Pictures With Unrelated Quotes

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.

You might think that's selfish of me - and maybe it is - but I am a trained psychologist. No matter how depressed someone is, no matter how deep or unrelenting their pain may seem to be, there's always more to the picture. Situations change. Things get better. The human mind, no matter how stressed, still retains a capacity for joy.

The picture of a universe of infinitely many wholly unrelated substances is at least as hard to understand as the monism of Spinoza, and far less easy to reconcile with appearances.

People say that America has no religion, but it's the opposite: America has every religion, all the old ones, and produces more new ones than anywhere else on earth. America;'s religious life is like the photo mosaic in which a thousand little images add up to one big picture, except there's no big picture, just a blob of unrelated and unrelatable images, texts, and poses, the freedom to take what you want from a religion and reject hte rest and be lonely, standing outsdie the warm shelters of temples with your own goon god that no one else can understand.

One consequence of this formulation is that a physical principle that unites many smaller physical theories must autoomatically unite many seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. This is precisely what string theory accomplishes. In fact, of all physical theories, string theory unites by far the largest number of branches of mathematics into a single coherent picture. Perhaps one of the by-products of the physicists' quest for unification will be the unification of mathematics as well.

I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore. If, as I think is quite possible now, I never have any children and never write any books, I suppose I will leave nothing on this earth to be remembered by. And maybe that’s better. It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for? But even that seems so beyond me that it’s like a dream, completely unrelated to anything in reality.

Modern scientific culture has evolved from its roots in the ancient world and has become a complex web of many highly specialized disciplines. Gone are the days when one man, such as the seventeeth-century Robert Hooke, could be a groundbreaking inventor, microscopist, physicist, surveyor, astronomer, biologist and even artist. Today the sheer enormity of available information has led to highly defined specialisms, and academics are expected to keep to their field - despite the truism that science has no experts. [...] The gains from modern science are beyond counting. But the loss, arguably, is the synthesis of information generated by the many gentleman scholars that once existed, before becoming extinct somewhere around hte late nineteenth century. So few scholars now have a chance to view the bigger picture - to seek out patterns that might unexpectedly exist when apparently unrelated data is brought together. It has to be remembered that the difference between a major breakthrough and nothing at all can be just the angle of view rather than anything else.

Subliminal cuing and unconscious priming influence numerous behaviors unrelated to this book. People think potato chips taste better when hearing crunching sounds. We like a neutral stimulus more if, just before seeing it, a picture of a smiling face is flashed for a twentieth of a second. The more expensive a supposed (placebo) painkiller, the more effective people report the placebo to be. Ask subjects their favorite detergent; if they’ve just read a paragraph containing the word “ocean,” they’re more likely to choose Tide—and then explain its cleaning virtues.6

These assurances were taken by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it agreed to leave Beirut. On August 12, after epic negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38 This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.

We are all gastropods, soft, sticky creatures pulling ourselves along the earth from which we came and leaving a trail of silvery drool behind. But the snail, a worm that eternally slides along the horizon, lifts into the air, from its soft bivalve back, the geometrical wonder of its spiral shell, seemingly unrelated to the body that produced it in fear and loneliness. We secrete our shell in the sweat and mucous of our skin, in the transparent, scaly flesh of the foot we use to drag ourselves along. Through an alchemical transmutation, our drool turns to ivory and the spasms of our flesh into an undisturbed stillness. We curl around our central pilaster of rose-colored kaolin, we add, in our desperate drive to persist, spiral after spiral, each one wider, asymptotic, and translucid, until the miracle comes to pass: the revolting worm—existing in the life it lives, fermenting in its sins, irrigated by hormones and blood and sperm and lymph—rots and dies, leaving behind the ceramic filigree of its shell, a triumph of symmetry, the deathless icon in the platonic world of the mind. We all secrete, as we live, poems and pictures, ideas and hope, glistening palaces of music and faith, shells which begin by protecting our soft abdomen but after our disappearance live in the golden air of pure forms. Geometry always appears out of the amorphous, serenity out of pain and torture, just as dry tears leave behind the most wondrous crystals of salt.

Two men were advancing towards the car along the cross track. One man carried a short wooden bench on his back, the other a big wooden object about the size of an upright piano. Richard hailed them, they greeted him with every sign of pleasure. Richard produced cigarettes and a cheerful party spirit seemed to be developing. Then Richard turned to her. “Fond of the cinema? Then you shall see a performance.” He spoke to the two men and they smiled with pleasure. They set up the bench and motioned to Victoria and Richard to sit on it. Then they set up the round contrivance on a stand of some kind. It had two eye-holes in it and as she looked at it, Victoria cried: “It’s like things on piers. What the butler saw.” “That’s it,” said Richard. “It’s a primitive form of same.” Victoria applied her eyes to the glass-fronted peephole, one man began slowly to turn a crank or handle, and the other began a monotonous kind of chant. “What is he saying?” Victoria asked. Richard translated as the singsong chant continued: “Draw near and prepare yourself for much wonder and delight. Prepare to behold the wonders of antiquity.” A crudely coloured picture of Negroes reaping wheat swam into Victoria’s gaze. “Fellahin in America,” announced Richard, translating. Then came: “The wife of the great Shah of the Western world,” and the Empress Eugénie simpered and fingered a long ringlet. A picture of the King’s Palace in Montenegro, another of the Great Exhibition. An odd and varied collection of pictures followed each other, all completely unrelated and sometimes announced in the strangest terms. The Prince Consort, Disraeli, Norwegian Fjords and Skaters in Switzerland completed this strange glimpse of olden far-off days. The showman ended his exposition with the following words: “And so we bring to you the wonders and marvels of antiquity in other lands and far-off places. Let your donation be generous to match the marvels you have seen, for all these things are true.” It was over. Victoria beamed with delight. “That really was marvellous!” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” The proprietors of the travelling cinema were smiling proudly. Victoria got up from the bench and Richard who was sitting on the other end of it was thrown to the ground in a somewhat undignified posture. Victoria apologized but was not ill pleased. Richard rewarded the cinema men and with courteous farewells and expressions of concern for each other’s welfare, and invoking the blessing of God on each other, they parted company. Richard and Victoria got into the car again and the men trudged away into the desert. “Where are they going?” asked Victoria. “They travel all over the country. I met them first in Transjordan coming up the road from the Dead Sea to Amman. Actually they’re bound now for Kerbela, going of course by unfrequented routes so as to give shows in remote villages.” “Perhaps someone will give them a lift?

Much of Buddhist cosmology seems fantastical. The physical layout of the cosmos has a logic mostly unrelated to what we know of the universe, and the mathematical calculations consist of apparently arbitrary numbers which, however, are strangely precise. Naturally, ideas such as the centrality of the Indian experience to the cosmology and the existence of hells inside the earth do not hold true today. All the same, we do not necessarily gain by interpreting Buddhist cosmology purely in terms of geography and revealing all its deficiencies, for to a certain extent it was constructed as a symbolic representation. For example, we may infer that the authors of the cosmology depicted it symbolically from the first, given the overly schematic description of the universe and the too-artificial numbers of the worlds' dimensions. Of course those authors did not come out and say that their cosmology was symbolic. Because of the boldness of expression though, both speakers and hearers must have understood it as being so. If we comprehend it in this way, we can appreciate the sophistication of ancient Buddhist cosmology. It explained graphically, in a way that is easy to memorize, the entire picture of the world and the universe. In this sense it is of little import the the individual numbers and configurations do not match reality.

Focus, specialization, and analysis have been important in the Information Age, but in the Conceptual Age, the ability to synthesize seemingly unrelated pieces to form and articulate the big picture is crucial—even a differentiator.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes... He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life.

I still look at Rumi’s pictures. I have men still swooning over me, wanting to kiss me, but not love me like the love I know. I knew. The love that came from Rumi to me and streamed from me to Rumi. My heart is at unrelenting unrest. There lives a void in it. I never happen to find love or peace in whatsoever I may do.

Shame is an emotion that many rape survivors struggle with for reasons that can be more complicated than we might think. It is a distinctly insidious form of humiliation, the result of a serious injury to our self-esteem, which can be exacerbated by the feeling that we’ve done something wrong. Humiliation is par for the course when your body is used sexually against your will—that part of the aftermath of sexual violence is pretty well understood. Less well appreciated is why rape survivors may end up feeling responsible for what has happened to them. A common assumption is that women blame themselves because of low self-esteem: if only I had dressed differently, if only I had not looked at him that way, if only I had made better decisions for myself. While a woman’s self-image may play a role in how she comes to understand what has happened to her, the sense of responsibility held by many rape survivors is at least partly driven by a dominant worldview regarding personal safety and harm. Although this picture is slowly changing, historically, at least in the West, girls have been taught from a young age that the world is basically a safe place and that so long as you are sufficiently careful and intelligent, you can protect yourself from any serious harm. Underscoring this narrative is the fact that in our entertainment-saturated media culture, the everydayness of sexual violence against women is overlooked in favour of sensationalized stories of extreme violence. And because rape is typically experienced in private, unlike other traumatic experiences, like combat fighting in war, for instance, the clear evidence of its pervasiveness is obscured from our collective vision. This further reinforces the mistaken notion that the world is a benign place for women—and worse, it makes incidents of sexual violence against women look like a series of unrelated, isolated events when in fact they are the systematic consequence of patriarchal social structures. So how does the rape survivor reconcile this dominant worldview with what has happened to her? After all, it cannot be true both that the world is a safe place and that you were raped, unless, of course, the rape was your fault. The other alternative is to reject the dominant worldview, but this means accepting the fact that we live in a world where women, by virtue of being women, are at risk. For a variety of reasons, it can be easier and less painful to believe instead that being raped was a result of your own poor choices.

When we see how God’s perfections relate to every aspect of our life and thinking, the seemingly unrelated aspects of the world become part of a marvelous picture of God’s purpose and works.

Earlier, when he had happened to picture it all in his imagination, he sometimes thought he would be very afraid. But he was not very afraid now, even not afraid at all. He was even occupied at that moment with certain unrelated thoughts,

For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

The talks were conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage.37 Reagan’s diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.”38