Peter Jennings Quotes

CUSTOMER: OK, so you want this book? THEIR DAUGHTER: Yes! CUSTOMER: Peter Pan? THEIR DAUGHTER: Yes, please. Because he can fly. CUSTOMER: Yes, he can - he's very good at flying. THEIR DAUGHTER: Why can't I fly, daddy? CUSTOMER: Because of evolution, sweetheart.

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity, which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people there are who by natural constitution have been given a different nature and disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning which is wilder and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are opened wider; their senses are more subtile in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands.

I don't know how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace goals.

For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.

...he looked so strange and absentminded; quite obviously he had just been reading a book, one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.

Of what are you thinking now?" she asked. "I am thinking of myself." "That's just what I am doing." "Are you also thinking of yourself?" "No, of yourself—of you, Mogens.

To learn is as beautiful as to live. Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.

Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.

He did not think of love as an eternally vigilant, blazing flame, which with its powerful, flickering glow shown into all the peaceful folds of life and in some fantastic way made everything seem bigger and stronger than it was. For him, love was more like the calm, smoldering ember that gives off an even heat from its soft bed of ashes and in the muted twilight tenderly forgets what is distant and makes what is near seem twice as close and twice as intimate.

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own.

Haven't you noticed that we women daydream infinitely less than you men? We can't anticipate pleasure in our imagination or keep suffering out our lives with some imaginary consolation.Whatever is,is.Imagintion! It's so paltry!Yes,when you've grown older,as I have,you occasionally make do with the poor comedy of the imagination.

As a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits

She dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting—what is so easily forgotten—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.

He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings — and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.

Of all the emotional relationships in life, is there any more delicate, more noble, and more intense than a boy's deep and yet so totally bashful love for another boy? The kind of love that never speaks, never dares give way to a caress, a glance, or a word, the kind of vigilant love that bitterly grieves over every shortcoming or imperfection in the one who is loved, a love which is longing and admiration and negation of self, and which is pride and humility and calmly breathing happiness.

There was no style in nature.

Reach out, call your family members, if you have children, call them right now.

He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell! And these laws--laws of thought, laws of nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther--as if there were not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another, horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he was not that kind of philosopher.

A woman can't be pure, and isn't supposed to be--how could she? It is against nature! And do you think God made her to be pure? Answer me! --No, and ten thousand times no. Then why this lunacy! Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other! Can't you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o'-the-wisps. Let us alone! For God's sake, let us alone!

[...]You can take the pink hair dye out of the girl, but you never lose those roots." I took another sip of the martini. "You don't know me." At the end of the bar, the other customer lifted his face to Peter Jennings and smiled. "Maybe," Seven said, "but neither do you.

But, oh, how sweet it was to love for once with the love of real life; for now he knew that nothing of what he had imagined to be love was real love, neither the turgid longing of the lonely youth, nor the passionate yearning of the dreamer, nor yet the nervous foreboding of the child. These were currents in the ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, fragments of love as the meteors rushing through space are splinters of a world--for that was love; a world complete in itself, fully rounded, vast, and orderly. It was no medley of confused sensations and moods rushing one upon another! Love was like nature, ever changing, ever renewing; no feeling died and no emotion withered without giving life to the seed of something still more perfect which was embedded in it.

To learn is as beautiful as to live. Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own! Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge! Never fear! The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by the sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.

I don't understand you. I can't treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whistling.

The time that passes with goodness will not return with evil; and nothing experienced in life later on can make one day wither or erase one hour of the life that has been lived.

It is only when we have heard the door of destiny slam shut that we begin to feel the iron-cold talons of certainty digging into our breast, gathering slowly, slowly around our heart, and fastening their clutches upon the fine thread of hope on which our world of happiness hangs: then the thread is severed; then all that it held falls and is shattered; then the shriek of despair sounds through the emptiness. In doubt, no one despairs.

When I sit here and mope and don’t do anything and can’t do anything, then I actually feel the time slipping away from me. Hours and weeks and months rush past with nothing in them, and I can’t nail them to the spot with a piece of work.

Bartholine was not of their kind. She had no interest in the affairs of the fields and the stables, no taste for the dairy and the kitchen — none whatever. She loved poetry. She lived on poems, dreamed poems, and put her faith in them above everything else in the world.

I am not offended by your love, Mr.Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many others do. People close their eyes to real life, they don't want to hear the 'no' it shouts at their wishes, they want to forget the deep chasm it shows them between their longing and what they long for. They want to realize their dreams. But life doesn't take dreams into account, there is not a single obstacle that can be dreamed away from reality, and so in the end they lie there wailing at the chasm, which has not changed but is the same as it has always been.

He lived much among people, but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no hurry--that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong enough to move mountains--the trouble was that he never managed to set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never formed it in his own image. The will power necessary to persistent self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection--Why? For whom?

He was surprised at his own calm, but he did not have perfect faith in it. He felt as though something in the very depths of his being were bubbling, very softly, but persistently: welling up, seething, pressing on, but far, far away. He was in a mood as one who waits for something that must come from afar, a distant music that must draw near, little by little, singing, murmuring, frothing, rushing, roaring, and whirling down over him, catching him up he knew not how, carrying him he knew not whither, coming on as a flood, breaking as a surf, and then-- But now he was calm. There was only the tremulous singing in the distance; otherwise all was peace and tranquility.

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed— all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.

You have done what so many people do: they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life cries 'No' to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want their dream to be fulfilled. But life takes no account of dreams. There isn't a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world, and in the end we lie there crying at the edge of the chasm, which hasn't changed and is just where it always was. But we have changed, for we have let our dreams goad all our thoughts and spur all our longings to the very highest tension. The chasm is no narrower, and everything in us cries out with longing to reach the other side, but no, always no, never anything else. If we had only kept a watch on ourselves in time! But now it is too late, now we are unhappy.

Det var en Foraarsaften, Solen skinnede saa rød ind i Stuen, den var lige ved at gaa ned. Vingerne af Møllen deroppe paa Volden drev deres Skygger over Ruderne og Værelsets Vægge, kommende, svindende, i ensformig Veklsen af Skumring og Lys: - een stund Skumring, to Stunder Lys. Ved Vinduet sad Niels Lyhne og stirred gjennem Voldens bronzemørke Ælme mod Skyernes Brand. Han havde været udenfor Byen, under nyudsprungne Bøge, mellem grønne Rugmarker, over blomsterbrogede Enge; Alting havde været saa lyst og let, Himlen saa blaa, Sundet saa blankt og de spadserende Damer saa sælsomt smukke. Syngende var han gaaet henad Skovstien, saa blev Ordene borte i hans Sang, saa lagde Rhytmen sig, saa døde Tonerne bort og Stilheden kom som en Svimmelhed over ham. Han lukkede Øjnene, men endda mærkede han, hvordan Lyset ligesom drak sig ind i ham og flimred gjennem alle Nerver, medens den køligt berusende Luft ved hvert Aandedrag sendte det sært betagne Blod med vildere og vildere Kraft gjennem de i Magtesløshed dirrende Aarer, og der kom ham en Følelse paa, som om alt det Myldrende, Bristende, Spirende, Ynglende i Vaarnaturen om ham, mystisk søgte at samle sig i ham i eet stort, stort Raab; og han tørsted efter dette Raab, lytted til hans Lytten tog form af en uklar, svulmende Længsel. Nu, han sad der ved Vinduet, vaagnede Længslen igjen.

No se imaginaba el amor como una llama eternamente flameante y vivaz que con su fulgor intenso y vacilante iluminaría todos y cada uno de los pliegues apacibles de la vida y que, por arte de magia, engrandecería todas las cosas y las haría parecer más extrañas de lo que en realidad eran; para él, el amor era más bien como la brasa que arde quedamente, que desde su lecho de cenizas emite un calor duradero y que, en el suave crepúsculo, olvida dulcemente lo lejano, acercando doblemente lo cercano y hogareño.

Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness. Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned. There is nothing you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind wreaths--does that help you?

To learn is as beautiful as to live. Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.

The flowers growing from that soil are made of cotton cloth; they don't even grow, they are taken from the head and stuck in the heart, because the heart has no flowers of its own. That is exactly what I envy in the young girl: everything about her is genuine, she does not fill the goblet of her love with the makeshift of imagination. Do not suppose, because her love is shot through and shadowed over by imagined pictures and again pictures in a great, teeming vagueness, that she cares more for those images than for the earth she walks upon. It is only that all her senses and instincts and powers are reaching out for love everywhere--everywhere, without ever feeling weary.

The flowers growing from that soil are made of cotton cloth; they don't even grow, they are taken from the head and stuck in the heart, because the heart has no flowers of its own. That is exactly what I envy in the young girl: everything about her is genuine, she does not fill the goblet of her love with the makeshift of imagination. Do not suppose, because her love is shot through and shadowed over by imagined pictures and again pictures in a great, teeming vagueness, that she cares more for those images than for the earth she walks upon. It is only that all her senses and instincts and powers are reaching out for love everywhere--everywhere, without ever feeling weary.

When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors.

Whatever stamped itself on Niels's mind, what he saw, what he understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he knew he ought to admire--all was woven into the story. As running water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad's story reflected feeling and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. It was a play life, running side by side with real life. It was a snug retreat, where you could abandon yourself to dreams of the wildest adventures. It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else.

Il suo amore non mi offende, signor Bigum, ma io la condanno. Lei ha fatto quello che fanno tanti altri. Si chiudono gli occhi davanti alla vita reale, non si vuole udire il no che grida contro ai nostri desideri, si vuol ignorare I'abisso che si spalanca fra la propria brama e l'oggetto bramato. Si vuol sognare fino in fondo il proprio sogno. Ma la vita non tiene conto dei sogni, non v'è un solo ostacolo che si possa allontanare dalla realtà con un sogno, e infine ci si trova gementi all'orlo dell'abisso, che non s'è mutato, ma è com'è sempre stato. Ma noi, sì, siamo mutati, perché coi sogni si sono accesi i pensieri ed eccitati i desideri fino alla massima tensione. L'abisso però non s'è ristretto, e tutto il nostro essere tende dolorosamente a valicarlo. Invece no, sempre no, null'altro che no; oh, si fosse badato a sé a tempo, ma ora è troppo tardi, ormai si è infelici!

But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another equally human longing, the longing to keep one's self greater than one's self and purer. In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him; he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by circumstances, had made his own.

Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped had wearied him. Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty! He preferred to stop his ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had nothing to do with the busy everyday world, but were like an ocean apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed among curious animals. He was tired, and the root of his weariness sprang from his baffled hope of love; thence it had spread, quickly and surely, through his whole being, to all his faculties and all his thoughts. Now he was cold and passionless enough, but in the beginning, after the blow had fallen, his love had grown, day by day, with the irresistible power of a malignant fever. There had been moments when his soul was almost bursting with insane passion; it swelled like a wave in its infinite longing and frothing desire; it rose and went on rising and rising, till every fiber in his brain and every cord in his heart were strung tense to the breaking point. Then weariness had come, soothing and healing, making his nerves dull against pain, his blood too cold for enthusiasm, and his pulse too weak for action. And more than that, it had protected him against a relapse by giving him all the prudence and egoism of the convalescent. When his thoughts went back to those days in Fjordby, he had a sense of immunity akin to the feeling of a man who has just passed through a severe illness and knows that now, when he has endured his allotted agony, and the fever has burned itself to ashes within him, he will be free for a long, long time.

There is no God, and man is his prophet," replied Niels bitterly and rather sadly. "Exactly," scoffed Hjerrild. "After all, atheism is unspeakably tame. Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity's last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can't see it." "But don't you see," exclaimed Niels Lyhne, "that on the day when men are free to exult and say: 'There is no God!' on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth's, when the dim world of bliss or damnation beyond has burst like a bubble. The earth will be our true mother country, the home of our hearts, where we dwell, not as strangers and wayfarers a short time, but all our time. Think what intensity it will give to life, when everything must be concentrated within it and nothing left for a hereafter. The immense stream of love that is now rising up to the God of men's faith will bend to earth again and flow lovingly among all those beautiful human virtues with which we have endowed and embellished the godhead in order to make it worthy of our love. Goodness, justice, wisdom--who can name them all? Don't you see what nobility it will give men when they are free to live their life and die their death, without fear of hell or hope of heaven, but fearing themselves, hoping for themselves? How their consciences will grow, and what a strength it will give them when inactive repentance and humility cannot atone any more, when no forgiveness is possible except to redeem with good what they sinned with evil.

For the better part of two years Niels Lyhne wandered abroad. He was so lonely. He had no family, no friend who was dear to his heart. But there was a greater loneliness about him than that; for a person may well feel anguished and forsaken if on the whole enormous earth there is not one small place he can bless and wish well, someplace he can turn his heart toward when his heart insists on swelling, a place he can long for when longing insists on spreading its wings; but if he has the clear, steady star of a life’s goal shining overhead, then there is no night so lonely that he is entirely alone. But Niels Lyhne had no star. He didn’t know what to do with himself and his abilities. He did have talent, but he just couldn’t use it; he went around feeling like a painter without hands. How he envied the others, great and small, who, no matter where they reached in life, always found something to hold on to! Because he could not find anything to hold on to. It seemed to him that all he could do was sing the old romantic songs over again, and everything that he had accomplished had been nothing more than this. It was as if his talent were something remote in him, a quiet Pompeii, or like a harp he could take out of a corner. It was not omnipresent, it did not run down the street with him, it did not reside in his eyes, it did not tingle in his fingertips, not at all; his talent did not have a hold on him. At times it seemed to him that he had been born half a century too late, at other times that he had arrived much too early. The talent within him was rooted in something from the past which was the only thing that could give it life. It could not draw nourishment from his opinions, his convictions, his sympathies, it could not assimilate them and give them form; they floated away from each other, these two parts, like water and oil, they could be shaken together but could not be mixed, never become one.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” ― C. S. Lewis “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement.

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed—all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.

The famous ritual of Jesus washing the feet of his male disciples (John 13 : 1–11). After taking his clothes off (yes, he strips) and tying a towel around his waist, Jesus does something that only slaves and women did in his culture, something that “real men” never did: he washes other peoples’ feet. More provocatively still, it is this unmanly or womanly act, he teaches, that signals both his own divinity and the way he wants his own disciples to live. As Jennings has it, “Jesus’s ‘divine’ identity thus is expressed in his disregard for the most intimately enforced institutions of worldly society: gender role expectations.” Not everyone, of course, is pleased with such a queer act: “Jesus stripping naked and washing the feet of his friends,” Jennings reminds us, is “something that Peter at least regards as quite unseemly.” Dale Martin makes a very similar point: although “Jesus allows a woman to wash his feet (and we biblical scholars— who know our Hebrew—recognize the hint [foot penis]), when it is his turn, he takes his clothes off, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes the feet of his male disciples, again taking time out for a special seduction of Peter.” Modern readers, then, may be blind to the gendered and sexual meanings of such acts, but the original participants certainly were not, nor are our contemporary gnostic scholars.

Ma c'erano anche dei momenti in cui la solitudine della sua grandezza gli si appesantiva addosso e l'opprimeva. Quante volte, ahimè, dopo essere stato ad ascoltare se stesso in religioso silenzio per ore e ore, e dopo essere di nuovo tornato a vedere e a udire la vita intorno a sé e sentendola estranea a sé, miserabile e fuggevole, s'era sentito uguale a quel monaco che, nel bosco del convento, aveva udito soltanto un trillo dell'uccello del paradiso e, ritornatovi, trovò ch'erano passati cent'anni! E se il monaco era solo in mezzo alla gente ignota che viveva fra le tombe note, quanto più solo era lui, i cui veri contemporanei non erano ancor nati!

Happiness usually makes people good, and Niels strove earnestly to make their lives so beautiful, noble, and useful that there should never be any pause in the growth of their souls toward the human ideal in which they both believed. But he no longer thought of carrying the standard of his ideal out into the world; he was content to follow it. Once in a while, he would take out some of his old attempts, and then he would always wonder if it was really he who had written these pretty, artistic tilings.

But when he began to think of human beings, his soul sickened again. He summoned them in review before him, one by one, and they all passed and left him alone, and not one stayed with him. But how far had he held fast to them? Had he been true? He had only been slower in letting go, that was all. No, it was not that. It was the dreary truth that a soul is always alone. Every belief in the fusing of soul with soul was a lie. Not your mother who took you on her lap, nor your friend, nor yet the wife who slept on your heart ....

After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own smoke — no, he wanted to burn slowly. And yet this living on at half speed in quiet waters, always in sight of land, seemed so paltry. Would that the storm and waves would come! If he only knew how, his sails should fly to the yards for a merry run over the Spanish Main of life! Farewell to the slowly dripping days, farewell to the pleasant little hours! Peace be with you, you dull moods that have to be furbished with poetry before you can shine, you lukewarm emotions that have to be clothed in warm dreams and yet freeze to death! May you go to your own place! I am headed for a coast where sentiments twine themselves like luxuriant vines around every fibre of the heart—a rank forest; for every vine that withers, twenty are in blossom; for each one that blossoms, a hundred are in bud. Oh, that I were there!

The time that has gone with happiness does not come back with grief, and nothing the future may bring can wither a day or wipe out an hour in the life that has been lived.

It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head--let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue!

She looked around with a haunted look, then sank down on her knees and prayed a long time. She repented and confessed, wildly and unrestrainedly, in growing passion, with the same fanatic self-loathing that drives the nun to scourge her naked body. She sought fervently after the most groveling expressions, intoxicating herself with self-abasement and with a humility that thirsted for degradation. At last she rose. Her bosom heaved violently, and there was a faint light in the pale cheeks, which seemed to have grown fuller during her prayer.

For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it.

Oh, ye're always pitchin' into some wan," said Mr. Hennessy. "I bet ye Willum Jennings Bryan niver see th' platform befure it wint in. He's too good a man." "He is all iv that," said Mr. Dooley. "But ye bet he knows th' rale platform f'r him is: 'Look at th' bad breaks Mack's made,' an' Mack's platform is: 'Ye'd get worse if ye had Billy Bryan.' An' it depinds on whether most iv th' voters ar-re tired out or on'y a little tired who's ilicted. All excipt you, Hinnissy. Ye'll vote f'r Bryan?" "I will," said Mr. Hennessy. "Well," said Mr. Dooley, "d'ye know, I suspicted ye might." THE YACHT RACES

Besides, how could she bother about giving each and every one a correct impression of herself when all her thoughts centered around the one, Erik, the only one, her chosen lord, whom she loved with a passion that was not of herself and with an idolatrous worship that terrified her. She had imagined love to be a sweet dignity, not this consuming unrest, full of fear and humiliation and doubt. Many a time when the declaration seemed trembling on Erik's lips, she had felt as if it were her duty to put her hand on his mouth and warn him against speaking, accusing herself and telling him how she had deceived him and how unworthy of his love she was, how earthly and small and impure, so far from noble, so wretchedly low and common and wicked! She felt herself dishonest under his admiring gaze; calculating, when she failed to avoid him; criminal, when she could not bring herself to beg God in her evening prayer that He would turn Erik's heart from her in order that his life might be all sunlight and honor and glory. For she knew that her lowborn passion would drag him down.

There are those who can take up their grief and bear it, strong natures who feel their own powers through the very heaviness of their burden. Weaker people give themselves up to their sorrow passively, as they would submit to a sickness; and like a sickness their sorrow pervades them, drinks itself into their innermost being and becomes a part of them, is assimilated in them through a slow struggle, and finally loses itself in them, as they return to perfect health. But there are yet others to whom sorrow is a violence done them, a cruelty which they never learn to accept as a trial or chastisement or as simple fate. It is to them an act of tyranny, an expression of personal hate, and it always leaves a sting in their hearts. Children do not often grieve in this way, but Niels Lyhne did. For had he not been face to face with God in the fervor of his prayers? Had he not crawled on his knees to the foot of the throne, full of hope, tremulous with fear, and yet firm in his faith in the omnipotence of prayer, with courage to plead until he should be heard? And he had been forced to rise from the dust and go away with his hope put to shame. His faith had not been able to bring the miracle down from heaven, no God had answered his cry, death had marched straight on and seized its prey, as if no sheltering wall of prayers had been lifted toward the sky.

He longed to settle peacefully on his own quiet perch and drowse, with his tired head under the soft, feathery shelter of a wing. He had never conceived of love as an ever-wakeful, restless flame, casting its strong, flickering light into every nook and corner of existence, making everything seem fantastically large and strange. Love to him was more like the quiet glow of embers on their bed of ashes, spreading a gentle warmth, while the faint dusk wraps all distant things in forgetfulness and makes the near seem nearer and more intimate.

Parents, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends — none of them ever said a word that was worth listening to. Their thoughts never rose above their land and their business; their eyes never sought anything beyond the conditions and affairs that were right before them. But the poems! They teemed with new ideas and profound truths about life in the great outside world, where grief was black, and joy was red; they glowed with images, foamed and sparkled with rhythm and rhyme. They were all about young girls, and the girls were noble and beautiful — how noble and beautiful they never knew themselves. Their hearts and their love meant more than the wealth of all the earth; men bore them up in their hands, lifted them high in the sunshine of joy, honored and worshipped them, and were delighted to share with them their thoughts and plans, their triumphs and renown. They would even say that these same fortunate girls had inspired all the plans and achieved all the triumphs. Why might not she herself be such a girl? They were thus and so — and they never knew it themselves. How was she to know what she really was? And the poets all said very plainly that this was life, and that it was not life to sit and sew, work about the house, and make stupid calls.

Niels Lyhne was bent upon being a poet, and there was much in the external circumstances of his life to lead his thoughts in that direction and stimulate his faculties for the task. So far, however, he had little but his dreams to write about, and nowhere is there more sameness and monotony than in the world of imagination; for in that dreamland, which seems so boundless and so infinitely varied, there are, in fact, only a few short beaten paths where everybody walks and from which no one ever strays. People may differ, but in their dreams they do not differ; there they always attain the three or four things that they desire--it may be with more or less speed and completeness, but they always attain them in the end. No one seriously dreams of himself as empty-handed. Therefore no one ever discovers himself in his dreams or becomes conscious through them of his individuality. Our dreams tell nothing of how we are satisfied when we win the treasure, how we relinquish it when lost, how we feast on it while it is ours, where we turn when it is taken from us.

He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by bit, and was welded into a much more familiar personality than the one he had chased after in his dreams. This figure was far more genuine, far stronger, and more richly endowed. It was no mere dead stump of an ideal, but a living thing, full of infinite shifting possibilities playing through it and shaping it to a thousand fold unity.

One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom.

A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself--new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.

Many new things came to his mind; traits of his own nature that he had never thought of and that seemed unrelated one to the other, fitted themselves together wonderfully and were fused into a rational whole. It was a fascinating time of discovery. Little by little, in fear and uncertain exultation, in incredulous joy, he found himself. He began to realize that he was not like others, and a new spiritual modesty made him shy, awkward, and taciturn. He grew suspicious of questions, and imagined he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned his elders, preferring to roam about alone.

It cannot be otherwise, for it is bitterly disheartening to see that which your inmost soul believes to be right and true, to see this Truth reviled and struck in the face by the meanest camp follower in the victorious army, to hear her called vile names, while you can do nothing at all except to love her even more faithfully, kneel to her in your heart with even deeper adoration, and see her beautiful face as radiantly beautiful as ever and as full of majesty, shining with the same immortal light, no matter how much dust is whirled up around her white forehead, no matter how thickly the poisonous fog closes around her halo. It is bitterly disheartening, and your soul suffers injury inevitably, for it is so easy to hate until your heart is weary, or to draw around you the cold shadows of contempt, or to be dulled by pain and let the world go its own way.-- Of course, if there is that within you which makes you not choose the easiest way nor evade the whole matter, but walk upright with all your faculties tense and all your sympathies wide awake, taking the blows and stings of defeat as the scourge falls on your back again and again, and still keep your bleeding hope from dropping, while you listen for the distant rumblings that presage revolution, and look for the faint, distant dawn that some day-- some time, perhaps ... If you have that within you!--but don't try it, Lyhne. Imagine what the life of such a man must be, if he is to be true to himself.

Back then, there weren’t channels dedicated to subcategories of the population. There was no Disney channel, no Food Network, no ESPN, no Bravo. There was Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, and, my personal crush, Tom Brokaw on the news, and we got cartoons for three hours on Saturday mornings until CBS switched to golf at 11:00 after the Smurfs. Oh sure, MTV hit the scene in 1981, but we couldn’t watch it because of the devil. Apparently we could watch a show starring two outlaw brothers, their half-naked cousin, and a car painted with the Confederate flag but couldn’t watch Madonna sing “Like a Virgin” because we might get secondhand pregnant.

He had reached the point where he had to choose, for when first youth is past -- early or late in accordance with each person's individuality -- then, early or late, dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste! The ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance, but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our youth.

Ah yes, “The Calling.” This is certainly a favorite Christian concept over in these parts. Here is the trouble: Scripture barely confirms our elusive calling—the bull’s-eye, life purpose, individual mission every hardworking Protestant wants to discover. I found five scriptures, three of which referred to salvation rather than a job description (Rom. 11:29, 2 Peter 1:10, and Heb. 3:1).

What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps—who knows? A soul is such a fragile thing, and no one knows how far the soul extends in a human being. We ought to be good to ourselves—

But for all that, the exultation of the storm was in their young souls. They had faith in the light of the great stars of thought; they had hope fathomless as the ocean. Enthusiasm bore them on the wings of the eagle, and their hearts expanded with the courage of thousands. No doubt life would in time wear it all out, lull most of it to sleep; worldly wisdom would break down much, and cowardice would sweep away the rest-but what of it? The time that has gone with happiness does not come back with grief, and nothing the future may bring can wither a day or wipe out an hour in the life that has been lived.

Who's to say I'm not an entirely different person? Because I am. You have to understand, five years ago I was a waitress.” ― Lady Gaga

I'm a free bitch baby” ― Lady Gaga

By 1957 97% of all marriageable men and women were married, and if they cared to have a social life, they stayed that way.

Important names in the twentieth century included constitutional lawyers and academics such as Sir Ivor Jennings, Sir Kenneth Wheare, Geoffrey Marshall, O. Hood Phillips, and E. C. S.6 Wade and in the twenty-first century include Vernon Bogdanor, Rodney Brazier, and Peter Hennessy.7

People close their eyes to real life, they don't want to hear the 'no' it shouts at their wishes, they want to forget the deep chasm it shows them between their longing and what they long for. They want to realize their dreams. But life doesn't take dreams into account, there is not a single obstacle that can be dreamed away from reality, and so in the end they lie there wailing at the chasm, which has not changed but is the same as it has always been. But they themselves have changed for with their dreams they have goaded all their thoughts and inflamed their passions to the highest pitch. Yet the chasm has not grown narrower, and everything in them longs to cross over it. But no, always no, never anything else. And only if they had watched out for themselves in time, but now it is too late, they are unhappy (pp 31)

1. I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it. 2. Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own. 3. I am sensitive to the value of faith and religion and spirituality in people's lives because I'm a journalist. 4. Have a sense of humor about life - you will need it. And be courteous. 5. A couple of weeks is a long time in American politics. 6. I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion, and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people. 7. I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

had prescribed fresh air, quiet, and milk.

Det, mente hun, var hendes egentlige Væsen, det, som de rette Omgivelser vilde gjøre hende til, og hun drømte tusinde Drømme om hine sollyse Egne og fortæredes af Længsel efter sit rette, rige Jeg, og glemte, hvad der ligger saa nær at glemme, at selv de fagreste Drømme, selv de dybeste Længsler ikke lægger en eneste Tomme til Menneskeaandens Vækst.

Hvor ofte havde han ikke, næsten ydmygt, forundret sig over denne sin Sjæls vidunderlige Rigdom og over sin Aands magtsikre Guddomstryghed, thi Dagene kunde finde ham dømmende Verden og de Ting, som er i Verden, fra helt modsatte Standpunkter og finde ham betragtende dem, Verden og dens Ting, gjennem Forudsætninger, der var saa forskjellige fra hinanden som Nat fra Morgen, uden at dog disse valgte Standpunkter og valgte Forudsætninger, som han havde gjort til sine, nogensinde, selv blot et Sekund, gjorde ham til deres, ligesaalidt som Guden, der har taget Tyrens eller Svanens Skikkelse paa sig, et eneste øjeblik bliver Tyr eller Svane og ophører at være Gud.

Hvem veed? maaske man tager fejl, maaske Ens Forstand, Ens Instinkt, Ens Sandser, med al deres dagslyse Klarhed, dog fører En vild, maaske det netop gjælder om at have det uforstandige Mod at følge den Haabets Lygtemand, som brænder over Ens Lidenskabers attraasvangre Gjæring. Det er først naar man har hørt Afgjørelsens Dør slaa i, at Vishedens jernkolde Kløer graver sig ind i Ens Bryst for langsomt, langsomt at samle sig i Ens Hjærte om den nervefine Traad af Haab, hvori Ens Lykkeverden hænger, saa skjæres Traaden over, saa falder det, den bar, saa knuses det, saa kommer Fortvivlesens Skrig skarpt gjennem Tomheden. I Tvivl fortvivler der Ingen.

This was Fennimore's new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.

And I have always loved you, and if it sometimes seems to me that it is only now that I really love you since we have met again, it is not true, however great my love may be, for I have always loved you, I have always loved you. And if it should happen now that you would become mine- you cannot imagine what that would mean to me, if you, who were taken from me for so many years, were to come back.

Joseph Haydn was a revolutionary. Those who used the nickname 'Papa Haydn' in the eighteenth century were ascribing to him a genuine fatherhood, not drawing a 'caricature' of a 'bewigged and old-fashioned' court officer, the image (to use Jens Peter Larsen's language) that the nineteenth century saw in its rearview mirror. Rising out of Baroque roots, Haydn spend his lifetime forging from his creative imagination the style that has come to be called 'Classical,' and he did so largely in geographic isolation.

Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.

All that ever holds somebody back, I think, is fear. For a minute I had fear. [Then] I went into the [dressing] room and shot my fear in the face...” ― Lady Gaga

When I wake up in the morning, I feel like any other insecure 24-year-old girl. Then I say,'Bitch, you're Lady Gaga, you get up and walk the walk today.” ― Lady Gaga

Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead” (v. 10). The table is being turned over, an upside down world is being turned right side up in these words of Peter. Peter

Jacobsen once jestingly compared himself to the sloth (det beromte Dovendyr Ai-ar) which needed two years to climb to the top o f a tree. It was necessary for him to withdraw absolutely from the world and to retire, as it were, within the character he wished to portray before he could set pen to paper. Hanna Astrup Larsen (Introduction to Marie Grubbe, New York 1917)

Finally Thora went to her room, but Mogens remained sitting in the conservatory, miserable that she had gone. He drew black imaginings for himself, that she was dead and gone, and that he was sitting here all alone in the world and weeping over her, and then he really wept. At length he became angry at himself and stalked up and down the floor, and wanted to be sensible. There was a love, pure and noble, without any coarse, earthly passion; yes, there was, and if there was not, there was going to be one. Passion spoiled everything, and it was very ugly and unhuman. How he hated everything in human nature that was not tender and pure, fine and gentle! He had been subjugated, weighed down, tormented, by this ugly and powerful force; it had lain in his eyes and ears, it had poisoned all his thoughts.

A culture of small bets is a learning culture in which people discover the right paths to new destinations. In these organizations work is often less like executing a blueprint and more like crossing a fast-moving stream by jumping from rock to rock. Decisions are made in the moment, without perfect information, and people experiment by changing variables, staying in motion, and conquering their fears, with the ultimate destination always clear in their mind’s eye. “This takes skills we don’t learn in school, even business school,” author Peter Sims explains.

KISS A LOT OF FROGS “The successful don’t start with brilliant ideas … they discover them!” —Peter Sims, best-selling author and venture capitalist

Peter Jennings was gearing up to a segment about NASA and Pioneer 10, how it sent its last signal, and how NASA had no plans to contact Pioneer 10. No plans! None. The metal ship was going to keep on going way out there in quiet, quiet glides of black, and since it was a thing, a machine, it couldn’t see like us, and we way back here would never, ever know if the machine was okay. I wished that the near impossible would happen: that a passing space rock would collide with it, shatter it to pieces, and send it broken toward the stars.

—No, no sonría, no debe tomárselo a la ligera. Al contrario, esto es muy serio, pues esta adoración, en todo su fanatismo, es absolutamente tiránica, nos obliga a adaptarnos al ideal del hombre. ¡Corta un talón y secciona un dedo! Hay que eliminar todo aquello que en nosotras no se corresponda a su ideal, si no coartándolo, pasándolo por alto, olvidándolo sistemáticamente, negándonos todo progreso. Y lo que no tenemos, o que no es en absoluto propio de nosotras, hay que llevarlo a la floración más salvaje poniéndolo por las nubes, presumiendo siempre que es el don más destacable y convirtiéndolo en la piedra angular sobre la que se construye el amor del hombre. Yo lo llamo violación de nuestra naturaleza. Lo llamo adiestramiento. El amor del hombre es domesticación.

The second course is a soft-shell crab tempura with miso rémoulade, fresh peaches, and lovage." "What's lovage?" Jen asked. "It's what I have for you," Peter replied. Chef smiled. "It is an herb, like parsley. Only more zesty." Everyone oohed and mmmed over first bites. The lovage lent a crisp note of citrus and celery to the deep umami flavor of the miso and crunchy fried crab's creamy inside, while the peaches picked up the sweetness.