“
In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.
”
”
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
“
How are you coming with your home library? Do you need some good ammunition on why it's so important to read? The last time I checked the statistics...I think they indicated that only four percent of the adults in this country have bought a book within the past year. That's dangerous. It's extremely important that we keep ourselves in the top five or six percent.
In one of the Monthly Letters from the Royal Bank of Canada it was pointed out that reading good books is not something to be indulged in as a luxury. It is a necessity for anyone who intends to give his life and work a touch of quality. The most real wealth is not what we put into our piggy banks but what we develop in our heads. Books instruct us without anger, threats and harsh discipline. They do not sneer at our ignorance or grumble at our mistakes. They ask only that we spend some time in the company of greatness so that we may absorb some of its attributes.
You do not read a book for the book's sake, but for your own.
You may read because in your high-pressure life, studded with problems and emergencies, you need periods of relief and yet recognize that peace of mind does not mean numbness of mind.
You may read because you never had an opportunity to go to college, and books give you a chance to get something you missed. You may read because your job is routine, and books give you a feeling of depth in life.
You may read because you did go to college.
You may read because you see social, economic and philosophical problems which need solution, and you believe that the best thinking of all past ages may be useful in your age, too.
You may read because you are tired of the shallowness of contemporary life, bored by the current conversational commonplaces, and wearied of shop talk and gossip about people.
Whatever your dominant personal reason, you will find that reading gives knowledge, creative power, satisfaction and relaxation. It cultivates your mind by calling its faculties into exercise.
Books are a source of pleasure - the purest and the most lasting. They enhance your sensation of the interestingness of life. Reading them is not a violent pleasure like the gross enjoyment of an uncultivated mind, but a subtle delight.
Reading dispels prejudices which hem our minds within narrow spaces. One of the things that will surprise you as you read good books from all over the world and from all times of man is that human nature is much the same today as it has been ever since writing began to tell us about it.
Some people act as if it were demeaning to their manhood to wish to be well-read but you can no more be a healthy person mentally without reading substantial books than you can be a vigorous person physically without eating solid food. Books should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. Dr. Johnson said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both.
”
”
Earl Nightingale
“
Nothing enhances our brain like Reading
”
”
Dion Harper (A Secret Cavalry)
“
Don’t just read the Bible. Start circling the promises. Don’t just make a wish. Write down a list of God-glorifying life goals. Don’t just pray. Keep a prayer journal. Define your dream. Claim your promise. Spell your miracle.
”
”
Mark Batterson (The Circle Maker (Enhanced Edition): Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears)
“
(P)sychologists at the new School for Social Research found that fiction books improve our ability to register and read others' emotions and, according to an article in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, research also shows that literary fiction enhances our ability to reflect on our problems through reading about characters who are facing similar issues and problems.
”
”
Meik Wiking (The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People)
“
Happiness is a state of mental,physical and spiritual well-being. Think pleasantly,engaged sport and read daily to enhance your well-being.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
“
Books are portals for the imagination, whether one is reading or writing, and unless one is keeping a private journal, writing something that no one is likely to read is like trying to have a conversation when you’re all alone. Readers extend and enhance the writer’s created work, and they deepen the colors of it with their own imagination and life experiences. In a sense, there’s a revision every time one's words are read by someone else, just as surely as there is whenever the writer edits. Nothing is finished or completely dead until both sides quit and it’s no longer a part of anyone’s thoughts. So it seems almost natural that a lifelong avid reader occasionally wants to construct a mindscape from scratch after wandering happily in those constructed by others. If writing is a collaborative communication between author and reader, then surely there’s a time and a place other than writing reviews for readers to 'speak' in the human literary conversation.
”
”
P.J. O'Brien
“
The only criterion I have is that the books must look clean, which means that I have to disregard a lot of potential reading material in the charity shop. I don't use the library for the same reason, althought obviously, in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.
”
”
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
“
Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.
”
”
John Dufresne
“
Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.
”
”
Martha C. Nussbaum
“
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
”
”
John Wesley (The Journal of John Wesley - Enhanced Version)
“
I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.
”
”
Nicholson Baker (The Fermata)
“
A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys.
Why the difference? There have always been suggestions that testosterone is central. During development, testosterone fuels the growth of a brain region involved in mathematical thinking and giving adults testosterone enhances their math skills. Oh, okay, it's biological. But consider a paper published in science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in 40 countries based on economic, educational and political indices of gender equality. The worst was Turkey, United States was middling, and naturally, the Scandinavians were tops. Low and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys. Footnote, note that the other reliable sex difference in cognition, namely better reading performance by girls than by boys doesn't disappear in more gender equal societies. It gets bigger. In other words, culture matters. We carry it with us wherever we go.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
You should plan on working 60 hours per week. The first 40 are for your employer. The remaining 20 are for you. During this remaining 20 hours you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career.
”
”
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
“
Designers provide ways into—and out of—the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. (...) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design’s most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading.
”
”
Ellen Lupton (Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, and Students)
“
Books expand, enhance, enlighten, and enthrall.Read a good book today,and open your mind to new dimensions!
”
”
C.J. Peterson
“
But in the slow, attentive reading demanded by unpunctuated texts, the faculty of hearing has its chance, is enhanced until the text speaks itself.
”
”
Dorothy M. Richardson
“
Humans are completely incapable of reading and comprehending text on a screen and listening to a speaker at the same time. Therefore, lots of text (almost any text!), and long, complete sentences are bad, Bad, BAD.
”
”
Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations (Voices That Matter))
“
Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
I like to have my tea at the same time each day. I like my newspaper folded in the same way and I take precisely thirty minutes to sit and read.”
“Then I am spoiling your routine.”
“You are not spoiling it. You are enhancing it. It is good to shake things up.
”
”
Phaedra Patrick (The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper)
“
I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I'd lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I'd been doing up to this point hadn't enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it.
”
”
Patton Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland)
“
I read with interest Max Muller’s book, India—What Can It Teach Us? and the translation of the Upanishads published by the Theosophical Society. All this enhanced my regard for Hinduism, and its beauties began to grow upon me. It did not, however, prejudice me against other religions.
”
”
Mahatma Gandhi (My Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi)
“
Fitz said the words in a light, teasing way, but the truth behind them weighed heavily on Sophie’s shoulders. They’d be in a lot less trouble if she hadn’t ignored the rules of telepathy and tried to read the ogre king’s mind. She’d known it was a dangerous risk, but she’d been desperate to know why the ogres had snuck into the Sanctuary and hidden one of their homing devices in Silveny’s tail. The rare female alicorn wasn’t just essential for the survival of her species, she was one of Sophie’s closest friends. If only Sophie had known that ogres’ minds could detect Telepaths—even genetically enhanced Telepaths like her. She hadn’t learned anything useful, and she’d nearly voided the elvin-ogre treaty and started a war.
”
”
Shannon Messenger (Neverseen (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #4))
“
For some of the things that plagued the seventeenth-century New Englander we have modern-day explanations. For others we do not. We have believed in any number of things—the tooth fairy, cold fusion, the benefits of smoking, the free lunch—that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. We have all believed that someone had nothing better to do than spend his day plotting against us. The seventeenth-century world appeared full of inexplicables, not unlike the automated, mind-reading, algorithmically enhanced modern one.
”
”
Stacy Schiff (The Witches: Salem, 1692)
“
Two Ways to Read This book includes art and animation designed to enhance
”
”
Newt Scamander (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)
“
But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world
”
”
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book)
“
Reading and analyzing poetry can enhance language skills and literacy.
”
”
Oscar Auliq-Ice (Simple Essays: Unlocking the Power of Concise Expression)
“
Cut down on television watching and Internet surfing and instead spend the time with your family, read, exercise, or do something else that enhances the quality of your life.
”
”
Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
“
Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.
”
”
Jim Mattis (Call Sign Chaos)
“
Life exists; why therefore should not the means of preserving it indefinitely exist also? But I have no wish to prejudice your mind about the matter. Read and judge for yourself.
”
”
Enhanced Classics (She (Illustrated): A History of Adventure)
“
I couldn’t see the end of the corridor, so I stared at the entrance. The ship was a magnificent piece of living technology. Third Fish was a Miri 12, a type of ship closely related to a shrimp. Miri 12s were stable calm creatures with natural exoskeletons that could withstand the harshness of space. They were genetically enhanced to grow three breathing chambers within their bodies. Scientists planted rapidly growing plants within these three enormous rooms that not only produced oxygen from the CO2 directed in from other parts of the ship, but also absorbed benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. This was some of the most amazing technology I’d ever read about. Once settled on the ship, I was determined to convince someone to let me see one of these amazing rooms. But at the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the technology of the ship. I was on the threshold now, between home and my future.
”
”
Nnedi Okorafor (Binti (Binti, #1))
“
As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself to the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond self.
”
”
Karen Armstrong (The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness)
“
but she wanted to give her sister more time to adjust before she dropped the I can read minds and teleport and inflict pain and speak any language and enhance other people’s powers bombshells.
”
”
Shannon Messenger (Nightfall (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #6))
“
The distinction that only sciences are useful and only arts are spirit-enhancing is a nonsensical one. I couldn't write much without scientists designing my computer. And some of them must want to read about Greek myth after a long day at work. These Muses always remind me that scientists and artists should disregard the idiotic attempts to separate us. We are all nerds, in the end.
”
”
Natalie Haynes (Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth)
“
The sheer vital energy of the Woolfs always astonishes me when I stop to consider what they accomplished on any given day. Fragile she may have been, living on the edge of psychic disturbance, but think what she managed to do nonetheless -- not only the novels (every one a breakthrough in form), but all those essays and reviews, all the work of the Hogarth Press, not only reading mss. and editing, but, at least at the start, packing the books to go out!
And besides all that, they lived such an intense social life. (When I went there for tea, they were always going out for dinner and often to a party later on.) The gaiety and the fun of it all, the huge sense of life! The long, long walks through London that Elizabeth Bowen told me about. And two houses to keep going! Who of us could accomplish what she did?
There may be a lot of self-involvement in A Writer's Diary, but there is no self-pity (and what has to be remembered is that what Leonard published at that time was only a small part of all the journals, the part that concerned her work, so it had to be self-involved). It is painful that such genius should evoke such mean-spirited response at present. Is genius so common that we can afford to brush it aside? What does it matter if she is major or minor, whether she imitated Joyce (I believe she did not), whether her genius was a limited one, limited by class? What remains true is that one cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
”
”
May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)
“
Developing humans has nothing to do with developing their skills. Developing humans is about getting them in connection with their primitiveness and what their Instinct guide them to what they should do in life. Afterwards any efforts to skill them will pay off immediately. We get humans to connect with their core primitiveness and instinct through readings, meditating, loving, awakening them, and maybe make them
notice how life can enhance all.
”
”
Sameh Elsayed
“
Enhancing personal growth and greatness means keeping your mind soaked in stimulating educational resources. Read and study the Bible, personal-development books, and areas of information that you would like to specialize in.
”
”
DeWayne Owens
“
Clean code can be read, and enhanced by a developer other than its original author. It has unit and acceptance tests. It has meaningful names. It provides one way rather than many
ways for doing one thing. It has minimal dependencies, which are explicitly defined, and provides a clear and minimal API. Code should be
literate since depending on the language, not all necessary information can be expressed clearly in code alone.
-Dave Thomas, founder
of OTI, godfather of the
Eclipse strategy
”
”
Robert C. Martin (Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship)
“
When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours.
”
”
Blaise Pascal (Pensées - Enhanced Version)
“
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.
”
”
N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
“
We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on.
Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be.
There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So - we might as well start
”
”
Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1))
“
But the most powerful arguments in favor of "a
tragic optimism" are those which in Latin are called
argumenta ad hominem. Jerry Long, to cite an example,
is a living testimony to "the defiant power of the
human spirit," as it is called in logotherapy.8 To quote
the Texarkana Gazette, "Jerry Long has been paralyzed
from his neck down since a diving accident
which rendered him a quadriplegic three years ago. He was 17 when the accident occurred. Today Long can
use his mouth stick to type. He 'attends' two courses
at Community College via a special telephone. The
intercom allows Long to both hear and participate in
class discussions. He also occupies his time by reading,
watching television and writing." And in a letter I
received from him, he writes: "I view my life as being
abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that
I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal
credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn't break me. I
am currently enrolled in my first psychology course in
college. I believe that my handicap will only enhance
my ability to help others. I know that without the
suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have
been impossible.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
One of the powerful functions of a library — any library — lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all humanity."
[Browsing in the Western Stacks, Harvard Library Bulletin NS 6(3): 27-33, 1995]
”
”
Richard F. Thomas
“
His feeling for the South was not so much historic as it was
of the core and desire of dark romanticism--that unlimited and
inexplicable drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that
takes them into the heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the
polar and emerald cold of the South as swiftly as it took the heart
of that incomparable romanticist who wrote The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, beyond which there is nothing. And this desire of his was
unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned, by the
romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the
whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to
live in "mansions," and slavery was a benevolent institution,
conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of
the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where
all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men chivalrous and
brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking
cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of the
barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous intrenchment
against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their legend of
the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives,
the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe--when he could
think of no return to their life and its swarming superstition
without weariness and horror, so great was his fear of the legend,
his fear of their antagonism, that he still pretended the most
fanatic devotion to them, excusing his Northern residence on
grounds of necessity rather than desire.
”
”
Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel)
“
certain persons have made a great mistake when, seeking to cultivate some special virtue, they attempt to obtrude it on all occasions, like the ancient philosophers we read of, who were always laughing or weeping. Worse still if they take upon themselves to censure those who do not make a continual study of this their pet virtue.
”
”
Francis de Sales (Introduction to the Devout Life - Enhanced Version)
“
In our world with limitless options, limitless books to read, limitless clothes to wear, limitless paths to take, it is extremely important to be picky. Excess is a suppressant to abundance. Excess represents the broad path which most people travel. With too many clothes in their closets and too many competing priorities, paralysis by analysis is at an extreme. We’ve
”
”
Benjamin P. Hardy (Slipstream Time Hacking: How to Cheat Time, Live More, And Enhance Happiness)
“
When Jess is my girlfriend, we will eat pizza without mushrooms every Sunday. I'll show her how to enhance the contrast of fingerprints on packing tape and I will let her read my CrimeBusters journals.
She'll confide that she has quirks, too, like the fact that she has a tail that she keeps hidden under her jeans. Okay, maybe not a tail. No one really wants a girlfriend with a tail.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (House Rules)
“
The only criterion I have is that the books must look clean, which means that I have to disregard a lot of potential reading material in the charity shop. I don't use the library for the same reason, although obviously, in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder. It's not you, libraries, it's me, as the popular saying goes. The thought of books passing through so many unwashed hands - people reading them in the bath, letting their dogs sit on them, picking their nose and wiping it on the pages. People eating cheesy crisps and then reading a few chapters without washing their hands first. I just can't. No, I look for books with one careful owner. The books in Tesco are nice and clean. I sometimes treat myself to a few tomes from there on payday.
”
”
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
“
Over time, we asked writers like the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault to publish the stories so they would live on forever. During that time, I realized how important storytelling is. While philosophy and science help enhance our mind and body, storytelling stimulates our spirit. It broadens our imagination, teaches us valuable lessons, shows us that things are not always as they seem, and encourages us to reach our greatest potential. With that said, I have a favor to ask of anyone reading this: Become a storyteller! Read to others the fairy tales in this book. Read them stories from another book. If you can, create your own stories to share. When you pass along the art of storytelling to your family and friends, you make the world a better place.
”
”
Chris Colfer (An Author's Odyssey (The Land of Stories #5))
“
With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child’s life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.
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Anonymous
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(…) it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.(…) Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding. (…) One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the
most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performer acceptably without having had to think.
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Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
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Many American women over forty are not worried about their wrinkles and don’t give a rat’s ass about enhancing them. There’s this scientific fact called gravity. Gravity happens to us all, men and women. Some women and men over forty spend money fighting gravity with cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. That’s their ball game. That’s their parade. More power to them. There was once this woman named Gertrude Stein. She was the aesthetic opposite of Marilyn Monroe. I never knew Ms. Stein but from what I’ve read about her life I would venture to say that she was approximately (there’s no way of measuring such things…well, there are a couple of ways) a million times happier than Marilyn Monroe. Sexy on the outside doesn’t do much for ugly on the inside. This isn’t to say that Marilyn Monroe was ugly on the inside. I’m sure she was really fucking gorgeous on the inside, too. Bottom line: sparkle on the INSIDE can enhance ANYTHING on the outside.
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Misti Rainwater-Lites
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Remember that a little learning can be a pleasant thing. Italy gives much, in beauty, gaiety, diversity of arts and landscapes, good humor and energy—willingly, without having to be coaxed or courted. Paradoxically, she requires (as do other countries, probably more so) and deserves some preparation as background to enhance her pleasures. It is almost impossible to read a total history of Italy; there was no united country until a hundred years ago, no single line of power, no concerted developments. It is useful, however, to know something about what made Siena run and stop, to become acquainted with the Estes and the Gonzagas, the Medicis and the Borgias, the names that were the local history. It helps to know something about the conflicts of the medieval church with the Holy Roman Empire, of the French, Spanish and early German kings who marked out large chunks of Italy for themselves or were invited to invade by a nervous Italian power. Above all, it helps to turn the pages of a few art and architecture books to become reacquainted with names other those of the luminous giants.
The informed visitors will not allow himself to be cowed by the deluge of art. See what interests or attracts you; there is no Italian Secret Service that reports on whether you have seen everything. If you try to see it all except as a possible professional task, you may come to resist it all. Relax, know what you like and don’t like—not the worst of measures—and let the rest go.
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Kate Simon (Italy: The Places in Between)
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I am convinced there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.
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Carl Sagan
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Dear Young Black Males… I encourage you to upgrade your thinking! Read books, articles, quotes, and other materials that will enhance your thinking and mindset. Embrace literature that will help propel you to greatness! Read information that will educate, empower, inspire, and motivate you. If you don’t understand the definition of a word, look it up in a dictionary. Broaden your vocabulary by utilizing the thesaurus, too. Knowledge is power, so make sure that you fill your mind with things that make you more and more powerful every day!
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Stephanie Lahart
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If our heart and mind are focused on experiencing food as a love note from God, eating becomes not only a way to nourish and love ourselves, but each meal becomes a time for enhanced spiritual awareness and gratitude to God. It becomes a way to directly experience a meaning of “give us this day our daily bread.” It provides a regular opportunity for the conscious eater to take the time to receive and read God's love note, rather than toss it unconsciously into the garbage can of the stomach. Eating consciously is a way of opening one's heart to God. It is a way to feel the Divine presence.
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Gabriel Cousens (Conscious Eating)
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by have a home in the first place? Good question! When I have a tea party for my grandchildren, I'm passing on to them the things my mama passed on to me-the value of manners and the joy of spending quiet time together. When Bob reads a Bible story to those little ones, he's passing along his deep faith. When we watch videos together, play games, work on projects-we're building a chain of memories for the future. These aren't lessons that can be taught in lecture form. They're taught through the way we live. What we teach our children-or any child who shares our lives-they will teach to their children. What we share with our children, they will share with generations to come.
friend of mine loves the water, the out doors, and the California sunshine. She says they're a constant reminder of God's incredible creativity. Do you may have a patio or a deck or a small balcony? Bob and I have never regretted the time and expense of creating outdoor areas to spend time in. And when we sit outside, we enhance our experience with a cool salad of homegrown tomatoes and lettuce, a tall glass of lemonade, and beautiful
flowers in a basket. Use this wonderful time to contemplate all God is doing in your life.
ecome an answer to prayer!
• Call and encourage someone today.
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Emilie Barnes (365 Things Every Woman Should Know)
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As you’ll read in this book, the keys to preparation are clarity, commitment, and composure. These are necessary for developing a sound, consistent routine. The ideal state of mind for action is feeling confident, focused, and in the flow, with body and mind synchronized in the present moment. This allows you to execute a shot free from the interference of mental chatter or paralysis from analysis. The best response to results is one that enhances future performance. You’ll be introduced to a unique “post-shot routine.” This special way of relating to the outcome of a shot is highly effective in fostering confidence by building on success and learning from mistakes without negativity.
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Joseph Parent (Zen Golf: Mastering the Mental Game)
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Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society’s norms. Vivid depictions of the suffering wrought by slavery, sadistic punishments, war, and cruelty to children and animals preceded the reforms that outlawed or reduced those practices. Though chronology does not prove causation, the laboratory studies showing that hearing or reading a first-person narrative can enhance people’s sympathy for the narrator at least make it plausible (chapter 9).
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
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We would never know the music of the harp—if the strings were left untouched. We would never enjoy the juice of the grape—if it were not trodden in the winepress. We would never discover the sweet perfume of cinnamon—if it were not pressed and beaten. We would never feel the warmth of fire—if the coals were not utterly consumed. The wisdom and power of the great Workman are revealed by the trials through which His vessels of mercy are permitted to pass. Present afflictions tend also to heighten future joy. There must be dark shadows in the picture—to bring out the beauty of the lights. Could we be so supremely blessed in heaven—if we had not known the curse of sin and the sorrow of earth? Will not peace be sweeter—after conflict? Will not rest be more welcome—after toil? Will not the bliss of the glorified—be enhanced the recollection of past sufferings?
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Morning and Evening: Daily Readings)
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Why is it necessary to everyone to read the classics? Shouldn't only specialists spend their time on these texts, with other people devoting their efforts to particular interests of their own? Actually, it is precisely because these works are intended for *all* that they have become classics. They have been tried and tested and deemed valuable for the general culture --- the way in which people live their lives. They have been found to enhance and elevate the consciousness of all sorts and conditions of people who study them, to lift their readers out of narrowness or provincialism into a wider vision of humanity. Further, they guard the truths of the human heart from the faddish half-truths of the day by straightening the mind and imagination and enabling their readers to judge for themselves. In a word, they lead those who will follow into a perception of the fullness and complexity of reality.
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Louise Cowan (Invitation to the Classics: A Guide to Books You've Always Wanted to Read)
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Is Jesus' whole body thriving and stronger than ever today because for over two millennia 'the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work' (Ephesians 4:16 NIV)? Do the world's headlines read, 'See how they love one another!'--not of tight-knit homogeneous subgroups of Christians, but of a bone-deep oneness that inexplicably thrives within wide-ranging diversity and denominational and theological differences and reaches across the gender divide?
In two thousand years, how far have we come in attaining that kaleidoscopic trinitarian oneness Jesus longs to see? How is God's reputation in the world enhanced because of us? Has the world changed for the better, is the Enemy in retreat, and is justice flourishing in the earth because the Blessed Alliance of men and women is formidable and fully deployed for God's kingdom?
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Carolyn Custis James (Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women)
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The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. without the human presence it is just a concatenation of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars Beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.
Now that we are here, it isn't enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That's science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It's too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we're on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won't destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won't go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars beauty? I don't think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind; if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So, we might as well start.
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Kim Stanley Robinson
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A Note from Zibby:
Hi! Thanks so much for coming by!
I truly, truly hope that the thoughtful content my team and I produce daily helps you make the most of your (very limited!) time. I mean, if we don’t make time for what’s important, life will just pass us by in a blur of emails and to-do lists. And life is way too short for that.
So let this programming enhance your life, not take it over.
* Learn about a new book and then go read it.
* Hear from an amazing author you’ve always loved and then attend their event.
* Get some sex tips and actually try them out.
* Receive writing advice from a bestselling pro and then write the essay or book you know you have in you.
* Rethink weight loss and change what you eat or how you work out that day.
* Message with someone you meet in our grief community over your shared loss.
* Offer travel tips to someone who can use them.
* Find a product you love or a gift that will delight someone.
* Read a personal essay and feel deeply understood.
* Connect, connect, connect.
But we must find time to enjoy life, before our time runs out. So let’s outrun it while we can.
Lace up, friends. Here we go.
Warmly,
Zibby
”
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Zibby Owens
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Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance
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Anita Diamant (The Boston Girl)
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Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels. Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going?
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Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine)
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Weaknesses in claims about self-esteem have been evident for a long time. In California in the late 1980s, the state governor set up a special taskforce to examine politician John Vasconcellos’s claim that boosting young people’s self-esteem would prevent a range of societal problems (see chapter 1). One of its briefs was to review the relevant literature and assess whether there was support for this new approach. An author of the resulting report wrote in the introduction that ‘one of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume … is how low the associations between self-esteem and its [presumed] consequences are in research to date.’1 Unfortunately, this early expression of concern was largely ignored. Carol Craig reviews more recent warnings about the self-esteem movement in an online article ‘A short history of self-esteem’, citing the research of five professors of psychology. Craig’s article and related documents are worth reading if you are interested in exploring this issue in depth.2 The following is my summary of her key conclusions about self-esteem: • There is no evidence that self-image enhancing techniques, aimed at boosting self-esteem directly, foster improvements in objectively measured ‘performance’. • Many people who consider themselves to have high self-esteem tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities, as assessed by objective tests of their performance, and may be insulted and threatened whenever anyone asserts otherwise. • Low self-esteem is not a risk factor for educational problems, or problems such as violence, bullying, delinquency, racism, drug-taking or alcohol abuse. • Obsession with self-esteem has contributed to an ‘epidemic of depression’ and is undermining the life skills and resilience of young people. • Attempts to boost self-esteem are encouraging narcissism and a sense of entitlement. • The pursuit of self-esteem has considerable costs and may undermine the wellbeing of both individuals and societies. Some of these findings were brought to wider public attention in an article entitled ‘The trouble with self-esteem’, written by psychologist Lauren Slater, which appeared in The New York Times in 2002.3 Related articles, far too many to mention individually in this book, have emerged, alongside many books in which authors express their concerns about various aspects of the myth of self-esteem.4 There is particular concern about what we are doing to our children.
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John Smith (Beyond the Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Fulfilment)
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Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.
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Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
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If it will reassure you that I’m not a coward, I suppose I could rearrange his face.” Quietly he added, “The music has ended,” and for the first time Elizabeth realized they were no longer waltzing but were only swaying lightly together. With no other excuse to stand in his arms, Elizabeth tried to ignore her disappointment and step back, but just then the musicians began another melody, and their bodies began to move together in perfect time to the music.
“Since I’ve already deprived you of your escort for the outing to the village tomorrow,” he said after a minute, “would you consider an alternative?”
Her heart soared, because she thought he was going to offer to escort her himself. Again he read her thoughts, but his words were dampening.
“I cannot escort you there,” he said flatly.
Her smile faded. “Why not?”
“Don’t be a henwit. Being seen in my company is hardly the sort of thing to enhance a debutante’s reputation.”
Her mind whirled, trying to tally some sort of balance sheet that would disprove his claim. After all, he was a favorite of the Duke of Hammund’s…but while the duke was considered a great matrimonial prize, his reputation as a libertine and rake made mamas fear him as much as they coveted him as a son-in-law. On the other hand, Charise Dumont was considered perfectly respectable by the ton, and so this country gathering was above reproach. Except it wasn’t, according to Lord Howard. “Is that why you refused to dance with me when I asked you to earlier?”
“That was part of the reason.”
“What was the rest of it?” she asked curiously.
His chuckle was grim. “Call it a well-developed instinct for self-preservation.”
“What?”
“Your eyes are more lethal than dueling pistols, my sweet,” he said wryly. “They could make a saint forget his goal.”
Elizabeth had heard many flowery praises sung to her beauty, and she endured them with polite disinterest, but Ian’s blunt, almost reluctant flattery made her chuckle. Later she would realize that at this moment she had made her greatest mistake of all-she had been lulled into regarding him as an equal, a gently bred person whom she could trust, even relax with. “What sort of alternative were you going to suggest for tomorrow?”
“Luncheon,” he said. “Somewhere private where we can talk, and where we won’t be seen together.”
A cozy picnic luncheon for two was definitely not on Lucinda’s list of acceptable pastimes for London debutantes, but even so, Elizabeth was reluctant to refuse. “Outdoors…by the lake?” she speculated aloud, trying to justify the idea by making it public.
“I think it’s going to rain tomorrow, and besides, we’d risk being seen together there.”
“Then where?”
“In the woods. I’ll meet you at the woodcutter’s cottage at the south end of the property near the stream at eleven. There's a path that leads to it two miles from the gate-off the main road." Elizabeth was too alarmed by such a prospect to stop to wonder how and when Ian Thornton had become so familiar with Charise's property and all its secluded haunts.
"Absolutely not," she said in a shaky, breathless voice. Even she was not naïve enough to consider being alone with a man in a cottage, and she was terribly disappointed that he'd suggested it. Gentlemen didn't make such suggestions, and well-bred ladies never accepted them. Lucinda's warnings about such things had been eloquent and, Elizabeth felt, sensible.
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Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
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techniques 2 ========== The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales. (Kennedy, Dan S.) - Your Highlight at location 1622-1630 | Added on Friday, 15 August 2014 10:09:51 illustrations, graphics, charts, and photos to help set them apart. CAPITALIZATION — Use capitalization to set off a single (or two or three) word(s) which need extra emphasis. Use sparingly, since oftentimes it's perceived as “shouting.” Captions — These should always be used under illustrations, graphics, charts, and photos, because captions are one of the most often read Copy Cosmetic enhancements when placed next to an
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Anonymous
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There is some feeling nowadays that reading is not as necessary as it once was. Radio and especially television have taken over many of the functions once served by print, just as photography has taken over functions once served by painting and other graphic arts. Admittedly, television serves some of these functions extremely well; the visual communication of news events, for example, has enormous impact. The ability of radio to give us information while we are engaged in doing other things—for instance, driving a car—is remarkable, and a great saving of time. But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.
Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.
One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.
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Mortimer J. Adler
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Climadex :- How do citizens grab first-class climadex conferences? I'm talking about anything having to do with your climadex. Most dabblers won't want to hear that, but overall the opinion is very sound. There is a slight chance this means is simply not going to take off. At first, start with an amazing climadex is that it supplies less Climadex Male Enhancement. I barely know anything bordering on this opinion, really. How many climadex do you have? Their area of interest is a commonly used modus operandi to find even more types of climadex.
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CHRONOTYPE: SEVEN STEPS TO SLEEP SMARTER Know your chronotype, and establish those of close friends and family. Use the Munich University questionnaire if you’re not sure. Manipulate your day so you can be at your best when it matters most. Use caffeine as a strategic performance enhancer, not out of habit – and no more than 400mg per day. PMers – don’t lie in at weekends if you want to beat social jet lag. Fit meeting rooms, offices and desks with daylight lamps to improve alertness, productivity and mood at work. Know when to step up and when to take a back seat: should you volunteer to take a penalty in a late-night match when you’re an AMer? Learn to work in harmony with your partner if your chronotypes differ.
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Nick Littlehales (Sleep: Change the way you sleep with this 90 minute read)
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RPA is software that emulates human execution of repetitive work. It's built on technologies designed to orchestrate, execute and enhance business workflows. Cognitive RPA adds intelligence the ability to perform human like decision making to RPA. CRPA can do things like read documents to identify specific information to pass to RPA to update another system. dayhuffgroup.com
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CognitiveRoboticProcessAutomation
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Climadex :- We are in a down economy right now and that's affecting that reconstruction. It could really multiply my efforts. As I have said before, most climadex options are rather generic. That is the best data I can give you on the situation however, all I need is determination. Unbelievable, isn't it? I marginally refuse this habitual intimation. Is it really that hard for you to comprehend? You need to try to concentrate on the goal that you have set with it. Perhaps you are trying to discover an overlooked climadex is that it connects better with Climadex Male Enhancement.
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climdex
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Sometimes I have used Kindle eBook reading device and it’s best due to specially Amazon Kindle eBook reader is compatible with Word Wise Enabled, Screen Reader Supported (as like VoiceView, VoiceOver, TalkBack, NVDA, ALT text), Enhanced Typesetting Enabled which is faster reading with less eye strain with beautiful page layout visibility, Page Flip Enabled, Text to Speech and others modern or advanced technological facilities inbuilt. But most of times I use my smart phone and computer as well to eReading at online & offline.
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Hari Seldon
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It is this heightened state that may produce several relatively new phenomena in childhood today. As the clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair,10 the author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, observes, the most commonly heard complaint when children are asked to go off-line is “I’m bored.” Confronted with the dazzling possibilities for their attention on a nearby screen, young children quickly become awash with, then accustomed to, and ever so gradually semi-addicted to continuous sensory stimulation. When the constant level of stimulation is taken away, the children respond predictably with a seemingly overwhelming state of boredom. “I’m Bored.” There are different kinds of boredom. There is a natural boredom that is part of the woof of childhood that can often provide children with the impetus to create their own forms of entertainment and just plain fun. This is the boredom that Walter Benjamin described years ago as the “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”11 But there may also be an unnatural, culturally induced, new form of boredom that follows too much digital stimulation. This form of boredom may de-animate children in such a fashion as to prevent them from wanting to explore and create real-world experiences for themselves, particularly outside their rooms, houses, and schools. As Steiner-Adair wrote, “If they become addicted to playing on screens,12 children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity.” It would be an intellectual shame to think that in the spirit of giving our children as much as we can through the many creative offerings of the latest, enhanced e-books and technological innovations, we may inadvertently deprive them of the motivation and time necessary to build their own images of what is read and to construct their own imaginative off-line worlds that are the invisible habitats of childhood. Such cautions are neither a matter of nostalgic lament nor an exclusion of the powerful, exciting uses of the child’s imagination fostered by technology. We will return to such uses a little later. Nor should worries over a “lost childhood” be dismissed as a cultural (read Western) luxury. What of the real lost childhoods? one might ask, in which the daily struggle to survive trumps everything else? Those children are never far from my thoughts or my work every day of my life.
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Maryanne Wolf (Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World)
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Awareness and knowledge of what occurs in the present, which we call reality, is imperfect and vague. While we can never comprehend all aspects of reality, a person enhances personal comprehension by placing the seed of their existence under strict scrutiny. Acting as an impartial judge of our own deeds and by reviewing the lives of other people whom underwent similar experiences, we enhance our level of self-awareness. Reviewing other people’s stories increases our understanding of humanity and provides insight into our own personal struggles.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Regarding books - specifically their life-enhancing capacity and their ability to build bridges between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the inner and outer life, the real and the ideal, and the body and the mind - Hesse became an evangelist of a secular spirit, which nevertheless still had a transcendental spark in it, and which in his own finite existence touched upon a little piece of immortality, He was not concerned with reality but with the mystery of life, which consisted at one and the same time of nature and spirit. This inherent contradiction culminated, at best, in the growth of civilization, at worst in barbarism. It was necessary to look the danger of the self-destruction of the individual and of the while squarely in the face; such a danger was part and parcel of the claim to truth. That was why this could not be achieved simply through avid reading - the decisive factor was always real life.
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Gunnar Decker (Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow)
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Sun When Celeste was born on March 7, the Sun was in Pisces. That means her Sun card is paired with the Moon, the card that corresponds to the sign of Pisces. Oddly enough, Celeste has always been a night owl. She feels most alive after dark, when the Sun sets and the Moon rises. Her emotions ebb and flow like the tide, and she cycles through life like a living lunar goddess. She even looks like a creature of the night, with pale skin and wide-set, luminous eyes. “It’s true,” she exclaimed, when she saw the two cards side by side. “I am the Moon! That explains so much. I like the Sun as much as anyone, but I’d much rather live my life by moonlight.
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Corrine Kenner (Tarot and Astrology: Enhance Your Readings with the Wisdom of the Zodiac)
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Read professional material as well as leisure material; allow students to see reading as a lifelong and life-enhancing activity.
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Cris Tovani (I Read It, but I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers)
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It reminded me of a study I had read about Alzheimer's disease. The study said that the disease often enhanced and reinforced people's existing personality traits. If a person was quiet and gentle, with Alzheimer's they became even more docile. If a person was argumentative and negative the disease made them unbearable to be around. I couldn't help but wonder if sudden wealth had that same effect on a person.
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Timothy Benson (King of the Trailer Park)
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In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So
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Michael Sokolove (Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater)
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Anxiety and the Social Process
Generally, in life, we only make progress when we are willing to take risks. If you don’t take risks in your life, it’s probably because you are held back by anxiety. Because you fear that interaction will result in rejection, embarrassment, and scrutiny, you feel anxiety about it. After all, you tell yourself, why risk experiencing failure? But as we have discussed, rejection is not devastating; it is merely disappointing, and, with your anxiety under control, disappointment is entirely bearable. In time, and with practice and eventual success, your fear of disappointment will diminish.
Some people, far from shying away from social contact, actually look forward to meeting new people. Meeting new people does not in itself cause anxiety. The beliefs you hold cause anxiety. If you believe rejection will be devastating to you, and that rejection is highly likely to happen, you will feel quite justified in making sure that you never meet any new people at all. But avoidance does not alleviate anxiety. It simply makes the problem worse next time the situation arises. You need to tap into your positive mental attitude. Tell yourself: “Meeting new people is healthy, and by doing it, I stand a good chance of having a positive experience.”
To summarize, here are some tips for interactive success. Try to integrate them into your being—make them part of your overall attitude toward interacting.
1. Anticipate success.
2. Be willing to risk.
3. Think positive thoughts about yourself to boost your self-esteem.
4. Think positive thoughts about others as well.
5. Be yourself.
This last point leads into a discussion of mental focus. It is typical of a socially anxious person to focus on himself or herself, to forget to read the nonverbal signals of others. Before you attempt to meet someone, it’s a good idea to focus your attention in the right direction, not on yourself, but on the other person. Use your new skills of self-awareness and relaxation to enhance your focusing abilities.
Think of your attention as a finite resource. Is it really best spent on thoughts about yourself? (“Do I look okay?” “Can he tell I’m sweating?” “Can she tell I’m blushing?” “I hope I don’t say anything dumb,” and so on.) With so much attention directed inward, there is very little left to spend on the other person. One of my clients has so much trouble focusing on others in conversation that she developed a habit of pinching herself to stay on track. Do all you can to stop your inward thinking, because paying attention to the other person will provide you with the basis of an interesting and successful conversation. If you have trouble averting the focus from your own anxiety, try using relaxation techniques to bring your symptoms under control. Diaphragmatic breathing, for example, can bring immediate relief.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
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Expert Tips On Search Engine Optimization That Are Proven To Work
Each business with a Web site needs to make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) part of their growth strategy, working to get their site ranked as high as possible on the major search engines. With a little work, a different approach, and these tips, you can get your site ranked well with the search engines.
To create more traffic to your site and to improve your standings with search engines, you can write and submit articles to online article directories. The directories make their articles available to countless people who will read your submissions and follow the links back to your site. This has the potential to bring traffic to your site far into the future as these links remain active for many years.
To help site crawlers better understand your site, you should use keywords as your anchor text for internal links. Non-descript links such as, "click here," do not help your site as they offer no information to the search engines. This will also help your site to appear more cohesive to human visitors.
Be varied in the page titles of your site, but not too lengthy. Targeting over 70 characters will begin to diminish the weight of the page or site. Keep the titles condensed and intersperse a wide variety of your keywords and phrases amongst them. Each individual page will add its own weight to the overall search.
In order to optimize incoming links to raise your search engine rankings, try to have links to different parts of your website, not just your homepage. Search engine spiders read links to different parts of your site, as meaning that your site is full of useful and relevant content and therefore, ranks it higher.
One way to enhance your standing in website search rankings is to improve the time it takes your website to load. Search engines are looking to deliver the best possible experience to their searchers and now include load time into their search ranking protocols. Slow loading sites get lost in the mix when searchers get impatient waiting for sites to load. Explore ways to optimize your loading process with solutions like compressed images, limited use of Flash animations and relocating JavaScript outside your HTML code.
Publish content with as little HTML code as possible. Search engines prefer pages that favor actual content instead of tons of HTML code. In fact, they consistently rank them higher. So, when writing with SEO in mind, keep the code simple and concentrate on engaging your audience through your words.
Do not obsess over your page rankings on the search engines. Your content is more important than your rank, and readers realize that. If you focus too much on rank, you may end up accidentally forgetting who your true audience is. Cater to your customers, and your rank will rise on its own.
As you can see, you need to increase your site's traffic in order to get ranked higher. This is possible to anyone who is willing to do what it takes. Getting your site ranked with the top search engines is highly possible, and can be done by anyone who will give it a chance.
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search rankings
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Monosodium Glutamate MSG is a chemical used to add flavor to all sorts of foods. It’s a common ingredient in Chinese food, often used to enhance savoriness. Many restaurants will now state if they’re a “no MSG” establishment—if you don’t see this information posted anywhere, then it’s worth asking for a dish with no added MSG. MSG is also a frequent additive in processed foods. If you’re buying something that isn’t in the produce or refrigerated section (i.e., it’s food that comes in a box or bag and can live in your pantry without spoiling for months on end), read the list of ingredients on the label. And be on the lookout for some of the common MSG aliases on the ingredient list, including glutamic acid, glutamate, yeast extract, sodium or calcium caseinate, or any type of “flavoring” (e.g. “natural flavor,” “chicken flavor,” “beef flavor,” etc.).
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Josh Turknett (The Migraine Miracle: A Sugar-Free, Gluten-Free, Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and Relieve Your Headaches for Good)
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If the journey of study and reading cannot change and enhance the character and behaviour, towards disciplined and sober life and career, remains unworthy and odious.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Apart from nembutsu, we can cure our fatigue by sitting truly well in meditation, even if we shorten the time of our sleep. This has been proved by many who have experienced zazen. Ten minutes of zazen before reading and the momentary immersion in samadhi before work—how well they help us enjoy our work and reading, and to what a great extent they enhance our efficiency!
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Omori Sogen (Introduction to Zen Training: A Physical Approach to Meditation and Mind-Body Training (The Classic Rinzai Zen Manual))
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Gratitude works. Feelings of gratitude enhance well-being and deepen one’s sense of meaning. That’s why Martin Seligman, whose work I described earlier in this chapter, advocates “the gratitude visit.” It works like this: You think of a person in your life who has been kind or generous to you but whom you’ve never properly thanked. You write a detailed “gratitude letter” to that person, explaining in concrete terms why you’re grateful. Then you visit that person and read the letter aloud. According to Seligman, the ritual is quite powerful. “Everyone cries when you do a gratitude visit. It’s very moving for both people.
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Daniel H. Pink (A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future)
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Towards the end of recording Roger created two pieces called ‘Pigs On The Wing’ to open and close the album, designed to give the overall shape of the album a better dynamic and enhance the animal aspect of it. An unwanted side effect was that it opened up the question of the share-out of publishing royalties (which are based on the number of tracks, not their length) since it gave Roger two additional tracks, and meant that the longer piece ‘Dogs’, co-written with David, was not split up, but left as a single track. This was the kind of issue that would later prove contentious.
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Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd (Reading Edition): (Rock and Roll Book, Biography of Pink Floyd, Music Book))
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The services Henry and Sandra were so taken with were not evangelistic events; they were regular services designed for the praise of God and the strengthening of believers. There were Bible readings, songs, prayers, creeds and preaching-all the things that have always been part of church gatherings. Henry and Sandra were eavesdroppers, as it were. And this, I think, is part of the power of services like these. Visitors to church can easily feel threatened if they suspect the whole event is pitched at them. But when they feel the freedom simply to observe what Christians do-praying to the Lord, giving thanks to him, listening to his Word-visitors are often more at ease, less defensive and more open to the things they hear. They are more attentive to our “praises” of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light. I still think there is a place for the evangelistic church service and even for the so-called seeker service. I also think it is important to consider making small adjustments to our gatherings to make them more comprehensible to the uninitiated. However, I want to stress in the strongest terms that visitor-focused services are not an evangelistic necessity. Normal church meetings conducted exceptionally well will not only inspire the regulars; they will draw in visitors and, through the powerful vehicle of our corporate praise, promote the gospel to them. The burden is on us-whether we are laypeople or leaders-to do everything we can to enhance what goes on in our services and to invite our friends and family to eavesdrop on what we do.
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John Dickson (The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission: Promoting the Gospel with More Than Our Lips)
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The second law has a reputation for being recondite, notoriously difficult, and a litmus test of scientific literacy. Indeed, the novelist and former chemist C. P. Snow is famous for having asserted in his
The Two Cultures
that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to never having read a work by Shakespeare. I actually have serious doubts about whether Snow understood the law himself, but I concur with his sentiments. The second law is of central importance in the whole of science, and hence in our rational understanding of the universe, because it provides a foundation for understanding why any change occurs. Thus, not only is it a basis for understanding why engines run and chemical reactions occur, but it is also a foundation for understanding those most exquisite consequences of chemical reactions, the acts of literary, artistic, and musical creativity that enhance our culture.
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Peter Atkins (The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction)
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Tarot and astrology have always been connected. The earliest tarot decks depicted the Sun, the Moon, and the Star, alongside gods with cosmic connections like Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus.
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Corrine Kenner (Tarot and Astrology: Enhance Your Readings with the Wisdom of the Zodiac)
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It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival.
Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34
Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.
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Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
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Enhancing Diabetes Management: The Role of Blood Glucose Monitors from Med Supply US
Introduction
In the modern landscape of diabetes care, continuous monitoring of blood glucose levels has become an invaluable tool for individuals striving to manage their condition effectively. Among the pioneering names in this field is Med Supply US, a brand that has been making waves in New York, Miami, and Florida by offering state-of-the-art Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) services. Let's delve into how these Blood Glucose Monitors are revolutionizing diabetes management.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring: A Game-Changer
Gone are the days of frequent finger pricks and sporadic glucose checks. Med Supply US is at the forefront of empowering individuals with diabetes to monitor their blood glucose levels seamlessly and gain insights in real-time. CGMs have ushered in a new era of convenience, accuracy, and comprehensive data analysis, allowing for a more proactive approach to diabetes care.
Benefits of CGMs by Med Supply US
Med Supply US has carved a niche for itself in the diabetes management landscape, offering a range of benefits that set it apart:
Accurate Monitoring: CGMs provide continuous readings throughout the day and night, eliminating the guesswork associated with traditional glucose monitoring methods. This accuracy is pivotal for making informed decisions about diet, medication, and activity levels.
Real-time Data: With CGMs, individuals receive real-time data on their glucose levels. This not only keeps them informed but also enables prompt action in response to fluctuations, reducing the risk of extreme highs and lows.
Trend Analysis: Med Supply US's CGMs offer comprehensive data analysis, highlighting trends and patterns in glucose levels over time. This aids in identifying factors that impact blood sugar, thus facilitating better management strategies.
Alerts and Notifications: CGMs from Med Supply US come equipped with customizable alerts and notifications. This feature helps users stay vigilant about their glucose levels, especially during critical moments.
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https://medsupply.us/continuous-glucose-monitors/
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Unveiling the Benefits of Numerology Certification Courses in Mumbai | Occult Science
Numerology Certification Courses in Mumbai, Offer people the chance to study and practice numerology, an old metaphysical science that looks at the meaning of numbers in our life, much like in many other regions of the world.
These Courses offer Various Advantages:
Awareness of Numerology: The principles of numerology, including the significance of numbers, their vibrations, and how they connect to various facets of life, are covered in a systematic curriculum offered by certification schools. The basis for advanced studies is this understanding.
Enhancing your personal growth: journey of self-discovery can be achieved while learning numerology. People can learn more about their own personality traits, strengths, weaknesses, and life path thanks to this. A deeper understanding of oneself and personal improvement can result from this self-awareness.
Choosing a career: As a professional numerologist, you may have more employment options after earning a certification in numerology. To clients looking for guidance regarding their lives, relationships, and job decisions, you can provide readings, consultations, and counsel. This can be a fulfilling and possibly lucrative career.
Improved Decision-Making: Making vital choices in life can benefit from the use of numerology. By comprehending the energies connected to particular numbers and their compatibility with individual vibrations, it can assist people in making informed decisions about their job, relationships, and other parts of life.
Compatibility in relationships: Numerology can be utilized for determining a pair's compatibility in a relationship. Understanding one other's numerical compatibility can enhance communication and reduce tension.
Integrative Health: Numerologists who hold this viewpoint consider it to be complementary to other forms of holistic medicine. Based on a person's data, it can offer insights into their health difficulties and possible treatments.
Growth spiritually: Numerology has been described as a form of spirituality. It may improve a person's awareness of spirituality and offer a structure for exploring into queries about the soul's journey.
The Self-Employed: Numerologists have the option to work for themselves, giving them the freedom to set their own hours. Those looking for independence and a work-life balance may find this particularly appealing.
Helping others: Many people find satisfaction in using numerology readings to help others. Giving customers advice and insight can be a satisfying way to make a difference in their life.
Personal hobbies and interests: Certification programmes can be an interesting hobby and a way to further your personal development, even if you don't want to follow numerology as a career.
It's important to do some research about a numerology certification course's subject matter, an organization or instructor who teaches it, and the certification's standing in the industry before enrolling. Additionally, while numerology can be an original and unique topic of study, think about whether it fits with your personal interests and objectives.
For More Details: Click Here
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Occulscience2
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Freelancing and Creativity
In Freelancing, doing a job in different ways is called creativity. The importance of creativity is immense among all that is required for freelancing work because creativity is the main thing of freelancing.
It is difficult to give an exact definition of creativity. Because there is no end to creativity. In the case of some, creativity or the development of creativity begins to manifest naturally, while for some it manifests through talent, practice, and practice.
Creativity is basically a mental process that is the result of positive thinking, perseverance, and high analytical ability.
Just as it takes practice, practice, and dedication to develop this creativity, there is a high chance that this creativity will be wasted if it is not properly used or applied.
Below are the causes of creativity loss and ways to increase Creativity:
** Reasons for loss of Creativity -
1. Lack of focus on work – Creativity does not arise if there is no focus on work, to complete a task properly, there must be focus on it.
2. Irregular sleep – the brain does not work properly if you do not sleep properly, repeated sleep disturbances can also cause many mental problems that hinder creativity.
3. Suffering from indecisiveness – Having too many negative thoughts running through your head while doing a task can also hamper creativity. For example: if the work is going well, if the client likes it, if the client doesn't like it, if the client doesn't pay, etc.
4. Fear of not succeeding at work – Many people rush to work for quick cash income, but it does not work properly or on the contrary, more creativity is lost, which results in payment time problems. As a result, the fear of not succeeding enters the freelancer.
** Ways to Increase Creativity -
1. Dietary discipline – Of course, there is no substitute for healthy eating. Consuming regular meals maintains mental and physical well-being which in turn enhances creativity.
2. Gaining knowledge from nature – Nature is the main source of knowledge. All the sages and poets in the world were worshipers of nature. All of them could see something extraordinary in the ordinary things of this nature. Try to see it that way.
3. From everyday events – notice what is happening around you. You can get new ideas from it, for example, you can get an idea on any subject by reading a book, and new ideas can be invented while watching TV or watching newspaper advertisements.
4. Write down ideas – We all have something going on in our heads all the time, either mainly through thought or sensory processing. So whenever you get an idea, note it down so that you don't forget to read it.
So, creativity is created by the combination of ideas and skills. Freelancing is unthinkable without this creativity because to do freelancing you must have a clear idea about something or acquire full skill in that subject.
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Bhairab IT Zone
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Enhancing our memory is just the beginning. When you express an idea in writing, it’s not just a matter of transferring the exact contents of your mind into paper or digital form. Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.V Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking. There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts in writing can lead to benefits for our health and well-being.11 One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.” In a wide range of controlled studies, writing about one’s inner experiences led to a drop in visits to the doctor, improved immune systems, and reductions in distress. Students who wrote about emotional topics showed improvements in their grades, professionals who had been laid off found new jobs more quickly, and staff members were absent from work at lower rates. The most amazing thing about these findings is that they didn’t rely on input from others. No one had to read or respond to what these people wrote down—the benefits came just from the act of writing.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)