or unsure, we called it upon again to explain away the things that made us nervous. In the 1950s and 1960s it was Russians. In the 1970s it was new religious movements and advertising agencies. In the 1980s it was heavy-metal music. Like Batman, brainwashing came to save us. 'It's not your fault,' it told us. 'There's nothing you could have done. You're not responsible: you're just a victim.' Of course, this was exactly what we wanted to hear - which was why we called it up so often. 'It was a cultural manifestation of the time,' says Robert Jay Lifton, 'and we're not through with it - by any means.' Today, once again, 'brainwashing' has been dusted down and given a new coat of paint. This time the threat is a heady combination of terrorism and religion. Why would anyone want to bomb the World Trade Centre? How could these people do this to us? Is it the virgins and the rivers of wine? There must be a reason. There is, of course. There are lots of reasons. But none of them is 'brainwashing'.
Dominic Streatfeild (Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control)
Just because something is old, doesn’t mean we need to throw it away. What kind of society have we become, what happens to our values when we say that just because something or someone has been around a hell of a long time that they’ve outlived their usefulness? We become a society of vacant, immature materialists. Moving from one new thing on to the next. Devaluing age and experience.” He was talking about the Constitution, but he couldn’t help but feel like he was talking about himself as well.
Nick Webb (Constitution (Legacy Fleet Trilogy, #1))
I was unable to leave immediately for another reason: this was that the lavishness (unknown to the Courvoisiers) for which the Guermantes, whether opulent or practically ruined, were famous when they entertained their friends, was not only lavishness in material terms but also, as I had often experienced with Robert de Saint-Loup, a lavishness of charming words, courteous gestures, a whole gamut of verbal elegance nourished by real intensity of feeling. But as this last, in the idleness of fashionable existence, finds no outlet, it poured forth at times, seeking some channel of expression in a kind of fleeting effusiveness, which was all the more anxiously solicitous, and which might, on the part of Mme de Guermantes, have been mistaken for affection. She did in fact feel it at the moment she let it overflow, for she discovered then, in the company of the friend, man or woman, she was with at the time, a sense of intoxication, in no way sensual, similar to that which music induces in certain people; she would find herself picking a flower from her bodice, or a medallion, and giving it to someone with whom she would have liked to prolong the evening, yet with the melancholy feeling that to prolong it would have led to nothing but idle chatter, which would have absorbed nothing of the nervous pleasure, the fleeting emotion of the experience, and which would have been reminiscent in this respect of the impression of lassitude and regret that follow the first warm days of spring. And as far as the friend was concerned, it was important that he was not too taken in by the promises, more thrilling than any he had ever heard, proffered by these women, who, because they are particularly susceptible to the sweetness of a moment, turn it, with a delicacy, a nobility not granted to ordinary creatures, into a masterpiece of endearment and kindness, and no longer have anything of themselves left to give in the moment that follows. Their affection does not outlive the moment of elation that dictated it; and the subtlety of mind which had led them at that point to intuit all the things that you wished to hear, and to say them to you, will enable them, a few days later, to pinpoint your foibles and use them to entertain another of their guests with whom they will in turn be enjoying one of these moments musicaux which are so short-lived.
Marcel Proust
Mama Juanita used to tell us the story of La Vieja Tollussa, who put herself in a hundred-year sleep to outlive her enemies. But when she woke, her body had kept aging and ached too much to move. She used the last of her power to turn herself into a caterpillar because her journey was still not complete.
Zoraida Córdova (Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas, #1))
She is young, she is beautiful after all,’ she continued. ‘And do you realize who my youth and beauty were taken by, Anna? By him and his children. I have outlived my usefulness to him, I gave it my all, and of course he finds a young, vulgar creature more attractive now.
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
dry saunas. Until about 2019 I was very skeptical of the data linking sauna use to brain and heart health. However, the more time I spend buried in this literature, the more I become convinced by the magnitude of the benefit,
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
In a stroke of genius, the mayor found a solution. He asked the Common Council to annex the Greenwich Village potter’s field as a new military parade ground, which he would also use as the site for his party. The graveyard, which had closed the year before, had outlived its usefulness. And this wasn’t just a short-term fix. Hone was playing a long game, and this new “Washington Parade-Ground” was just the opening gambit.
James Nevius (Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers)
It was the night before my parents and Gardiner were to arrive. “I’m bored. Let’s go for a drive.” Ruth jumped up and ran down the stairs with Millie and me trailing along behind. We followed her out to the barn, which had once held racehorses but now housed Papa’s “island cars”—a disreputable-looking collection of automobiles that had outlived their useful lives back at home in Boston but were
Mary Kay Andrews (The High Tide Club)
Back when I used to fly every week, I tried a clever trick that Michael Rintala showed me: put two tennis balls in an athletic sock about four to six inches apart, and position them just about at the level of my kidneys, or where my thoracic spine meets my lumbar spine. Then, with every breath I try to make sure I expand fully enough to feel the tennis balls on both sides. The idea is that it cues your breathing. When I did this, I could get off a five-hour flight and feel as if I had not been sitting for longer than about five minutes. (It also kept my seatmates from talking to me when I was trying to work.) It’s worth trying on a long flight or drive. *
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
Decisions made without sentiment about what was junk and what was useful. Packing away a life is a slow, fragmented affair. Everyone is outlived by objects, everyone bequeaths an uncurated museum to the living.
Andrew Michael Hurley (Devil's Day)
COLOURS IN THE MIRROR One day my pride will outlive myself and whatever remains of its colours will be remembered by others - for I was always my true self. I live too little for things that make me dream & care too much for fears that sleep in between the fine lines of my weary mind - so write me gentle words, for it may break. My diversity should not be a mistake but a celebration of identity & guiding light to others who ache to leave the numbness of »pretending-to-be«. We are not broken mirrors that hurt the world by showing our true reflection; we are merely hearts used to rejection - yet, their words will only blur but not break our shine.
Laura Chouette
Her name was Jane,” I said, and Olivia stopped walking. “We were together for two years, married after a few months. I was happy, genuinely happy. Even though she was human, and I knew I’d outlive her, I just wanted to enjoy the time that we had together. “It all ended on a damp November morning in seventeen eighty-two. I’d been away working for Avalon for a few months and had been eager to get home. I found her inside the house we’d shared. She’d been butchered. Her blood decorated our bedroom. She was naked and appeared to have been dead for several days. My rage was…terrifying. I buried Jane with my own hands, placing her near a field that we used to love going to. And then I burnt the house to the ground.” Olivia’s shoulders sagged, but she didn’t turn and face me. “I hunted her killer for a year. I didn’t care who I hurt to get the information I needed. I was so single-minded, so determined to have vengeance. Eventually, I discovered that her murderer had been part of the king’s army, which had been going through the area. “The killer was an officer by the name of Henry. No idea what his last name was. It didn’t matter. He liked hurting women, and once he’d finished with them, he kept their hair as a souvenir. The rest of his squad had waited outside while he brutalized and murdered the woman I loved. No one had helped Jane, and no one had tried to stop him. “I discovered that they’d been on training maneuvers the day of the murder, just their squad of thirty. And after all my searching, I found them and I killed them. They died in one night of blood and rage. All but one. I left Henry until last. I took him away to a secluded place and had my fill of vengeance. It took a week for him to die, and when he finally succumbed, I buried Hellequin with him.” The memory of Henry’s blind and bloody form flashed in my mind—his pleas had long since silenced because I’d removed his tongue. I hadn’t wanted information from him; I’d just wanted to make him suffer. Before he’d lost his ability to talk, he’d told me that someone had paid him to do it, but he never said who. No matter what I did to him, he took that secret to his grave. And after a few years of searching, I decided he’d been lying. Trying to prolong his life for a short time more, hoping for mercy where there was none to give. “I no longer had the desire to go by that name,” I continued, still talking to Olivia’s back, “I no longer wanted to instill fear with a word. I hoped that the legend would die, but it didn’t, it grew, became more…fanciful. “You’re right, I’m a killer. I’ve killed thousands, and very few of them have ever stained my conscience. I can go to a dark place and do whatever I need to. But for those I care about, those I love, I will move fucking mountains to keep them safe. And I care about Tommy and Kasey, whether you grant permission or not.
Steve McHugh (Born of Hatred (Hellequin Chronicles, #2))
Most of us are as comfortable with our misbeliefs as we are with an old pair of house slippers: well-worn, familiar, and always waiting for us, despite the fact that they have out-lived their usefulness.
William Backus (Learning to Tell Myself the Truth)
Only instead of running off a cliff and drowning in the sea, it’s managed to stick around long enough to cover its tracks.” “Okay,” Lucas said, in carefully measured tones, “but how would it do that?” She frowned like a teacher whose student is proving slow to grasp a simple lesson. “By stealing its own bones back, for a start,” she said, raising one finger. “By incinerating the film,” she said, raising another. “By murdering people like my father”—a third—“and by killing even its own servants, once they’ve outlived their usefulness.” Andy Brandt. “And, finally, by luring me out of my carrel, chasing me through the library and trying to scare me to death, before destroying all the proof I’d gathered in there.
Robert Masello (The Einstein Prophecy)
Appendix 1 Our Family's Core Values and Mission YOUR CORE VALUES What are the most important values in your family? Do your kids know these are critical? Do both parents agree on the ranking of values? This worksheet will help you develop and communicate your top values. A "value" is an ideal that is desirable. It is a quality that we want to model in our own lives and see developed in the lives of our kids. For instance, honesty is a very important value, for without it you can't have trust in your relationships. Take time in writing your answers to the following questions. 1. When time and energy are in short supply, what should we make sure we cover in parenting our children? List a few ideas. Then circle the nonnegotiables. 2. What are the "we'd like to get around to these" values? These are the semi-negotiables. 3. What were the top three values of each of your families of origin (the family you grew up in)? Father Mother 1. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. Think about a healthy, positive family-one that serves as a role model for you. What would you say are their top three values? 1. 2. 3. 5. What are three or four favorite Scripture verses that communicate elements of a healthy family? 1. 2. 3. 4. Based on these verses, what are the three or four principles from Scripture that you'd like to see evidenced in your family? 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. What values are your "pound the table with passion" values? What are the ones that you feel very strongly about? (You may already have them listed.) To help you with this, complete the following sentences: More families need to ... The problem with today's families is ... DEVELOPING YOUR FAMILY'S MISSION STATEMENT Besides writing out your core values, you will do well to develop a family mission statement (or covenant). These important documents will shape your family. The founders of the United States knew that guiding documents would keep us on course as a fledgling democracy; so too will these documents guide your family as you seek to be purposeful. Sample mission statement: We exist to love each other and advance Gods timeless principles and his kingdom on earth. Complete the following: 1. Our family exists to ... 2. What are some activities or behaviors that you imagine your family carrying out? 3. Describe some qualities of character that you can envision your family being known for. 4. What is unique about your family? What makes you different? What are you known for? What sets you apart? 5. What do you hope to do with and through your family that will outlive you? What noble cause greater than yourselves do you want your family to pursue? 6. With these five questions completed, look for a Scripture that supports the basic ideas of your rough-draft concepts for your family mission statement. If there are several candidates, talk about them thoughtfully and choose one, writing it out here: 7. Using the sample as a template, your five questions and your family Scripture, write a rough draft of your family mission statement: 8. Rewrite the mission statement, keeping the same concepts but changing the order of the mission statement. This is simply to give you two options. 9. Discuss this mission statement as a family if the kids are old enough. Discuss it with a few other friends or extended family members. Any feedback? 10. Pray about your family mission statement for a couple of weeks, asking God to affirm it or help you edit it. Then write up the final version. Consider making a permanent version of your family mission statement to hang on a wall in your home.
Timothy Smith (The Danger of Raising Nice Kids: Preparing Our Children to Change Their World)
Loving Father, you made me, so you know very well that I am but dust. Yet you have called me into your kingdom to serve you at this specific place, at this specific time, for a very specific purpose. Despite my ordinariness, I belong to you—and you are anything but ordinary! Help me pour out your grace and compassion upon others that they, too, may experience the richness of your love. Through me, my Father, show others how you can use an ordinary life to bring extraordinary blessing into the world. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.
Max Lucado (Outlive Your Life: You Were Made to Make A Difference)
The entire island joined in the fun and dubbed Reily “Moncho Reyes.” Suckling pigs, called moncho reyes, were barbecued and devoured. Songs and plays about Moncho Reyes were performed throughout the island and caused great hilarity—because moncho is Caribbean slang for “congenital idiot.”53 When an entire island is laughing at its colonial governor, it is safe to say that he has outlived his usefulness. It is impossible to subjugate people who are laughing at you.54
Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
With great power comes great responsibility.” And each of us, like it or not, are now the recipients of great power. This means we now have the power to solve the world’s grand challenges and create a world of abundance. But this also means triumphing over age-old bad habits. Greed, fear, slavery, cruelty, tyranny—haven’t these curses outlived their usefulness?
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
You only died when you outlived your usefulness. That was the nature of things. He
T.J. Brearton (Gone)
Our Eldest Son The first of two Is a disappointment To tell the truth His ways are foreign And wit too keen Words are sharp His spirit mean   Our Eldest Son Has a hustler’s edge He loves to argue And use his head A bestselling poet Emotionally scarred Our Eldest Son Is a wildcard   Our Eldest Son Blames his Dad For everything He never had Blended evil A toxic concoction Our Eldest Son Speaks up too often     Our Eldest Son Lives in the city He prefers the rain And loathes self-pity Verbally battered With Catholic guilt Our eldest son Was born to tilt   Our Eldest Son Now forty-three Has far outlived His expectancy An impulsive nature And troubled mind Our eldest son Is a different kind    
K.W. Peery (Purgatory)
When an entire island is laughing at its colonial governor, it is safe to say that he has outlived his usefulness. It is impossible to subjugate people who are laughing at you.
Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
It’s difficult to imagine that Artificial Intelligence will take the place of people but many believe that it’s only a short time before computers will outthink us. They already can beat our best chess players and have been able to out calculate us since calculators first came onto the scene. IBM’s Watson is on the cutting edge of Cognitive Computers, being used to out think our physicians but closer to home, for the greatest part; our cars are no longer assembled by people but rather robots. Our automobiles can be considered among our first robots, since they took the place of horses. Just after the turn of the last century when the population in the United States crossed the 100 M mark the number of horses came to 20M. Now we have a population of 325 M but only 9 M horses. You might ask what happened. Well back in 1915 there were 2.4 M cars but this jumped to 3.6 M in just one year. Although horses still out-numbered cars the handwriting was on the wall! You might think that this doesn’t apply to us but why not? The number of robots increase, taking the place of first our workers on the assembly line and then workers in the food industry and this takes us from tractors and combines on the farms to the cooking and serving hamburgers at your favorite burger joint. People are becoming redundant! That’s right we are becoming superfluous! Worldwide only 7 out of 100 people have college degrees and here in the United States only 40% of our working population possesses a sheep skin, although mine is printed on ordinary paper. With education becoming ever more expensive, we as a population are becoming ever more uneducated. A growing problem is that as computers and robots become smarter, as they are, we are no longer needed to be anything more than a consumer and where will the money come from for that? I recently read that this death spiral will run its course within 40 years! Nice statistics that we’re looking at…. Looking at the bright side of things you can now buy an atomically correct, life sized doll, as perhaps a robotic non-complaining, companion for under $120. In time these robotic beings will be able to talk back but hopefully there will be an off switch. As interesting as this sounds it will most likely not be for everyone, however it may appeal to some of our less capable, not to have to actually interface with real live people. The fact is that most people will soon outlive their usefulness! We as a society are being challenged and there will soon be little reason for our being. When machines make machines that can out think us; when we become dumb and superfluous, then what? Are we ready for this transition? It’s scary but If nothing else, it’s something to think about….
Hank Bracker
Genuine love wants what is best for the other, even if it means risking the relationship. Love wants the beloved to become strong and independent, even if it means that the Two must withdraw from the other's life. Real love is never used to take away from others what they would not freely give. Love outlives a lack of response, selfishness, and mistakes, no matter who is at fault. And it cannot be taken back. If it can be, it is not love.
Don Richard Riso (Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery)
Lessons from Continuous Glucose Monitoring In the years that I have used CGM, I have gleaned the following insights—some of which may seem obvious, but the power of confirmation cannot be ignored: Not all carbs are created equal. The more refined the carb (think dinner roll, potato chips), the faster and higher the glucose spike. Less processed carbohydrates and those with more fiber, on the other hand, blunt the glucose impact. I try to eat more than fifty grams of fiber per day. Rice and oatmeal are surprisingly glycemic (meaning they cause a sharp rise in glucose levels), despite not being particularly refined; more surprising is that brown rice is only slightly less glycemic than long-grain white rice. Fructose does not get measured by CGM, but because fructose is almost always consumed in combination with glucose, fructose-heavy foods will still likely cause blood-glucose spikes. Timing, duration, and intensity of exercise matter a lot. In general, aerobic exercise seems most efficacious at removing glucose from circulation, while high-intensity exercise and strength training tend to increase glucose transiently, because the liver is sending more glucose into the circulation to fuel the muscles. Don’t be alarmed by glucose spikes when you are exercising. A good versus bad night of sleep makes a world of difference in terms of glucose control. All things equal, it appears that sleeping just five to six hours (versus eight hours) accounts for about a 10 to 20 mg/dL (that’s a lot!) jump in peak glucose response, and about 5 to 10 mg/dL in overall levels. Stress, presumably, via cortisol and other stress hormones, has a surprising impact on blood glucose, even while one is fasting or restricting carbohydrates. It’s difficult to quantify, but the effect is most visible during sleep or periods long after meals. Nonstarchy veggies such as spinach or broccoli have virtually no impact on blood sugar. Have at them. Foods high in protein and fat (e.g., eggs, beef short ribs) have virtually no effect on blood sugar (assuming the short ribs are not coated in sweet sauce), but large amounts of lean protein (e.g., chicken breast) will elevate glucose slightly. Protein shakes, especially if low in fat, have a more pronounced effect (particularly if they contain sugar, obviously). Stacking the above insights—in both directions, positive or negative—is very powerful. So if you’re stressed out, sleeping poorly, and unable to make time to exercise, be as careful as possible with what you eat. Perhaps the most important insight of them all? Simply tracking my glucose has a positive impact on my eating behavior. I’ve come to appreciate the fact that CGM creates its own Hawthorne effect, a phenomenon where study subjects change their behavior because they are being observed. It makes me think twice when I see the bag of chocolate-covered raisins in the pantry, or anything else that might raise my blood glucose levels.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
Carbohydrates are our primary energy source. In digestion, most carbohydrates are broken down to glucose, which is consumed by all cells to create energy in the form of ATP. Excess glucose, beyond what we need immediately, can be stored in the liver or muscles as glycogen for near-term use or socked away in adipose tissue (or other places) as fat. This decision is made with the help of the hormone insulin, which surges in response to the increase in blood glucose.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
the risk of oversimplifying a bit, the carbohydrate from our doughnut has two possible fates. First, it can be converted into glycogen, the storage form of glucose, suitable for use in the near term. About 75 percent of this glycogen ends up in skeletal muscle and the other 25 percent goes to the liver, although this ratio can vary. An adult male can typically store a total of about 1,600 calories worth of glycogen between these two sites, or about enough energy for two hours of vigorous endurance exercise. This is why if you are running a marathon or doing a long bike ride, and do not replenish your fuel stores in some way, you are likely to “bonk,” or run out of energy, which is not a pleasant experience. One of the liver’s many important jobs is to convert this stored glycogen back to glucose and then to release it as needed to maintain blood glucose levels at a steady state, known as glucose homeostasis.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
turns out that peak aerobic cardiorespiratory fitness, measured in terms of VO2 max, is perhaps the single most powerful marker for longevity. VO2 max represents the maximum rate at which a person can utilize oxygen. This is measured, naturally, while a person is exercising at essentially their upper limit of effort. (If you’ve ever had this test done, you will know just how unpleasant it is.) The more oxygen your body is able to use, the higher your VO2 max.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
Innovation that outlives its usefulness, is no longer innovation but carnivoration. Innovators not in touch with soil-n-roots, are predators of the concrete jungle.
Abhijit Naskar (The Divine Refugee)
Humanovator (The Sonnet) Chatgpt pampers plagiarism, Facebook pampers conspiracy. More and more innovations are becoming catalyst of catastrophe. Note, I didn't mention the birdie, Very mindful, very demure. Facebook can still be repaired, but once a MAGA, always a sewer. Innovation that outlives its usefulness, is no longer innovation but carnivoration. Innovators not in touch with soil-n-roots, are predators of the concrete jungle. The golden age of startups is behind us, today it's mostly filth, fraud and smut. Amidst the crowd of trust fund termites, be the humanovator to humanize the world.
Abhijit Naskar (The Divine Refugee)
Why do you think women are designed to outlive men? Why do we keep going for thirty years after our bodies can no longer reproduce? Do you think nature meant for those years to be useless? No, of course not. Our lives our designed to have three parts. The first is education. The second, creation. And in part three, we put our experience to use and protect those who are weaker. This third stage, which you have entered, can be one of incredible power.
Kirsten Miller (The Change)
What do you plan to do about Captain Westfall?” “Right now, Captain Westfall is useful to me, and useful to our queen.” “So as soon as he’s outlived his usefulness …” “I’ll decide that when the time comes—if it’s safe to leave him alive.
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
A still more sobering social media example of a different kind, one so important that it could well have influenced the presidential election of 2016, was the cooperation between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm, was largely the creation of Steve Bannon and his billionaire sponsor, Robert Mercer. One former co-executive referred to Cambridge Analytica as “Bannon’s arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies.” Cambridge Analytica combined a particularly vicious version of traditional “dirty tricks” with cutting-edge social media savvy. The dirty tricks, according to its former CEO, Alexander Nix, included bribery, sting operations, the use of prostitutes, and “honey traps” (usually involving sexual behavior, sometimes even initiated for the purposes of obtaining compromising photographs) to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research. The social media savvy included advanced methods developed by the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University. Aleksandr Kogan, a young Russian American psychologist working there, created an app that enabled him to gain access to elaborate private information on more than fifty million Facebook users, information specifically identifying personality traits that influenced behavior. Kogan had strong links to Facebook, which failed to block his harvesting of that massive data; he then passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica. Kogan also taught at the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia; and given the links between Cambridge Analytica and Russian groups, the material was undoubtedly made available to Russian intelligence. So extensive was Cambridge Analytica’s collection of data that Nix could boast, “Today in the United States we have somewhere close to 4 or 5 thousand data points on every individual…. So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” Whatever his exaggeration, he was describing a new means of milieu control that was invisible and potentially manipulable in the extreme. Beyond Cambridge Analytica or Kogan, Russian penetration of American social media has come to be recognized as a vast enterprise involving extensive falsification and across-the-board anti-Clinton messages, with special attention given to African American men in order to discourage them from voting. The Russians apparently reached millions of people and surely had a considerable influence on the outcome of the election. More generally, one can say that social media platforms can now create a totality of their own, and can make themselves available to would-be owners of reality by means of massive deception, distortion, and promulgation of falsehoods. The technology itself promotes mystification and becomes central to creating and sustaining cultism. Trump is the first president to have available to him these developments in social media. His stance toward the wild conspiracism I have mentioned is to stop short of total allegiance to them, but at the same time to facilitate them and call them forth in his tweets and harbor their followers at his rallies. All of this suggests not only that Trump and the new social media are made for each other, but also that the problem will long outlive Trump’s brief, but all too long, moment on the historical stage.
Robert Jay Lifton (Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry)
Asylums became haunted by what happened inside their walls and also by the walls themselves: an architecture that was purposely boastful but which spoke of a previous generation with different ideals, economic motives, and attitudes toward the sick. The moment when we were most optimistic about our ability to cure the mind is when we built our most ostentatious palaces to psychiatry. There is a danger, then, in telegraphing too prominently one's utopian ideals via architecture. We design buildings not only for their utilitarian values but to project ideals and reflect our shared values. But these ideals and values are prone to change faster than the buildings. Shifting political fortunes, vacillating periods of excess and austerity, evolving attitudes about how the government should best serve its population -- these all tend to move much faster than the time it takes for a building to outlive its usefulness.
Colin Dickey (Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places)
My dad told me not to think I know the future. He reminded me that retired people save money to live a life in retirement differently from the way they lived life while working. He also said, some men prefer not to retire because they think it means they have outlived their usefulness. Most men, including myself, no longer feel this way. They view retirement as an accomplishment and a reward. I don’t know why I thought about the past, while having a conversation about the future. This, too was a surprise.
George H Szlemp (Retirement: The First 365 Days: Day-to-Day Advice for Happiness in Retirement)
[I pray] that we might not outlive our usefulness.
David Brainerd (The Life and Diary of David Brainerd)
Holiday herself was an avid heroin user. She was criticized, of course. Her response, according to biographer Farah Jasmine Griffin, was that neither of her parents used drugs and she outlived them both: “Heroin not only kept me alive—maybe it also kept me from killing.”8 I know the feeling.
Carl L. Hart (Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear)
At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, the carbohydrate from our doughnut has two possible fates. First, it can be converted into glycogen, the storage form of glucose, suitable for use in the near term. About 75 percent of this glycogen ends up in skeletal muscle and the other 25 percent goes to the liver, although this ratio can vary. An adult male can typically store a total of about 1,600 calories worth of glycogen between these two sites, or about enough energy for two hours of vigorous endurance exercise. This is why if you are running a marathon or doing a long bike ride, and do not replenish your fuel stores in some way, you are likely to “bonk,” or run out of energy, which is not a pleasant experience.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)