Reversal Of Fortune Quotes

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox -- the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death... I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself... I did not know who she was, the one waiting for me to start moving toward her. I was curious about her, all the same. I was eager to meet her.

But though I knew just how lucky I was, still it was impossible to feel happy or even grateful for my good fortune. It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.

Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

He needed time to adjust to real life, where heroes and villains could not be told apart by their looks or their accents, where there were no last minute reversals of fortune.

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

There is no cancer, no sickness, no sin, no reversal of fortunes, no curse, no heartache - nothing - that's greater than Jesus. Jesus heals. Jesus restores. Jesus brings life.

Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortune takes back. It depends on us alone. One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labor, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves. LUCA AND FRANCESCO CAVALLI-SFORZA

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness. After all, there are many ways to die—peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead—one either is or isn’t. The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.

One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.

A well constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue, rather than double as some maintain. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad.

I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses, I must endeavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

It’s not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it’s any comfort, the dark wood isn’t just that. It’s also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

When elderly Cypriot women wish ill on someone, they don't ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don't pray for lightning bolts, unforseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say, May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.

On the surface,” he told me, “it appears that the letter outlines what we already know: My grandfather died and left everything to the devil he didn’t know, thereby reversing the fortune of many. Why? Because power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But I've never met anybody whose life has taken a sudden turn for the worse who thought a reversal of fortune was just what they had coming to them.

In my expectation that good fortune will lead inextricably to its reversal, I should note that I don't think I'm less deserving of happiness than anyone else; it is that in an unequal world, nobody deserves the privileges I enjoy.

He adopts a silver-muzzled sixty-five-pound brindle dog named Luther, walks him through the front door of the house, dumps a can of beef and barley stew into a bowl, and watches Luther engulf it. Then the dog sniffs around his surroundings as though in disbelief at his reversal of fortune.

My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions.

Authority: I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly. And therefore, like a woman, she is always a friend to the young, because they are less cautious, fiercer, and master her with greater audacity. (Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527) REVERSAL Boldness should never be the strategy behind all of your actions.

All that had seemed impossible, too late, a dream, had suddenly become possible, even natural and inevitable.

Looking for a weird old guy who could grant wishes was pathetic. It was sad and stupid.

The devil scowled for a moment, then bowed shallowly. “Well done, Nicole. Count on seeing me again soon.

Taking part in your own creation is as simple as changing your mind. The way you think literally creates your everyday reality. Obsessive and negative thinking fosters a negative or even hostile lifestyle. Positive and constructive thoughts create happiness and contentment in the same manor. The fortunate thing for us is that the frequency wave of a positive thought far exceeds that of a negative one, so even if we suffer through a bout of depression or anger, a few positive thoughts can easily reverse the damage we have created in ourselves

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions.

Stop looking for signs. Signs follow; they do not precede. Begin to reverse the statement, "Seeing is believing," to "Believing is seeing." Start now to believe, not with the wavering confidence based on deceptive external evidence but with an undaunted confidence based on the immutable law that you can be that which you desire to be. You will find that you are not a victim of fate but a victim of faith (your own).

It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and father of mischief. It has been the ruin of many worthy families, the loss of many a man’s honor, and the cause of suicide. To all those who enter the list, it is equally fascinating. The successful gamester pushes his good fortune till it is overtaken by a reverse. The losing gamester, in hopes of retrieving past misfortunes, goes on from bad to worse.”37 Washington

[...] pain really does negate the whole concept of time. Fortunately, the reverse also seems to be true: given time, even the most horrible pain loses its immediacy, and you can no longer remember exactly how it felt.

One of Jesus’s characteristic teachings is that there will be a massive reversal of fortunes when the end comes. Those who are rich and powerful now will be humbled then; those who are lowly and oppressed now will then be exalted. The apocalyptic logic of this view is clear: it is only by siding with the forces of evil that people in power have succeeded in this life; and by siding with God other people have been persecuted and rendered powerless.

When the gods intend to make a man pay for his crimes, they generally allow him to enjoy moments of success and a long period of impunity, so that he may feel his reverse of fortune, when it eventually comes, all the more keenly.

Fortunately, ideas already exist for how to achieve every aspect of deconsumer society that appears in this book. Lifespan labeling can encourage product durability: new tax regimes and regulations can favour repair over disposability, job-sharing programs and shorter work days or work weeks can keep people employed in a slower, smaller economy. Redistribution of wealth can reverse income inequality, or prevent it from worsening in a lower-consuming world.

Never did I learn to think in terms of The Niggers. When I grew up, and I did grow up with black people, they were Calpurnia, Zeebo the garbage collector, Tom the yard man, and whatever else their names were. There were hundreds of Negroes surrounding me, they were the hands in the fields, who chopped the cotton, who worked the roads, who sawed the lumber to make our houses. They were poor, they were diseased and dirty, some were lazy and shiftless but never in my life was I given the idea that I should despise one, should fear one, should be discourteous to one, or think that I could mistreat one and get away with it.They as a people did not enter my world, nor did I enter theirs: when I went hunting I did not trespass on a Negro's land, not because it was a Negro's, but because I was not supposed to trespass on anybody's land. I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised. That is the way I was raised, by a black woman and a white man.

When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes, it was really something, you will see your friends nod in recognition.

And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done: the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions.

The verse is about slippage, fall, reversal of fortune, the casting down of the great by the great: around the throne thunder rolls, circa regna tonat; even as he sits under his canopy of estate, the king hears it, he feels it shudder in the stone flags, he feels its reverberation in the bone. He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame, they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; tills they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey's dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.

Fortunately, suppressing an impulse doesn’t always have to decrease your dopamine—it can actually feel good. The key is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pursuing long-term goals and has the ability to modulate dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. So suppressing an impulse can be rewarding, as long as it’s in service of your larger values.

How, then, did it happen that this same France forty years later came to be crushed on the battlefield by a nation it outnumbered fivefold? Why should its noblemen be split up into factions, its bourgeoisie in revolt, its people overwhelmed by excessive taxation, its provinces lawless and plagued by roving gangs engaged in pillaging and crime, all authority flouted, the currency weakened, trade at a standstill, and poverty and violence rife everywhere? Why this collapse? What caused this reversal of fortune? It was mediocrity. The mediocrity of just a few kings, their vanity and self-importance, their frivolousness in the conduct of their affairs, their inability to attract talented advisors, their nonchalance, their presumptuousness, their failure to draw up grand designs or even to follow those already conceived.

For clearly if we were to keep pace with his fortunes, we should often call the same man happy and again wretched, making the happy man out to be chameleon and insecurely based. Or is this keeping pace with his fortunes quite wrong? Success or failure in life does not depend on these, but human life, as we said, needs these as mere additions, while virtuous activities or their opposites are what constitute happiness or the reverse.

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.

now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done: the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions.

Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another. These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature’s; reversals, after all, are the means by which nature regulates this visible realm of hers: clear skies follow cloudy; after the calm comes the storm; the winds take turns to blow; day succeeds night; while part of the heavens is in the ascendant, another is sinking. It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.

AUTHOR’S NOTE Dear reader: This story was inspired by an event that happened when I was eight years old. At the time, I was living in upstate New York. It was winter, and my dad and his best friend, “Uncle Bob,” decided to take my older brother, me, and Uncle Bob’s two boys for a hike in the Adirondacks. When we left that morning, the weather was crisp and clear, but somewhere near the top of the trail, the temperature dropped abruptly, the sky opened, and we found ourselves caught in a torrential, freezing blizzard. My dad and Uncle Bob were worried we wouldn’t make it down. We weren’t dressed for that kind of cold, and we were hours from the base. Using a rock, Uncle Bob broke the window of an abandoned hunting cabin to get us out of the storm. My dad volunteered to run down for help, leaving my brother Jeff and me to wait with Uncle Bob and his boys. My recollection of the hours we spent waiting for help to arrive is somewhat vague except for my visceral memory of the cold: my body shivering uncontrollably and my mind unable to think straight. The four of us kids sat on a wooden bench that stretched the length of the small cabin, and Uncle Bob knelt on the floor in front of us. I remember his boys being scared and crying and Uncle Bob talking a lot, telling them it was going to be okay and that “Uncle Jerry” would be back soon. As he soothed their fear, he moved back and forth between them, removing their gloves and boots and rubbing each of their hands and feet in turn. Jeff and I sat beside them, silent. I took my cue from my brother. He didn’t complain, so neither did I. Perhaps this is why Uncle Bob never thought to rub our fingers and toes. Perhaps he didn’t realize we, too, were suffering. It’s a generous view, one that as an adult with children of my own I have a hard time accepting. Had the situation been reversed, my dad never would have ignored Uncle Bob’s sons. He might even have tended to them more than he did his own kids, knowing how scared they would have been being there without their parents. Near dusk, a rescue jeep arrived, and we were shuttled down the mountain to waiting paramedics. Uncle Bob’s boys were fine—cold and exhausted, hungry and thirsty, but otherwise unharmed. I was diagnosed with frostnip on my fingers, which it turned out was not so bad. It hurt as my hands were warmed back to life, but as soon as the circulation was restored, I was fine. Jeff, on the other hand, had first-degree frostbite. His gloves needed to be cut from his fingers, and the skin beneath was chafed, white, and blistered. It was horrible to see, and I remember thinking how much it must have hurt, the damage so much worse than my own. No one, including my parents, ever asked Jeff or me what happened in the cabin or questioned why we were injured and Uncle Bob’s boys were not, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Karen continued to be my parents’ best friends. This past winter, I went skiing with my two children, and as we rode the chairlift, my memory of that day returned. I was struck by how callous and uncaring Uncle Bob, a man I’d known my whole life and who I believed loved us, had been and also how unashamed he was after. I remember him laughing with the sheriff, like the whole thing was this great big adventure that had fortunately turned out okay. I think he even viewed himself as sort of a hero, boasting about how he’d broken the window and about his smart thinking to lead us to the cabin in the first place. When he got home, he probably told Karen about rubbing their sons’ hands and feet and about how he’d consoled them and never let them get scared. I looked at my own children beside me, and a shudder ran down my spine as I thought about all the times I had entrusted them to other people in the same way my dad had entrusted us to Uncle Bob, counting on the same naive presumption that a tacit agreement existed for my children to be cared for equally to their own.

In many ways, we can't help but experience our lives as story... we feel as if we're the hero of the steadily unfolding plot of our lives, one that's complete with allies, villains, sudden reversals of fortune, and difficult quests for happiness and prizes. Our tribal brains cast haloes around our friends and plant horns on the heads of our enemies. Our episodic memory means we experiences our lives as a sequence of scenes... We're constantly moving forward, pursuing our goals, on an active quest to make our lives, and perhaps the lives of others, somehow better. To have a self is to feel as if we are, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, the invisible actor at the center of the world.

At last, he began to discourse of fortune and human affairs. "Is it meet," said he, "for him that knows he is but man, in his greatest prosperity to pride himself, and be exalted at the conquest of a city, nation, or kingdom, and not rather well to weigh this change of fortune, in which all warriors may see an example of their common frailty, and learn a lesson that there is nothing durable or constant? For what time can men select to think themselves secure, when that of victory itself forces us more than any to dread our own fortune? and a very little consideration on the law of things, and how all are hurried round, and each man's station changed, will introduce sadness in the midst of the greatest joy. Or can you, when you see before your eyes the succession of Alexander himself, who arrived at the height of power and ruled the greatest empire, in the short space of an hour trodden underfoot- when you behold a king, that was but even now surrounded with so numerous an army, receiving nourishment to support his life from the hands of his conquerors- can you, I say, believe there is any certainty in what we now possess whilst there is such a thing as chance? No, young men, cast off that vain pride and empty boast of victory; sit down with humility, looking always for what is yet to come, and the possible future reverses which the divine displeasure may eventually make the end of our present happiness.

In comparison, young unmarried women in America were fortunate: They had a certain measure of sexual freedom. Eighteenth-century parents allowed their daughters to spend tie with suitors unsupervised, and courting couples openly engaged in "bundling," the practice of sleeping together without undressing, in the girls' homes. (Theoretically, that is, they were sleeping together without undressing: in fact, premarital pregnancy boomed during the period of 1750 to 1780, when bundling was nearly universal.) But by the turn of the century, in a complete reversal of previous beliefs about women's sexuality, the idea took hold that only men were carnal creatures; women were thought to be passionless and therefore morally superior.

He is our cousin, cousin; but 'tis doubt, When time shall call him home from banishment, Whether our kinsman come to see his friends. Ourself, and Bushy, Bagot here, and Green, Observ'd his courtship to the common people; How he did seem to dive into their hearts With humble and familiar courtesy; What reverence he did throw away on slaves, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles And patient underbearing of his fortune, As 'twere to banish their affects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench; A brace of draymen bid God speed him well And had the tribute of his supple knee, With 'Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends'; As were our England in reversion his, And he our subjects' next degree in hope.

The acquittal of Clinton, and the forgiving by implication of his abuses of public power and private resources, has placed future crooked presidents in a strong position. They will no longer be troubled by the independent counsel statute. They will, if they are fortunate, be able to employ “the popularity defense” that was rehearsed by Ronald Reagan and brought to a dull polish by Clinton. They will be able to resort to “the privacy defense” also, especially if they are inventive enough to include, among their abuses, the abuse of the opposite sex. And they will only be impeachable by their own congressional supporters, since criticism from across the aisle will be automatically subjected to reverse impeachment as “partisan.” This is the tawdry legacy of a sub-Camelot court, where unchecked greed, thuggery, and egotism were allowed to operate just above the law, and well beneath contempt.

Gibbon and Hume, the great British historians, who were contemporaries of Franklin, express in their autobiographies the same feeling about the propriety of just self-praise. And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions. The notes one of my uncles (who had the same kind of curiosity in collecting family anecdotes) once put into my hands, furnished me with several particulars relating to our ancestors. From these notes I learned that the family had lived in the same village, Ecton, in Northamptonshire, [5] for three

I would note how much this universal desire for reputation, honors, and preferences, which consumes us all, exercises and compares talents and strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions, and—by making all men competitors, rivals, or rather, enemies—how many reverses, successes, and catastrophes of every type it daily causes this ardor to be talked about, this frenzy to distinguish ourselves that almost always keeps us outside ourselves, to which we owe what is best and worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers—that is, a multitude of bad things as against a small number of good ones. Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of glory and fortune while the crowd grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value the things they enjoy only to the extend that the latter are deprived of them, and that, without any change in their status, they would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable.

Because of the way our brains function, our sense of ‘me’ naturally runs in narrative mode: we feel as if we’re the hero of the steadily unfolding plot of our lives, one that’s complete with allies, villains, sudden reversals of fortune, and difficult quests for happiness and prizes. Our tribal brains cast haloes around our friends and plant horns on the heads of our enemies. Our ‘episodic memory’ means we experience our lives as a sequence of scenes – a simplistic chain of cause and effect. Our ‘autobiographical memory’ helps imbue these scenes with subtextual themes and moral lessons. We’re constantly moving forward, pursuing our goals, on an active quest to make our lives, and perhaps the lives of others, somehow better. And our biased brains ensure that the ‘invisible actor’ that is us seems like a good person – someone morally decent whose values and opinions are usually correct. The healthy, happy brain runs a gamut of sly tricks in order to help us feel this way. It ensures we’re often over-generous with our estimation of ourselves, imagining we’re better looking, kinder, wiser, more intelligent, have better judgement, are less prejudiced and more effective in our personal and working lives than is actually true.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” whatever else it might be, seems to be an investigation into the possibility of durational being, which Bergson had described as “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” The succession that Bergson opposes to vitality is the realm in which the morbid Prufrock tries to imagine speaking Andrew Marvell’s line, “Now let us sport us while we may,” but then falls back on his indecision, his failure to pose his overwhelming question, and his inability to sing his love. Prufrock’s problems are shown to be symptoms of the form of time in which desire for youth runs defiantly against the remorselessness of aging, snapping the present in two. The “silent seas” that might bring relief from currents and countercurrents of time turn out to be like the troubling one that figures in Hamlet’s overwhelming question: “To be or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.” Prufrock understands but is unable to admit the ontological force of the question: the “whips and scorns of time” that threaten to reverse all his “decisions and revisions” make him wish to be merely “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” That synecdochic figure is as much an anachronous peripeteia for Prufrock as it is for Polonius when Hamlet taunts him: “you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backwards.

New reflections developed out of Israel’s new social circumstances as well as its new political situation on the international stage from the seventh century on. The loss of family patrimonies due to economic stress and foreign incursions contribute to the demise of the model of the family for understanding divinity. With the rise of the individual along with the family as significant units of social identity (Deut. 24:16; Jer. 31:29-30; Ezekiel 18; cf. 33:12-20) came the corresponding notion on the divine level, namely of a single god responsible for the cosmos. Judah’s reduced status on the world scene also required new thinking about divinity. Like Marduk, Yahweh became an “empire-god,” the god of all the nations but in a way that no longer closely tied the political fortunes of Judah to the status of this god. With the old order of divine king and his human, royal representation on earth reversed, Yahweh stands alone in the divine realm, with all the other gods as nothing. In short, the old head-god of monarchic Israel became the Godhead of the universe.

in 2011 Kaplan’s fortunes were reversed by a new slate of regulations initiated by the Obama administration and approved by Congress that impacted the for-profit education sector, where Kaplan was a leader. In the third quarter of the year, Kaplan’s revenues tumbled 79 percent, as did its reputation.

The grass on your front lawn is a perfect example. Grass contains several vitamins and minerals, but they are largely inaccessible to humans because of grass’s cellulose content. Cellulose is a fiber that forms the walls of cells in most green plants. Ruminants, such as cows and sheep, have a specialized compartment in the stomach called a rumen; it produces an enzyme that breaks down cellulose, allowing the nutrients in the grass to be absorbed. Ruminants also have other chambers in their stomachs to help them assimilate the nutrients from grass. Humans don’t have rumens, multiple stomach chambers, or the enzymes to break down cellulose, so we can’t extract any nutrients from grass if we eat it. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem: rather than eating the grass, humans can let animals do the hard work of assimilating the nutrients from grass, and then we can eat the animals.

Nuts and seeds were third on the nutrient-density scale, with about one-third the score of organ meats. However, most nuts and seeds contain phytates, antinutrients that reduce the bioavailability of some of the minerals nuts and seeds contain. Fortunately, soaking nuts overnight and either dehydrating them (with a food dehydrator) or roasting them at low temperatures (150 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit) in an oven for four to eight hours breaks down much of this phytic acid and improves bioavailability. These methods also make nuts easier to digest, which is of particular benefit for those with sensitive digestive systems.

The situation was vastly different way back in 1968-69. The politicians and the bureaucrats hadn’t yet found the open sesame mantra into the national treasury. Most of them depended on the lowly SIB representatives for monetary help, tactical support and for building bridges with the political bosses and the top bureaucrats in Delhi. The situation has now reversed. The local political bosses like their counterparts in Delhi and elsewhere in India, have found the open sesame keys and are in a position to shame some of the millionaire barons of industry. Now, I understand, they are not required to pamper the local SIB station chief. They can shop around in Delhi, right from the top political to the chick bureaucratic shopping mall and spend as much as they like. They arrive in Delhi with suitcases and go back with political support and plan and non-plan budgetary grants and aids. Most of these allocations, even a blind person can perceive, travel straight to the private coffers of the adventurers and fortune hunters. That’s how the development activities are implemented in India to remove poverty and to bring the people up to civilised standard of living!

It would have been so easy from the beginning if she had thought of it in complete reversal. Faith loves.

A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past.

Fortunately, there may be an even better tool than BMI that we can use to gauge the health risks of body fat. It’s called Waist-to-Height Ratio, or WHtR.120 Instead of a scale, grab a simple measuring tape. Stand up straight and take a deep breath, exhale, and let it all hang out. The circumference of your belly (halfway between the top of your hip bones and the bottom of your rib cage) should be half your height—ideally, less. If that measurement is more than half your height, it’s time to start eating healthier and exercising more regardless of your weight.

Theirs was a marriage founded on love… He loved her dowry, and she loved his status as a gentleman.

family noble, my parents rich, my misfortune so great that my parents must have wept and my family grieved over it without being able by their wealth to lighten it; for the gifts of fortune can do little to relieve reverses sent by Heaven.

but last night I felt strangely drawn to Mr Collins.

being told that he was indeed a changeling and was being cast aside,

But the more he considered the position of the Darcys, the more he came to an, albeit grudging, understanding.

Mr Hemmings had made Robert see that Mr Darcy and Lady Anne had been exceedingly generous by raising him the way they did and even providing him with funds for his future.

William, who had quietly approached the two women he loved,

William, as the slightly older son, is the heir to Pemberley I think that it is fair to present you to society as my adopted younger son.

except for Mr and Mrs Hurst

Neither noticed Jane and Bingley who were standing up with them.

While she was grateful to Mr Bingley, who had helped Darcy pass his courses at Cambridge,

while Caroline, as his hostess, had been assigned the mistress’ suite.

chapter with a quotation from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, but we could just as easily have quoted Buddha (“Our life is the creation of our mind”)2 or Shakespeare (“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”)3 or Milton (“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”).4 Or we could have told you the story of Boethius, awaiting execution in the year 524. Boethius reached the pinnacle of success in the late Roman world—he had been a senator and scholar who held many high offices—but he crossed the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric. In The Consolation of Philosophy, written in his jail cell, he describes his (imaginary) encounter with “Lady Philosophy,” who visits him one night and conducts what is essentially a session of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). She chides him gently for his moping, fearfulness, and bitterness at his reversal of fortune, and then she helps him to reframe his thinking and shut off his negative emotions. She helps him see that fortune is fickle and he should be grateful that he enjoyed it for so long. She guides him to reflect on the fact that his wife, children, and father are all still alive and well, and each one is dearer to him than his own life. Each exercise helps him see his situation in a new light; each one weakens the grip of his emotions and prepares him to accept Lady Philosophy’s ultimate lesson: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”5

leader Gennady Zyuganov, who looked likely to defeat Yeltsin, threatened to reverse privatizations that constituted the basis of the oligarchs’ fortunes. “If Zyuganov wins the Russian presidency . . . he will undo several years of privatization and this will lead to bloodshed and all-out civil war,” thundered longtime Yeltsin aide Anatoly Chubais in 1996.39 Chubais convinced the oligarchs to set aside their disputes and mobilize against the Communists. They poured millions into Yeltsin’s campaign and—to everyone’s surprise—Yeltsin won a second term.

One poll in July 2003 found that 88 percent of Russians believed that all large fortunes were accumulated illegally, while 77 percent wanted privatization results fully or partially reversed, and 57 percent supported criminal investigations against oligarchs.

Love. Anaïs Nin called anxiety “love’s greatest killer.” But fortunately, the reverse is also true. Love is anxiety’s greatest killer.

Dissipation leads to poverty, which cannot be patiently borne by those who have lived on the vain applause of others, on account of outward advantages; these were the things they imagined of most consequence, and of course they are tormented with false shame, when by a reverse of fortune they are deprived by them.

You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders—there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions—there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it up—and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own. “You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder—the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live. But their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself. “You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’—may the God you invented forgive you!—they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

When Fortune interviewed Collins in 2000, he was already starting to rethink the idea. “If in fact there’s a reverse takeover, with the McDonnell ethos permeating Boeing, then Boeing is doomed to mediocrity,” he said. “There’s one thing that made Boeing really great all the way along. They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company. If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company.

His chest heaved. “I’m tired of trying to be the perfect, considerate husband to you, Emmeline, so you’re just going to get the one you’ve got. Faulty, far from perfect, and frequently wrong.

Above all else, prepare yourself, for at the end of these two weeks I will return, and you will be mine. Jeremy

Quite frankly, she had afforded him a lot of grace, considering his past conduct toward her. He would just have to work on building Emmeline’s confidence in him.

He wanted simultaneously to worship her, to share his life with her, and, ultimately, to lay his head in her lap and ask her to please love him. It hurt to know they might never be on such terms.

Jeremy felt the laughter bubbling up inside him but knew it would be a mistake to let it out. God, he had forgotten how much he liked talking with her. It was so strange how she still had the ability to make him feel like the world was a better place simply by being in her presence.

The boy.” Nye paused. “Your boy. The way you are with him. If I ever compared our lives in the past, I soon realized I got the better bargain. You’re ten times the father to your son than the old lord was to you.” Jeremy swallowed. “Thanks,” he said hoarsely. “But I’m a much better husband,” Nye said cheerfully.

Once inside, with the door shut, he turned to her. “Before I start, is there anything you want to say?” His tone was perfectly controlled and calm. Oh God, he was going to be all polite again, and she couldn’t bear it. What should she do? Apologize? No, that would not suffice. If she went all polite as well, they would get nowhere. Right, it was clearly up to her. She squared her shoulders.

Before the “enlightenment” and the age of rationality, there was in the culture a collection of tricks to deal with our fallibility and reversals of fortunes. The elders can still help us with some of their ruses.

these densely settled civilizations interacted in a perverse way with European colonialism to create a “reversal of fortune,” making the places that were previously relatively wealthy in the Americas relatively poor. Today it is the United States and Canada, which were then far behind the complex civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, that are much richer than the rest of the Americas.

As a result, individuals with “nonreversible” marriages might be more satisfied than individuals with “reversible” ones. As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn’t work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might have played a causal role in the marriage’s failure.

The eternal struggle between failure and fortune is a fight not between mortal enemies but sparring partners. So fortune is improved by failure, and the reverse is also true.

Humans don’t have rumens, multiple stomach chambers, or the enzymes to break down cellulose, so we can’t extract any nutrients from grass if we eat it. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem: rather than eating the grass, humans can let animals do the hard work of assimilating the nutrients from grass, and then we can eat the animals.

As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn’t work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might

On the day that the king was delivering his injunction to the Lords, the Prudent Mary was disembarking Edward Whalley and William Goffe in Boston. New England was as yet unaware of the reversal of fortunes in England. No one in America, including the two newcomers, yet knew of the hue and cry unleashed all over England in pursuit of the king’s judges. The two men were war heroes and stars of a revolution of which Massachusetts heartily approved, and the colony’s Puritan establishment opened its arms to them.22

This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance, that one ad man used to push toothbrushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession. It shows how Procter & Gamble turned a spray named Febreze into a billion-dollar business by taking advantage of consumers’ habitual urges, how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core of addiction, and how coach Tony Dungy reversed the fortunes of the worst team in the National Football League by focusing on his players’ automatic reactions to subtle on-field cues.

Swicord is not a New Age nut; she's a writer. And even after mega-wrangles with Mattel's management—the musical was sketched out but never produced—she is still a fan of the doll. "Barbie," she said, "is bigger than all those executives. She has lasted through many regimes. She's lasted through neglect. She's survived the feminist backlash. In countries where they don't even sell makeup or have anything like our dating rituals, they play with Barbie. Barbie embodies not a cultural view of femininity but the essence of woman." Over the course of two interviews with Swicord, her young daughters played with their Barbies. I watched one wrap her tiny fist around the doll's legs and move it forward by hopping. It looked as if she were plunging the doll into the earth—or, in any event, into the bedroom floor. And while I handle words like "empowering" with tongs, it's a good description of her daughters' Barbie play. The girls do not live in a matriarchal household. Their father, Swicord's husband, Nicholas Kazan, who wrote the screenplay for Reversal of Fortune, is very much a presence in their lives. Still, the girls play in a female-run universe, where women are queens and men are drones. The ratio of Barbies to Kens is about eight to one. Barbie works, drives, owns the house, and occasionally exploits Ken for sex. But even that is infrequent: In one scenario, Ken was so inconsequential that the girls made him a valet parking attendant. His entire role was to bring the cars around for the Barbies.

those who tend to get depressed following setbacks in life differ from others in how they explain such events to themselves.  They take them as confirmation of lack of self-worth, instead of seeing them merely as temporary reversals of fortune.  This difference in explanatory styles turns out to be the key difference between optimists and pessimists.   One

Moments later, Sona Kilroy, heading for the open doorway, stepped over the sergeant’s body. With an old auto-rifle in his left hand and his favorite sword in the other, and the sharp melodic din of bolts and bullets ringing in his ears, ‘the Hammer’ grinned an evil grin to himself, well pleased. He wished he could’ve seen the look on the face of Indomitable’s captain when he realized the tables had just been turned on him! The thought amused him. It was bloody hilarious. He cackled, reveling in this complete reversal of fortune. Then he stalked onward with conviction, a grim smile on his lips – intent on taking the ship for himself. * * *

After so many reversals of fortune today, they half expected a meteorite to hurtle from the sky and vaporize them if they dared to move. Finally,

any country which has suffered a reverse of fortune instantly turns on its nonconformists.

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.