Resigned Related Quotes

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.

No one fears death more than immortals. Humans adjust to their lot in life little bits at a time. They’re introduced to the concept with goldfish, then move up to puppies, ancient relatives and reckless friends, each victim closer to them than the last. Death follows them through life, making itself known. Numbing them bit by bit until there is nothing left in them but resignation. We had no such preparation. We were never meant to die.

As a matter of fact, reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms. Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity....We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interested, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ] Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes—or aspires to become—a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factory, it is with the notion of being freed from it one day or another by a fame as sudden as it is inconceivable. * Equally tragic is the case of the poet. Walled up in his own language, he writes for his friends—for ten, for twenty persons at the most. His longing to be read is no less imperious than that of the impoverished novelist. At least he has the advantage over the latter of being able to get his verses published in the little émigré reviews which appear at the cost of almost indecent sacrifices and renunciations. Let us say such a man becomes—transforms himself—into an editor of such a review; to keep his publication alive he risks hunger, abstains from women, buries himself in a windowless room, imposes privations which confound and appall. Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is his fate. No matter how scanty the number of émigrés, they form groups, not to protect their interests but to get up subscriptions, to bleed each other white in order to publish their regrets, their cries, their echoless appeals. One cannot conceive of a more heart rending form of the gratuitous. That they are as good poets as they are bad prose writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any "minor" nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

The most devastating thing about suffering is that it is relative. There is always someone who hurts more, someone who hurts less.

The humorous self-sufficiency of genius is the unity of a modest resignation in the world and a proud elevation above the world: of being an unnecessary superfluity and a precious ornament. If the genius is an artist, then he accomplishes his work of art, but neither he nor his work of art has a telos outside him. Or he is an author, who abolishes every teleological relation to his environment and humorously defines himself as a poet. Lyrical art has certainly no telos outside it: and whether a man writes a short lyric or folios, it makes no difference to the quality of the nature of his work. The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short, he does not write in order that. The same is true of every genius. No genius has an in order that; the Apostle has absolutely and paradoxically, an in order that.

There she was. Roarke stood in the office doorway, took a few enjoyable minutes to just watch her. She had such a sense of purpose, such a sense of focus on that purpose. It had appealed to him from the first instant he’d seen her, across a sea of people at a memorial for the dead. He found it compelling, the way those whiskey-colored eyes could go flat and cold as they were now. Cop’s eyes. His cop’s eyes. She’d taken off her jacket, tossed it over a chair, and still wore her weapon harness. Which meant she’d come in the door and straight up. Armed and dangerous, he thought. It was a look, a fact of her, that continually aroused him. And her tireless and unwavering dedication to the dead—to the truth, to what was right—had, and always would, amaze him. She’d set up her murder board, he noted, filling it with grisly photos, with reports, notes, names. And somewhere along the line in her day, she’d earned herself a black eye. He’d long since resigned himself to finding the woman he loved bruised and bloody at any given time. Since she didn’t look exhausted or ill, a shiner was a relatively minor event. She sensed him. He saw the moment she did, that slight change of body language. And when her eyes shifted from her comp screen to his, the cold focus became an easy, even casual warmth. That, he thought, just that was worth coming home for.

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language to speak in their own terms they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try and enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly- through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat...Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty.

We are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life–that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.

He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick—if “trick” was the right word—was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to

My monk had to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk. For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it. So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge.

Sonnet of Human Resources There is no blue collar, no white collar, just honor. And honor is defined by character not collar. There is no CEO, no janitor, just people. Person's worth lies, not in background, but behavior. Designation is reference to expertise, not existence. Respect is earned through rightful action, not label. Designation without humanity is resignation of humanity, For all labels without love cause nothing but trouble. The term human resources is a violation of human rights. For it designates people as possession of a company. Computers are resources, staplers are resources, but people, Aren't resources, but the soul of all company and society. I'm not saying, you oughta rephrase it all in a civilized way. But at the very least, it's high time with hierarchy we do away.

Although it is true that everyone orients himself in accordance with the data supplied by the outside world, we see every day that the data in themselves are only relatively decisive...One man resigns himself to circumstances because experience has shown him that nothing else is possible, another is convinced that though things have gone the same way a thousand times before, the thousand and first time will be different.

Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool, inflexible manner, his courage, and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt himself revered and admired. And Chief Inspector Heat, arrested within six paces of the anarchist nicknamed the Professor, gave a thought of regret to the world of thieves--sane, without morbid ideals, working by routine, respectful of constituted authorities, free from all taint of hate and despair.

is turning all life into a unified flow experience. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together—and each activity will “make sense” in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life. But isn’t it incredibly naive to expect life to have a coherent overall meaning? After all, at least since Nietzsche concluded that God was dead, philosophers and social scientists have been busy demonstrating that existence has no purpose, that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary. It is true that life has no meaning, if by that we mean a supreme goal built into the fabric of nature and human experience, a goal that is valid for every individual. But it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of what we call culture and civilization consists in efforts people have made, generally against overwhelming odds, to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants. It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying. From the point of view of an individual, it does not matter what the ultimate goal is—provided it is compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. The challenge might involve the desire to have the best beer-bottle collection in the neighborhood, the resolution to find a cure for cancer, or simply the biological imperative to have children who will survive and prosper. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life. In the past few years I have come to be quite well acquainted with several Muslim professionals—electronics engineers, pilots, businessmen, and teachers, mostly from Saudi Arabia and from the other Gulf states. In talking to them, I was struck with how relaxed most of them seemed to be even under strong pressure. “There is nothing to it,” those I asked about it told me, in different words, but with the same message: “We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.” Such implicit faith used to be widespread in our culture as well, but it is not easy to find it now. Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.

The goal of the Council on Foreign Relations is world government. Admiral Chester Ward, former Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Navy, was a CFR member for sixteen years before resigning in disgust. In 1975, he stated that the Council’s objective is “submergence of U.S. sovereignty into an all-powerful one-world government.” He also said: “This lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership.” “In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First.’”25

Misery drives human beings into the future, misery drives them into a distant past so that they thereby can demonstrate the relative happiness of the present or console with the thought that at one time others lived well. It is the drive to find happiness that prevents human beings from discovering the lesson of their day, resignation; since happiness is not yet there, it obviously must be on the way, they conclude, or must already have been there. Or it is already there by comparison with prior unhappiness, etc. The same thing that drives on each human being drives them all on: they use history in order to become happier in the future.

Our contact was based on a misunderstanding that could not fail to become apparent the moment my homage, instead of being addressed to the relatively superior being she believed herself to be, was diverted to some other woman of similar mediocrity and exuding the same unconscious charm. A misunderstanding so natural, and one that will always exist between a young dreamer and the society woman he elects, but one that disturbs him profoundly for as long as he remains ignorant of the nature of his imaginative bent and has not yet resigned himself to the inevitable disappointments he is bound to discover with people, as is the case with the theater, with travel, with love.

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly–through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet–when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all around.

Those who nowadays see inconveniences to living in this laboratory often come up against the incomprehension and disapproval of their peers. They are accused of opposing the technological society on which they are nonetheless dependent and the comforts of which they enjoy—even if this argument is losing credence as the effects of the ecological crisis become ever more direct and flagrant. This logic follows the same pattern as attempts to silence patients criticizing the medical system on the pretext that their health and sometimes their lives depend on it. We are thus to be neutralized by guilt and condemned to submission and resignation. Can we be held responsible for the society into which we were born and in relation to which our room for maneuver is inevitably limited? To use this as grounds to ban all critique of our society amounts to tying our hands in the face of disaster, hamstringing thought and, more broadly, stifling imagination, desire and the capacity to recall that things are not doomed to be as they currently are.

I’m talking to God here, be with ye as soon as we’re done,— Is Mason going to get angry and into a fight? Will he stand and announce, “This is none of God’s judgment,— to be offended as gravely by Calendar Reform as by Mortal Sin, requires a meanness of spirit quite out of the reach of any known Deity,— tho’ well within the resources of Stroud, it seems.” And walk out thro’ their stunn’d ranks to the Embrace of the Night, and never enter the place again? No.— He buys ev’ryone another Pint, instead, and resigns himself to seeking out his Family tomorrow,— tho’ sure Agents of Melancholy, they sooner or later feel regretful for it, whilst Regret is just the sort of Sentiment that regular life at The George depends on having no part of. The Landlord is kind and forthright, the Ale as good as any in Britain, the Defenestration of the Clothiers in ’56 has inscrib’d the place forever in Legend, and Good Eggs far outnumber Bad Hats,— yet so dismal have these late Hours in it been for Mason, as to make him actually look forward to meeting his Relations again.

As Schopenhauer writes in the second volume, commenting on the ending of the first: 'it is in keeping with this that, when my teaching reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative character, and so ends with a negation.' But Schopenhauer's point is that this is a relative nothing, not an absolute nothing: it is a nothing that might yet be something, if seen from a different perspective: 'Now it is precisely here that the mystic proceeds positively, and therefore, from this point, nothing is left but mysticism'. Mysticism: the knowledge of the incommunicable: the great foe of Enlightenment philosophers from Bayle to Kant. Surely, if mysticism begins where philosophy ends, Schopenhauer's point must be: so much the worse for mysticism. But while it is true that Schopenhauer sees mysticism and philosophy as incommensurable in principle, nevertheless, as Young points out, Schopenhauer evaluates mysticism positively. Not only do the last words of the first volume leave open a space for mystical knowledge by the relativity of nothingness - but in the second volume, Schopenhauer also points to the wide agreement of mystical experience across different cultures and traditions. Hence, against the common interpretations of Schopenhauer as nihilist or 'absolute pessimist', Young argues that such readings are 'insensitive to the intense theological preoccupation that permeates, particularly, Book IV'. According to Young, Schopenhauer's concept of resignation is not purely negative, but also oriented towards some darkly intuited positive element: an existence of another kind. When Schopenhauer says that the saintly ascetic achieves redemption, he is speaking of an other-wordly state, and that is why he opposes Stoic ataraxia, which, being a this-worldly solution, leads away from salavation, rather than towards it. In Young's view, therefore, not only does Schopenhauer accept a 'field of illuminism' or mysticism - but 'it is upon the veridicality of mystical insight into another, ecstatic world, a world relative to which this one is a mere "dream", that, for Schopenhauer, our only chance of "salvation" depends.

That is to say, believing that God writes books is bad enough, but because the cosmos is a perverse cornucopia, spouting endless tragedies and absurdities, the theist must go one step beyond even that foolish affirmation; she must cast aside all pretense of being a dignified, sentient rebel against the cosmic horrors, and perpetrate a bonus bit of nonsense: she must pretend to care about her manifestly fictional deity while actively ignoring most of what this deity is supposed to have miraculously penetrated the present world to tell her. Having resigned herself to the undead god’s tyranny, with no thought of resistance, the theist utterly abandons herself to the sway of mindless forces, heaping one absurdity upon another until the local process of complexification is complete: natural forces, including the biases and fallacies to which we’re prone,produce a fantasy world in the theist’s mind, a mental map that bears as little relation to natural reality as one cosmos would bear to another in the multiverse. The theist’s worldview, complete with anthropomorphisms, delusions, fallacies, and so forth, stands as an emergent level of reality, like scum floating to the surface which nevertheless boasts patterns of putrefaction that can be divined by an intrepid anthropologist.

The unhappiness of the bachelor, whether seeming or actual, is so easily guessed at by the world around him that he will curse his decision, at least if he has remained a bachelor because of the delight he takes in secrecy. He walks around with his coat buttoned, his hands in the upper pockets of his jacket, his arms akimbo, his hat pulled down over his eyes, a false smile that has become natural to him is supposed to shield his mouth as his glasses do his eyes, his trousers are tighter than seem proper for his thin legs. But everyone knows his condition, can detail his sufferings. A cold breeze breathes upon him from within and he gazes inward with the even sadder half of his double face. He moves incessantly, but with predictable regularity, from one apartment to another. The farther he moves away from the living, for whom he must still – and this is the worst mockery – work like a conscious slave who dare not express his consciousness, so much the smaller a space is considered sufficient for him. While it is death that must still strike down the others, though they may have spent all their lives in a sickbed – for even though they would have gone down by themselves long ago from their own weakness, they nevertheless hold fast to their loving, very healthy relatives by blood and marriage – he, this bachelor, still in the midst of life, apparently of his own free will resigns himself to an ever smaller space, and when he dies the coffin is exactly right for him.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.   They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.   So they show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.   I wonder where they get those tokens, Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?   Myself moving forward then and now and forever, Gathering and showing more always and with velocity, Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them, Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers, Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly terms.   A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears, Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.   His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him, His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and return.   I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion, Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them? Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

I’m afraid that your sister, Marissa Ferguson, was gleaned by Scythe Curie today at one fifteen p.m. I’m very sorry for your loss.” The man didn’t seem upset or shocked, merely resigned. “Is that all?” “Is that all? Didn’t you hear me? I just told you that your sister was gleaned today.” The man sighed. “That which comes can’t be avoided.” If she didn’t already dislike the Tonists, she certainly did now. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is that your people’s ‘holy’ line?” “It’s not a line; it’s just a simple truth we live by.” “Yeah, whatever you say. You’ll need to make arrangements for your sister’s body—because that’s coming and can’t be avoided either.” “But if I don’t step forward, won’t the Thunderhead provide a funeral?” “Don’t you care at all?” The man took a moment before answering. “Death by scythe is not a natural death. We Tonists do not acknowledge it.” Citra cleared her throat, biting back the verbal reaming she wanted to give him, and did her best to remain professional. “There’s one more thing. Although you didn’t live with her, you are her only documented relative. That entitles you to a year of immunity from gleaning.” “I don’t want immunity,” he said. “Why am I not surprised.” This was the first time she had ever encountered anyone who refused immunity. Even the most downhearted would kiss the ring. “You’ve done your job. You may go now,” Brother Ferguson said. There was only so long Citra could restrain her frustration. She couldn’t yell at the man. She couldn’t use her Bokator moves to kick him in the neck or take him down with an elbow slam. So she did the only thing she could do. She picked up the mallet and put all of her anger into a single, powerful strike at the tuning fork.

The one thing that seemed to be on our side, however, was the reality on the streets of Egypt. Day after day, the protests spread and Mubarak’s regime seemed to crumble around him. On February 11, I woke to the news that Mubarak had fled to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh and resigned. It was, it seemed, a happy ending. Jubilant crowds celebrated in the streets of Cairo. I drafted a statement for Obama that drew comparisons between what had just taken place and some of the iconic movements of the past several decades—Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesians upending a dictatorship, Indians marching nonviolently for independence. I went up to the Oval Office that morning to review the statement with Obama. “You should feel good about this,” he said. “I do,” I replied. “Though I’m not sure all of the principals do.” “You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak[…] “for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an “extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.” As Obama delivered a statement to a smattering of press, it seemed that history might at last be breaking in a positive direction in the Middle East. His tribute to the protests was unabashed. Yet our own government was still wired to defer to the Egyptian military, and ill equipped to support a transition to democracy once the president had spoken.

Why did you come here-that is, why did you agree to reconsider my proposal?” The question alarmed and startled her. Now that she’d seen him she had only the dimmest, possibly even erroneous recollection of having spoken to him at a ball. Moreover, she couldn’t tell him she was in danger of being cut off by her uncle, for that whole explanation was to humiliating to bear mentioning. “Did I do or say something during our brief meetings the year before last to mislead you, perhaps, into believing I might yearn for the city life?” “It’s hard to say,” Elizabeth said with absolute honesty. “Lady Cameron, do you even remember our meeting?” “Oh, yes, of course. Certainly,” Elizabeth replied, belatedly recalling a man who looked very like him being presented to her at Lady Markham’s. That was it! “We met at Lady Markham’s ball.” His gaze never left her face. “We met in the park.” “In the park?” Elizabeth repeated in sublime embarrassment. “You had stopped to admire the flowers, and the young gentleman who was your escort that day introduced us.” “I see,” Elizabeth replied, her gaze skating away from his. “Would you care to know what we discussed that day and the next day when I escorted you back to the park?” Curiosity and embarrassment warred, and curiosity won out. “Yes, I would.” “Fishing.” “F-fishing?” Elizabeth gasped. He nodded. “Within minutes after we were introduced I mentioned that I had not come to London for the Season, as you supposed, but that I was on my way to Scotland to do some fishing and was leaving London the very next day.” An awful feeling of foreboding crept over Elizabeth as something stirred in her memory. “We had a charming chat,” he continued. “You spoke enthusiastically of a particularly challenging trout you were once able to land.” Elizabeth’s face felt as hot as red coals as he continued, “We quite forgot the time and your poor escort as we shared fishing stories.” He was quiet, waiting, and when Elizabeth couldn’t endure the damning silence anymore she said uneasily, “Was there…more?” “Very little. I did not leave for Scotland the next day but stayed instead to call upon you. You abandoned the half-dozen young bucks who’d come to escort you to some sort of fancy soiree and chose instead to go for another impromptu walk in the park with me.” Elizabeth swallowed audibly, unable to meet his eyes. “Would you like to know what we talked about that day?” “No, I don’t think so.” He chucked but ignored her reply, “You professed to be somewhat weary of the social whirl and confessed to a longing to be in the country that day-which is why we went to the park. We had a charming time, I thought.” When he fell silent, Elizabeth forced herself to meet his gaze and say with resignation, “And we talked of fishing?” “No,” he said. “Of boar hunting.” Elizabeth closed her eyes in sublime shame. “You related an exciting tale of a wild board your father had shot long ago, and of how you watched the hunt-without permission-from the very tree below which the boar as ultimately felled. As I recall,” he finished kindly, “you told me that it was your impulsive cheer that revealed your hiding place to the hunters-and that caused you to be seriously reprimanded by your father.” Elizabeth saw the twinkle lighting his eyes, and suddenly they both laughed. “I remember your laugh, too,” he said, still smiling, “I thought it was the loveliest sound imaginable. So much so that between it and our delightful conversation I felt very much at ease in your company.” Realizing he’d just flattered her, he flushed, tugged at his neckcloth, and self-consciously looked away.

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian's permission to address you on a subject than which I have none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now referred. Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental qualities above indicated. It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages towards the completion of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union. Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment. To be accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts. In return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor than usual. But in this order of experience I am still young, and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary illumination of hope. In any case, I shall remain,     Yours with sincere devotion,      EDWARD CASAUBON

The cities of the Empire and the guilds supported the Emperor Ludwig in his conflict with the Pope, and they suffered severely under the Interdict. In 1332 a number of cities addressed a letter to the Archbishop of Treves. They declared that the Emperor Ludwig of all the princes of the world lived most according to the teaching of Christ, and that in faith, as well as in modest resignation, he shone as an example to others. “We shall at all times”, they said, “unto death’, hold to him in firm and unchangeable fidelity, springing from faith, attachment and sincere obedience to him as our true Emperor and natural lord. No sufferings, no changes, no circumstances of any kind will ever separate us from him.” They go on to illustrate the right relations between Church and State by the sun and moon, express the most painful regret that ambition of earthly honour had disturbed these relations, deny the Papal claim to be the only source of authority, and as “poor Christians” beg and pray that no further harm may be done to the Christian faith.

In our relations with God we can sometimes say all that He wants us to say in silence and repose. This, of course, is not a prayer for all souls, nor for all times. Yet, if we pause occasionally between our acts and just kneel before God in a state of sincere resignation to His will, it will often happen that we find it possible and profitable to remain in this disposition for a short while.

In Russia, a man knew to whom he was speaking: boyar or peasant. Unless, by taking orders, a moujik turned into a clerk, a man in Russia kept his station, and his son after him through the generations. With this nation of madmen, where were you? They laughed at the stake, and boasted of relatives hanged: if you had no kinsmen quartered that you knew of, it was because you were not a gentleman, they remarked. They might well go to war, the other ambassadors said with resignation, for no other reason than a sheer love of novelty. And the Queen claimed she was poor, but where in Russia would you find such ostentation in living: the palaces of Whitehall and Westminster, Nonesuch, Chelsea and Oatlands, Richmond and Greenwich. And the clothes…

Disappointingly, at precisely the point where church-related colleges and universities ought to display a countercultural communitarian impulse, they generally mirror the radically individualistic tendencies of the rest of American culture. Thus, they do not realize in any exceptional way the kind of peaceable polity described by St. Augustine: “a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.”5 Irrespective of their rhetoric, Christian colleges and universities in practice seldom if ever resemble anything like the commonwealth of which St. Augustine speaks, wherein all are “united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and by a community of interest.”6 To the contrary, on these matters church-related colleges and universities all too easily reflect the character of the wider culture and thus fail to embody imaginative, faithful alternatives in which community simpliciter, and Christian intellectual community in particular, are in evidence. The familiar results include hyperspecialization that is not only content with but also prides itself on interdisciplinary irrelevance and inaccessibility; fragmentation of the curriculum; faculty disinclined toward conversation about common educative aims and curricular priorities; and students confirmed in their untutored, careerist, and consumerist impulses. In short, Christian educational institutions exhibit a failure to acknowledge and cherish our mutual interdependence, an aversion toward the hard work of finding common ground and arguing contested points, and resignation to lives and ideas torn asunder from the joys of serving a shared, mutually enriching good.

In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H.R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable. In Haldeman’s words, “There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events...Just as Eisenhower linked up the nation's cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communication so you wouldn't have to go there." One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects. Fortunately the Watergate scandal intervened, and Nixon was forced to resign before "the Wired Nation" could be hooked up.

We are referring to their ability to introspect and communicate, to read the moods of others, to relate with patience, charity and imagination to the less edifying moments of those around them. The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accomdodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.

No phrases are more commonly used in American English (and culture) than, ‘it is what it is,’ and ‘do what you gotta do!’ The first phrase indicates the acceptance of or resignation to a situation that cannot be changed. The second phrase is a way to say that you need to do what you need to do to take care of your problems. Yet, it is also well known in American culture that, no matter what, you must always ‘play it safe!’ This is precisely the problem we are dealing with—the fact that most people are suffering but also are advised to play it safe. Yet, are we safe? If we consider the mental, intellectual, and cultural costs that come with ‘playing it safe’, is anyone ever safe?

would never, ever say it to their face—as mentioned, we are way above the Mommy Wars. But still. We think they have it easier. Every day while we are living our lives of servitude, they go to a place, in real clothes, where they are paid to sit comfortably among adults and think entire, complete, punctuated thoughts. Often this place has free coffee round the clock and cake on their birthdays. Yes, work is work, and no, not every day is a joyfest. But here is what I did not realize when I handed in my resignation at the community college and became a professional mom: if you work outside the home, for eight or so back-to-back hours every weekday, you wipe zero butts that do not belong to you. And to be clear, butt wiping is pretty much the easiest part of stay-at-home-mom work. I would gladly wipe ten more butts per day if it did away with even just the raisin-related tantrums. If it meant I didn’t have to stand outside in every kind of weather saying, “I see! I’m watching!” while one of a succession of toddlers does absolutely nothing of interest for the tenth time in a row. If you have a full-time job outside the home, that means that for eight solid hours every day, no one asks you to go down a wet slide or starts crying

It turned out that Kerry’s opposition to the Magnitsky Act had nothing to do with whether he thought it was good or bad policy. The rumor in Washington was that John Kerry was blocking the bill for one simple reason: he wanted to be secretary of state after Hillary Clinton resigned. According to the story making the rounds, one of the conditions for his getting the job was to make sure that the Magnitsky Act never saw the light of day at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

At the time, it looked like either a wonderfully gutsy or an extremely foolhardy move, depending on your viewpoint. Not only was Erickson turning his back on a fortune, but he was proposing that Clif Bar remain independent and continue to operate as a relatively small private company in a marketplace filled with huge conglomerates out to get it. The investment bankers assured him that the company would be crushed in short order. So did the venture capitalists he spoke to. His partner agreed, and the risk of losing everything she’d worked for frightened her. Shortly thereafter, she resigned from the company and insisted that Erickson cash her out. (She could insist because, as a 50-percent owner, she could have shut the company down if her demands weren’t met. A less-than-50-percent owner does not have as much leverage.) They eventually settled on a deal whereby he would pay her $65 million over five years. He had $10,000 in his bank account at the time.

Bernard Law, the former cardinal of Boston, mistaking (or maybe understanding too well) the degree of authority bestowed on him by the signifier of his patronymic, denounced in 1996 proposed legislation giving health care benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees. He did so by proclaiming, in a noteworthy instance of piety in the sky, that bestowing such access to health care would profoundly diminish the marital bond. "Society," he opined, "has a special interest in the protection, care and upbringing of children. Because marriage remains the principal, and the best, framework for the nurture, education and socialization of children, the state has a special interest in marriage." With this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become, Law lent his voice to the mortifying mantra of a communal jouissance that depends on the fetishization of the Child at the expense of whatever such fetishization must inescapably queer. Some seven years later, after Law had resigned for his failure to protect Catholic children from sexual assault by pedophile priests, Pope John Paul II returned to this theme, condemning state-recognized same-sex unions as parodic versions of authentic families, "based on individual egoism" rather than genuine love. Justifying that condemnation, he observed, "Such a 'caricature' has no future and cannot give future to any society." Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives, not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order's coherence and integrity, but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop.

Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical. They were a dumber, sadder, fatter, more resignedly suffering breed. A Diseased underclass that he really, really liked to keep away from.

On June 17, 2017, the President called McGahn at home and directed him to call the Acting Attorney General and say that the Special Counsel had conflicts of interest and must be removed. McGahn did not carry out the direction, however, deciding that he would resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre.

The truth is that in order for my freedom not to risk coming to grief against the obstacle which its very engagement has raised, in order that it might still pursue its movement in the face of the failure, it must, by giving itself a particular content, aim by means of it at an end which is nothing else but precisely the free movement of existence. Popular opinion is quite right in admiring a man who, having been ruined or having suffered an accident, knows how to gain the upper hand, that is, renew his engagement in the world, thereby strongly asserting the independence of freedom in relation to thing. Thus, when the sick Van Gogh calmly accepted the prospect of a future in which he would be unable to paint any more, there was no sterile resignation. For him painting was a personal way of life and of communication with others which in another form could be continued even in an asylum. The past will be integrated and freedom will be confirmed in a renunciation of this kind. It will be lived in both heartbreak and joy. In heartbreak, because the project is then robbed of its particularity — it sacrifices its flesh and blood. But in joy, since at the moment one releases his hold, he again finds his hands free and ready to stretch out toward a new future. But this act of passing beyond is conceivable only if what the content has in view is not to bar up the future, but, on the contrary, to plan new possibilities. This brings us back by another route to what we had already indicated. My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.

On February 13, 2017, the President asked Flynn to resign. The following day, the President had a one-on-one conversation with Comey in which he said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.

Once the relation of science and metaphysics with “intellectual intuition” is misunderstood, Kant has no difficulty in showing that our science is entirely relative and our metaphysics wholly artificial. Because he strained the independence of the understanding in both cases, because he relieved metaphysics and science of the “intellectual intuition” which gave them their inner weight, science with its relations presents to him only an outer wrapping of form, and metaphysics with its things, an outer wrapping of matter. Is it surprising, then, that the first shows him only frameworks within frameworks, and the second phantoms pursuing phantoms? He struck our science and metaphysics such rude blows that they have not yet entirely recovered from their shock. Our mind would willingly resign itself to see in science a wholly relative knowledge and in metaphysics an empty speculation. It seems to us even today that Kantian criticism applies to all metaphysics and to all science. In reality it applies especially to the philosophy of the ancients, as well as to the form—still ancient—that the moderns have given most often to their thought. It is valid against a metaphysics which claims to give us a unique and ready-made system of things, against a science which would be a unique system of relations, finally against a science and a metaphysics which present themselves with the architectural simplicity of the Platonic theory of Ideas, or of a Greek temple. If metaphysics claims to be made up of concepts we possessed prior to it, if it consists in an ingenious arrangement of pre-existing ideas which we utilize like the materials of construction for a building, in short, if it is something other than the constant dilation of our mind, the constantly renewed effort to go beyond our actual ideas and perhaps our simple logic as well, it is too evident that it becomes artificial like all works of pure understanding. And if science is wholly the work of analysis or of conceptual representation, if experience is only to serve as the verification of “clear ideas,” if instead of starting from multiple and varied intuitions inserted into the movement proper to each reality but not always fitting into one another, it claims to be an immense mathematics, a single system of relations which imprisons the totality of the real in a mesh prepared for it, it becomes a knowledge purely relative to the human understanding. A close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason will show that for Kant this kind of universal mathematics is science, and this barely modified Platonism, metaphysics. To tell the truth, the dream of a universal mathematics is itself only a survival of Platonism. Universal mathematics is what the world of Ideas becomes when one assumes that the Idea consists in a relation or a law, and no longer in a thing.

Dear Kathleen, I have just returned from the Lufton farm after inquiring about the welfare of their newest resident. Please convey to all concerned parties that Hamlet is thoroughly content with his pen, which, I might add, has been constructed to the highest porcine standards. He seems enthused about keeping company with his own harem of sows. I would venture to say that a pig of simple pleasures could ask for nothing more. All other news from the estate pertains to drainage trenches and plumbing mishaps, none of it agreeable to relate I am anxious to know how you are taking the engagement between Helen and Winterborne. In the spirit of brotherly concern, I beg you to write soon, at least to tell me if murder is being planned. Affectionately yours, West Kathleen took up a pen to reply, reflecting that she missed West more than she would have guessed. How strange it was that the drunken young rake who had come to Eversby Priory all those months ago should have become such a steadying presence in her life. Dear West, Upon Mr. Winterborne’s proposal to Helen last week I will confess to initial thoughts of homicide. However, I realized that if I did away with Winterborne, I would also have to dispatch your brother and that wouldn’t do. One murder may be justifiable in these circumstances, but two would be self-indulgent. Helen is quiet and withdrawn, which is not what one expects of a girl who has just become engaged. It is obvious that she loathes the engagement ring, but she refuses to ask Winterborne to change it. Yesterday Winterborne decided to undertake all the planning and expenses of the wedding so she’ll have no say in that either. Winterborne dominates without even seeming to be aware of it. He’s like a great tree that casts a shade in which smaller trees can’t thrive. Regardless, the wedding seems inevitable. I’m resigned to the situation. At least, I’m trying to be. Your brotherly concern is much appreciated and returned with sisterly affection. Ever yours, Kathleen

Though his impudence and inconstancy strained his relations with family and colleagues, Dostoevsky appears almost to have cultivated these stresses as major sources of his fiction, most directly of the novel Poor Folk, the first draft of which he completed about a year after resigning his commission. The novel, like almost all of Dostoevsky’s writing, is a study of the forces that constrain human freedom, both exterior forces such as money and power, and interior ones like illness and sexual desire. Moreover Dostoevsky immediately set about questioning the very distinction between the two realms, showing how subjective experience becomes objectified in material objects of desire and fear, and vice versa. However, like most of Dostoevsky’s fiction, Poor Folk also revealed his belief in the power of fiction to redeem the world by manifesting an imaginative realm in which freedom is – or, at least, can be – sovereign.

On August 29, I flew from Kiev to Moldova and Belarus, continuing my travels in the former republics of the USSR. I wanted to show Russia we had a sustained focus on its periphery and were not content simply to leave these struggling states to contend with Moscow alone. Had I stayed in the White House longer, I had more substantive plans for US relations with the former Soviet states, but that was not to be. Particularly in Minsk, despite Alexander Lukashenko’s less-than-stellar human-rights record, I wanted to prove the US would not simply watch Belarus be reabsorbed by Russia, which Putin seemed to be seriously considering. One aspect of my strategy was a meeting the Poles arranged in Warsaw on Saturday, August 31, among the national security advisors of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States. Let the Kremlin think about that one for a while. I obviously had much more in mind than just having additional meetings, but this was one that would signal other former Soviet republics that neither we nor they had to be passive when faced with Russian belligerence or threats to their internal governance. There was plenty we could all do diplomatically as well as militarily. After I resigned, the Administration and others seemed to be moving in a similar direction.18

Tammany backed off, and Copeland embarked on a public relations campaign to repair the damage to himself and his “organization,” relying on patriotism to stifle criticism. By late summer the frenzy had died down, but what had been the best public health department in the world was demoralized. The internationally respected director of the Bureau of Public Health Education resigned. The deputy commissioner of health, in office twenty years, resigned, and the mayor replaced him with his personal physician.