Substance Use Inspirational Quotes

I use the terms "sky" and "earth" because as a human I cannot imagine those elements not being there. It is a way to give substance to nothingness.

While humans have the propensity to develop a suite of prosocial behaviors, they are also capable of developing antisocial behavior, engaging in substance abuse, experiencing depression, and bearing children at an early age...Young people who develop aggressive behavior tendencies are likely to develop problems with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; to fail academically; to have children at an early age; and to raise children likely to have the same problems.

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281).

I need only, to make them reappear, pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, Florence, within whose syllables had gradually accumulated the longing inspired in me by the places for which they stood. Even in spring, to come upon the name Balbec in a book sufficed to awaken in me the desire for storms at sea and for Norman Gothic; even on a stormy day the name Florence or Venice would awaken the desire for sunshine, for lilies, for the Palace of the Doges and for Santa Maria del Fiore. But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels. They magnified the idea that I had formed of certain places on the surface of the globe, making them more special and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself cities, landscapes, historical monuments, as more or less attractive pictures, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different in essence from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character they assumed from being designated by names, names that were for themselves alone, proper names such as people have! Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us— of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons— a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, on account of the limitations imposed by the process used in their reproduction or by a whim on the designer's part, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the ships and the church and the people in the streets.

If I were to create a word that more accurately describes alcoholism and addiction, I would say it was dependencyism. Sounds silly, doesn't it? Yet it's no sillier than the word alcoholism. The reason alcoholism no longer sounds silly to you is because you're used to hearing it, reading it, and thinking about it.

Carl Erskine, the famous baseball pitcher, said that bad thinking got him into more spots than bad pitching. As quoted in Norman Vincent Peale’s Faith Made Them Champions, he said: “One sermon has helped me overcome pressure better than the advice of any coach. Its substance was that, like a squirrel hoarding chestnuts, we should store up our moments of happiness and triumph so that in a crisis we can draw upon these memories for help and inspiration. As a kid I used to fish at the bend of a little country stream just outside my home town. I can vividly remember this spot in the middle of a big, green pasture surrounded by tall, cool trees. Whenever tension builds up both on or off the ball field now, I concentrate on this relaxing scene, and the knots inside me loosen up.” Gene Tunney told how concentrating on the wrong “facts” almost caused him to lose his first fight with Jack Dempsey. He awoke one night from a nightmare. “The vision was of myself, bleeding, mauled and helpless, sinking to the canvas and being counted out. I couldn’t stop trembling. Right there I had already lost that ring match which meant everything to me—the championship. . . . What could I do about this terror? I could guess the cause. I had been thinking about the fight in the wrong way. I had been reading the newspapers, and all they had said was how Tunney would lose. Through the newspapers I was losing the battle in my own mind. “Part of the solution was obvious. Stop reading the papers. Stop thinking of the Dempsey menace, Jack’s killing punch and ferocity of attack. I simply had to close the doors of my mind to destructive thoughts—and divert my thinking to other things.

Pharmaceuticals are essentially biomimetic in principle, but are not often designed to have no side effects. Drugs were historically created from natural substances; the word drug comes from the Dutch droog, meaning "dried plant." As evidenced in Neanderthal archaeological digs, natural medicines have been in use for more than sixty thousand years. Excavations have revealed the use of at least seven herbal remedies that still show proven therapeutic value, including ephedra (as a cold remedy), hollyhock (poor man's aspirin), and yarrow (wound dressing).