Vagaries Of Life Quotes

The vagaries of love with all its unpredictable and capricious meanders may be a hurdle in keeping life on an even keel. Rational thinking and irrational feeling don’t always get along very well. ( "Love as dizzy as a cathedral”)

Let's soar on the wings of liberty and trace the perfect angle to tackle the vagaries of life. What can happiness be else than covering freedom, creating harmony, and finding peace with oneself? ('"Poste Restante")

When we feel betrayed by the vagaries of life, and our wet dreams turn out to be nightmares, let us keep eyes wide open and look for the sparks in the glance of the people. They not only can share a shard of oxytocin but also inspire us to appreciate the fragrance of the ordinary things we have ignored for so long. (“A handful of dust”)

If people challenge the vagaries of life, in a world where conflicting powers are outlining our fate, it may be ill-advised to actuate wrecking high-wire acts without a safety net. If they need a new swing in their reality, they cannot count on sheer luck. Whatever their exploit may be, reflection and action must be ingrained allies, on all accounts.("Ruling the waves" )

Life is a comprehension of experiences, and the vagaries of our emotions guide us through the ramblings of our distinct journeys and the backwoods of our destiny. ( "Morning after")

But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

While we are threading our way through the vagaries of life, our shortage of reciprocity and solidarity may corner us into breaches of culpability. We can eschew this and kindle a dream of universalism that does not impose itself but emerges from the world's numerous cultural and topical particularities and enable us to compare, discern, and identify, allowing us to marvel at the diversity. In this way, we can embrace universal recognition, human understanding, peace of mind, and compassion with others and with ourselves. ("I only needed a light ")

When we come to face the entangled vagaries on the chessboard of our life, let us not shrink from using the queen’s gambit to disentwine predictable hassles or diffuse incendiary plots if we want to take control of our being and make our dreams come true, transparent, and straightforward. (”Life with a sea view”)

Tensions and muddles might be irritating, but they can allow us to explore the deeper levels of our inner selves. We can refurbish the casting of our emotions, reset the pieces of our mental pattern, and retune the vagaries of our habits, gaining the freedom to write a new script of our life story and a free pass for our destiny. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

I had always thought life was a road, twisting and turning with the vagaries of fate. Luck and opportunity, gifts beyond our control. As I gazed across the endless night, it dawned on me then, that our paths were forged from the choices we made. Whether to reach for an opportunity or to let it pass by. To be swept up with changed or to hold your ground.

Let it rain on some days, Let yourself shiver on some cold nights, So when it's Spring you'll know why it was all worth going through.

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.

In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities. A childhood that wasn't spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no wonder, seems too dull to imagine.

I began to realize that life, despite moments of happiness and joy, is really about discovering priorities and dealing with unforeseen vagaries, differences, obstacles, inconveniences, and imperfections.

In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Love of my life. Love. Of. My. Life. A retrospectively absurd concept since the most I can say is that he was the love of a particular period of my life, and that it is the random vagaries of life itself, and never love, that define time limits. Meaning, to be in love and wish for its immortality is energy unwisely spent. The idea that we have any choice in the matter is the great illusion.

So you have two basic options: deny the unpredictability of life and create your own false sense of security, or accept the vagaries of life and learn to live with them.

Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires.

The question of life being fair or unfair is one of the first things to drop away once you truly understand that you're as vulnerable as the next person to life's vagaries.

The prisoner's recurrent, sporadic dreams of escape were simply that - spurious vagaries dismissed almost as quickly as they blossomed in Schkirt's feverish mind.

... even if you don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, a few official-sounding vagaries and a confident tone often more than does the trick.

Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: “I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world.

You may realise that nothing is ever my fault. It is evident why that is. I am special and above the regular humdrum vagaries of life that affect the little people. Accordingly, since I cannot be held to account, by reason of my elevated status in the world, it follows that nothing is my fault.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale.

Life is difficult and people are imperfect. Unable to cope with the vagaries of this world, everyone makes mistakes. True love is the ability to love people despite their mistakes.

You’re human, and sometimes the vagaries of life are just too delicious to ignore.

we may hope for love,” the Ascendant said tremulously. “Yet, too often we pass it by, distracted as we are by the vagaries of life.

Occasionally someone will tell me that they won't have pets because they're messy, and I suppose there's some truth to that, between the fur and the slobber and the occasional puddle on the floor. I have to choke down the temptation to respond that life is messy, and its vagaries go down hardest with those who fool themselves into thinking they can keep it neat.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people’s savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became considerably less vague.

Oluale Kossola could never fathom why he was in “de Americky soil.” “Dey bring us ’way from our soil and workee us hard de five year and six months.” And once free, he says, “we ain’ got no country and we ain’ got no lan’.”41 And in postbellum America he was subject to the exploitation of his labor and the vagaries of the law, just as he was in antebellum America. He remained confounded by this cruel treatment for the rest of his life.

I'd like a break. I'm forty-six, so the undertow is beginning to get to me." "Then what are you good for?" she asked, in a kind tone. "Oh, a man around the house has his uses. A dildo; an ear to talk to; two arms around you; a voice from the next room when you're lonesome." "I have a dog to talk to." "That might be a deal killer.

In a universe whose size is beyond human imagining, where our world floats like a dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably lonely. We scan the time scale and the mechanisms of life itself for portents and signs of the invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet—perhaps the only thinking animals in the entire sidereal universe—the burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. We uncover the bones of the past and seek for our origins. There is a path there, but it appears to wander. The vagaries of the road may have a meaning, however; it is thus we torture ourselves....  Loren Eiseley, 1946...

Draupadi learns that both vengeance and justice come at a price. Krishna asks her to forgive and let go. It is difficult. He holds her in his arms and gives her strength. Life is difficult and people are imperfect. Unable to cope with the vagaries of this world, everyone makes mistakes. True love is the ability to love people despite their mistakes.

There comes an inevitable time in every life when we must cross a threshold and encounter that invisible divider between who we are and who we must become. Sometimes, the passage is evident - a sudden catastrophe that tests our mettle, a tragic loss that opens our eyes to the bane of our mortality, or a personal triumph that instills in us the confidence we need to cast aside our fears. Other times, our passage is obscured by the minutiae of an overcrowded life until we catch it in a glimpse of forbidden desire; in an inexplicable sense of melancholic emptiness or a craving for more, always more, than what we already possess. Sometimes we embrace the chance to embark on our passage, welcoming it as a chance to finally shed the adolescent skin and prove our worth against the incessant vagaries of fate. Other times, we rail against its unexpected cruelty, against the sharp thrust into a world we're not ready to explore, one we do not know or trust. For us, the past is a haven that we are loathe to depart, lest the future corrupt our soul. Better not to change at all, rather than become someone we will not recognize.

Q:What is the proletariat? A:The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century

Can you imagine? I would think any man who had decided to leave his wife and child to the vagaries of fate would have the decency to choose a more pristine method. Poison, perhaps. Like that Greek philosopher. Socrates, yes? He took a potion that allowed for a very dignified death. I believe he held court until the end.” “Hemlock,” Aunt Vera said with approval. “I would advise all suicidal men to seek hemlock,” Flora said. “A laudable suggestion,” her mother affirmed. “Or perhaps an extra dose of laudanum. There are several ways of ending one’s life that don’t necessitate a full scrubbing by servants before your loved ones can pay their respects.

When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors.

But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?

But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial precious moments in one's life; but of course, at that time, this was not the impression on had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Her mind escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through the great gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her girlhood. That question originally put in Paradise, "Why shouldn't we?" came into her mind and stayed there. It is a question that marks a definite stage in the departure from innocence. Things that had seemed opaque and immutable appeared translucent and questionable. She began to read more and more in order to learn things and get a light upon things, and less and less to pass the time. Ideas came to her that seemed at first strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and then crept to a sort of acceptance by familiarity. And a disturbing intermittent sense of a general responsibility increased and increased in her. You will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up in Lady Harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not then you may find it a little difficult to understand. You see it comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. All children, I suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. They go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision, they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst the directed securities of home. But for more of us and more there comes a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. The warm lights that once rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are, smoky and guttering candles. Beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. Ours is the wisdom or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision. That burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. The talent has been given us and we may not bury it.

III. Buddhism The Man Who Woke Up Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message and kings themselves were bowing before him, people came to him even as they were to come to Jesus asking what he was.1 How many people have provoked this question—not “Who are you?” with respect to name, origin, or ancestry, but “What are you? What order of being do you belong to? What species do you represent?” Not Caesar, certainly. Not Napoleon, or even Socrates. Only two: Jesus and Buddha. When the people carried their puzzlement to the Buddha himself, the answer he gave provided an identity for his entire message. “Are you a god?” they asked. “No.” “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?” Buddha answered, “I am awake.” His answer became his title, for this is what Buddha means. The Sanskrit root budh denotes both to wake up and to know. Buddha, then, means the “Enlightened One,” or the “Awakened One.” While the rest of the world was wrapped in the womb of sleep, dreaming a dream known as the waking state of human life, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze, the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with a man who woke up. His

The temple was in a field of graves suddenly a pitiful-looking skeleton appeared and said: A melancholy autumn wind Blows through the world; the pampas grass waves As we drift to the moor, Drift to the sea. What can be done With the mind of a man That should be clear But though he is dressed up in a monk's robe, Just lets life pass him by? Such deep musings Made me uneasy, I could not sleep. Towards dawn I dozed off... I found myself surrounded by a group of skeletons, acting as they had when they were still alive. One skeleton came over to me and said: Memories Flee and Are no more. All are empty dreams Devoid of meaning. Violate the reality of things And babble about 'God' and 'the Buddha' And you will never find the true Way. Still breathing, You feel animated, So a corpse in a field Seems to be something Apart from you. If chunks of rock Can serve as a memento To the dead A better headstone Would be a simple tea-mortar. Humans are indeed frightful things. A single moon Bright and clear In an unclouded sky; Yet we still stumble In the world's darkness. This world Is but A fleeting dream So why be alarmed At its evanescence? The vagaries of life, Though painful, Teach us Not to cling To this floating world. Why do people Lavish decoration On this set of bones, Destined to disappear Without a trace? The original body Must return to Its original place. Do not search For what cannot be found. No one really knows The nature of birth Nor the true dwelling place. We return to the source And turn to dust. Many paths lead from The foot of the mountain, But at the peak We all gaze at the Single bright moon. If at the end of our journey There is no final Resting place, Then we need not fear Losing our Way. No beginning. No end. Our mind Is born and dies; The emptiness of emptiness! Relax, And the mind Runs wild; Control the world And you can cast it aside. Rain, hail, snow, and ice: All are different But when they fall They become to same water As the valley stream. The ways of proclaiming The Mind all vary, But the same heavenly truth Can be seen In each and every one. Cover your path With fallen pine needles So no one will be able To locate your True dwelling place. How vain, The endless funderals at the Cremation grounds of Mount Toribe! Don't the mourner realize That they will be next? 'Life is fleeeting!' We think at the sight Of smoke drifting from Mount Toribe, But when will we realize That we are in the same boat? All is in vain! This morning, A healthy friend; This evening, A wisp of cremation smoke. What a pity! Evening smoke from Mount Toribe Blown violently To and fro By the wind. When burned We become ashes, and earth when buried. Is it only our sins That remain behind? All the sins Committed In the Three Worlds Will fade away Together with me.

She was the first close friend who I felt like I’d re­ally cho­sen. We weren’t in each other’s lives be­cause of any obli­ga­tion to the past or con­ve­nience of the present. We had no shared his­tory and we had no rea­son to spend all our time to­ gether. But we did. Our friend­ship in­ten­si­fied as all our friends had chil­dren – she, like me, was un­con­vinced about hav­ing kids. And she, like me, found her­self in a re­la­tion­ship in her early thir­ties where they weren’t specif­i­cally work­ing to­wards start­ing a fam­ily. By the time I was thirty-four, Sarah was my only good friend who hadn’t had a baby. Ev­ery time there was an­other preg­nancy an­nounce­ment from a friend, I’d just text the words ‘And an­other one!’ and she’d know what I meant. She be­came the per­son I spent most of my free time with other than Andy, be­cause she was the only friend who had any free time. She could meet me for a drink with­out plan­ning it a month in ad­vance. Our friend­ship made me feel lib­er­ated as well as safe. I looked at her life choices with no sym­pa­thy or con­cern for her. If I could ad­mire her de­ci­sion to re­main child-free, I felt en­cour­aged to ad­mire my own. She made me feel nor­mal. As long as I had our friend­ship, I wasn’t alone and I had rea­son to be­lieve I was on the right track. We ar­ranged to meet for din­ner in Soho af­ter work on a Fri­day. The waiter took our drinks or­der and I asked for our usual – two Dirty Vodka Mar­ti­nis. ‘Er, not for me,’ she said. ‘A sparkling wa­ter, thank you.’ I was ready to make a joke about her un­char­ac­ter­is­tic ab­sti­nence, which she sensed, so as soon as the waiter left she said: ‘I’m preg­nant.’ I didn’t know what to say. I can’t imag­ine the ex­pres­sion on my face was par­tic­u­larly en­thu­si­as­tic, but I couldn’t help it – I was shocked and felt an un­war­ranted but in­tense sense of be­trayal. In a de­layed re­ac­tion, I stood up and went to her side of the ta­ble to hug her, un­able to find words of con­grat­u­la­tions. I asked what had made her change her mind and she spoke in va­garies about it ‘just be­ing the right time’ and wouldn’t elab­o­rate any fur­ther and give me an an­swer. And I needed an an­swer. I needed an an­swer more than any­thing that night. I needed to know whether she’d had a re­al­iza­tion that I hadn’t and, if so, I wanted to know how to get it. When I woke up the next day, I re­al­ized the feel­ing I was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing was not anger or jeal­ousy or bit­ter­ness – it was grief. I had no one left. They’d all gone. Of course, they hadn’t re­ally gone, they were still my friends and I still loved them. But huge parts of them had dis­ap­peared and there was noth­ing they could do to change that. Un­less I joined them in their spa­ces, on their sched­ules, with their fam­i­lies, I would barely see them. And I started dream­ing of an­other life, one com­pletely re­moved from all of it. No more chil­dren’s birth­day par­ties, no more chris­ten­ings, no more bar­be­cues in the sub­urbs. A life I hadn’t ever se­ri­ously con­tem­plated be­fore. I started dream­ing of what it would be like to start all over again. Be­cause as long as I was here in the only Lon­don I knew – mid­dle-class Lon­don, cor­po­rate Lon­don, mid-thir­ties Lon­don, mar­ried Lon­don – I was in their world. And I knew there was a whole other world out there.

Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority—where he can forget the rule-bound "people," for he is an exception to them;—but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense. Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress—green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to himself, "The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception—than I am, the exception!"— and he would make his way down , above all, "inside." The study of the average man—long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company - (all company is bad company except with one’s peers):—that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real shortcuts and ways of making his task easier; I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics, simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the "rule-bound man" in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust—for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat and ape; as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter. More frequently it happens that, as I’ve intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul; among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak "badly" of human beings—not even in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man.

They spoke without much fluency about a minor universe of events that affected neither of them: the vagaries of neighborhood life, people they both knew but didn't much care about.

...I began planning all my work this way, beginning with a concrete student objective (e.g., to write a haiku) and a detailed analysis of the task involved, including the necessary knowledge of the form, knowledge of the kinds of content, and the procedures involved in actually producing one. I began to plan in terms of the prerequisite knowledge for a task and to delay teaching until that was in place. I began inventing activities that would make initial approaches to learning tasks simpler (e.g., providing the first line of the poem) and sequencing learning activities from easy to difficult. Underneath all this planning lay the concept of inquiry...That is, I worked to set up lessons so that the students could derive and test rules, generalizations, and interpretations for themselves. Most important, I learned that what and how much students learned was dependent on my planning and my care in bringing those plans to fruition in the classroom. I would never be able to view teaching as a hit-or-miss operation again, one that was subject to the vagaries of the weather, students' moods, and other random factors out of my control. I learned that if students did not learn, on any given day, I should look for the cause in my assumptions about the learning tasks, my planning, my teaching, or all three. I suddenly was more excited about teaching English to junior high students than about my graduate work. As I look back on it now, what I had considered a disgraceful demotion was one of the most important events in my life.

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else. Since gardening is a way not of subduing the indifference of nature but of raising one's own spontaneity to respond to the disregarding vagaries and unpredictabilities of nature, we do not look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look on ourselves as persons in passage.

The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely at all. Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle. If nature will offer us no home, offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space for ourselves. We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature's vagaries.

Tired of the vagaries of life under the judges, the people ask the last judge, Samuel, for a king “to rule over us and protect us from our enemies.” Although Samuel feels that this is a rejection of God’s “Kingship,” God tells him to do as the people ask, and Israel gets its first king: a man named Saul. At

The soul evolves as a person addresses the chaos, vagaries, and perplexities of enduring an earthly life. We each ultimately become our own version of an ideal self by stage-managing who we become.

At one time, the church provided much of the Western world with a ready-made symbol system to explain all of life's vagaries. With the weakening of organized religion in the past century, some have cast away the church, but replaced philosophies and morals with nothing. Abandoning all symbol systems because one has disappointed you is like abandoning all language because someone once insulted you. We need symbol systems. We have to know how meanings relate to each other and to ourselves.

Anna asked, “Does that matter? What counts is the result, not the route by which one reaches the result. It’s often all a matter of luck.” Ulf pondered this. The role of luck in human affairs had always intrigued him. So much of what we did was influenced by factors that were beyond our control—the vagaries of others, sequences of events that we initiated in ignorance of where they would lead, chance meetings that led to the making of a decision that would change our life.

Cometh The Day by Stewart Stafford All his life, he'd just been a pawn And each day, another false dawn Then the vagaries of the state Became his to dictate And his enemies never looked so forlorn. © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.

The immigration debate in America today is not really about immigration. Nor is it about national security, the economy or the vagaries of our outdated asylum system. Like much else in our civic life, the immigration debate is mostly a proxy for domestic policies and the culture wars. It just happens to a particularly potent proxy because it tends to elicit strong feelings about the American dream, ethnic identity, class and nationhood. That is to say, immigration is an issue that’s ripe for exploitation and cooption by both the Left and the Right. Each side can easily condemn the other without ever getting down to debating actual US policy on its merits. This is one reason why we still have an immigration system that dates from 1965. Book Review: “They’re not sending their best.” Claremont Review of Books, volume 20, no.3 (summer, 2020). P.45

Science, then, is the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything, whether it be the vagaries of human nature, the role of great figures in history, or the origins of life itself.

wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one.

crisis seemed to vindicate the Soviet model. For, if Marxism-Leninism stood for anything, it was the prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Now it seemed to be doing precisely that. Understandably, the more the American dream turned to nightmare, the more people were attracted to the Russian alternative of a planned economy – insulated from the vagaries of the market, yet capable of feats of construction every bit as awesome as the skyscrapers of New York or the mass-produced cars of Henry Ford. All the totalitarian state asked in return was complete control of every aspect of life.

No matter how narrow our perceptions become in the daily obsessions of the organization, there is no such thing as a life lived only within an organization. There are other necessities calling us to a much greater participation than any corporation can offer. The most efficiently run, streamlined organization, the best-groomed, most-organized executive is interwoven with the ragged vagaries of creation, and despite our best attempts to anchor ourselves in the concrete foundations of profitability and permanence, we remain forever at the whim, mercy, and pleasure of the wind-blown world. Ironically, we bring more vitality into our organizations when we refuse to make their goals the measure of our success and start to ask about the greater goals they might serve, and when we stop looking to them as parents who will supply necessities we can only obtain when we wrestle directly with our own destiny. In a sense, we place the same burdens on our organizational life as we place on the rest of our existence. We feel there is something wrong at the center of it all, and we have to put it right. We are forever looking for a cure for our ills. We do this by placing ourselves in the position of manager, of thus managing change. Unless it is managed, something is wrong. But our real unconscious and underlying wish is to find a cure for the impermanence of life, and for that there is no remedy. Most of the difficulties we confront at work are no different from those human beings have been dealing with for millenia. Life is full of loneliness, failure, grief, and loss to an extent that terrifies us, and we will do anything to will ourselves another existence.

I understood the vagaries of nature and the vicissitudes of young girls' hearts. The beats of my spirit I put on hold deepened my awareness of Life. But only the madness in me made me enjoy every second of being alive.

But astrophysics is a field of precision. It isn’t impacted by the vagaries of human behavior and emotions, like finance is. Business, economics, and investing, are fields of uncertainty, overwhelmingly driven by decisions that can’t easily be explained with clean formulas, like a trip to Pluto can. But we desperately want it to be like a trip to Pluto, because the idea of a NASA engineer being in 99.99998% control of an outcome is beautiful and comforting. It’s so comforting that we’re tempted to tell ourselves stories about how much control we have in other parts of our life, like money.

Those two ordeals taught me a lot about the vagaries of life, especially in China. I learned that friendships aren’t reliable. Nor are marriages. What kind of relationship is left?

Most strong women are strong because they have to be. Life has not allowed them to lean on others for support.

As if the natural world alone was not sufficiently demoralizing, our ancestors seemed compelled to augment it with supernatural forces designed to intensify its gloom. If religion's primary purpose was comfort against the vagaries of life, we could have wished for much better than the gods and myths we inherited.

Rockefeller had positioned himself exactly where he wished to be—poised to profit from either surplus or scarcity and all but immune to the vagaries of the marketplace.

When there are too many physician-patient interactions, the amplitude gets turned up on everything,” he says. “More people with non-fatal problems are taking more medications and having more procedures, many of which are not really helpful and a few of which are harmful, while the people with really fatal illnesses are rarely cured and ultimately die anyway.” So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you’ve got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don’t. Such are the vagaries of life.

Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag. It may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density. Crucially,

To be hanged He was in his cell, Wondering about heaven and hell, Because he was the one due to be hanged, And throughout the night by old demons he was flanked and fanged, He remembered everything, his every act, That had turned him into the man whose conscience was never intact, A victim of many vagaries and a flippant attitude, Always surrounded by them in multitude, But tonight, his last night, when he could dream, when he could imagine, Think of a new hope maybe; and think of a new short battle that he could still win, Because tomorrow by the afternoon he shall be dangling on the noose, Which is already beginning to form a grip around his neck, though loose, He imagined and conversed with his own mind, And there he picked moments of happiness, whichever he could find, And waited for the sun’s rays to enter his dark cell, Where desires, wishes and hopes died and fell, In their midst he held on to few moments of happiness, just a few, To help him walk upto the noose and invent a form courage, totally new, The sun’s rays gradually gathered in his dark cell and brightened it slowly, As he looked at the walls hopelessly, but thoughtfully, He looked perturbed but not demented or lost, He knew it was the end of everything, his walk upto the gallows to be his steps last, But he appeared to struggle with the invisible frost, That had frozen his feelings and cast him in an emotional world where he was lost, He was despondent, yes he was, you can say that, But the man in him had not died yet, he had not allowed that, So he walked with careful but slow steps towards the final knot that would seal everything for him, And push him into the world where there will be nothing and noone except him, For that is the tragedy of dying, you die alone, with no one but you, But he had held on to his moments of happiness, as he approached the hangman, he asked him to do what he ought to do, The look between the two, the one dying and the one to end life forever, was strange, It was like a rose looking at its own scent, but looking at it, it felt it belonged to a different range, Of emotions, of senses, of feelings, of every thought, and as the he let go of his moments of happiness, The hangman covered his face and hanged him for the sake of justice, and then entered the moment of emotional stillness, For he had executed a man whose body dangled on the rope, A sight with which the hangman could not cope, He turned his face around and then forced himself to be the hangman he is always meant to be, Whereas the man who was just now hanged remained hanging forever in his memories, there now forever to be, And in the dark cell where the sun’s rays still try to find him, The man hangs on like the strange scent of the rose, in faint smells of the corners less bright and more dim!

After the separation from his partners and the closing of his firm (for reasons that had nothing to do with him), he did not start a new mega-fund. He limited his involvement in managing other people’s money. (Most people reintegrate into the comfort of other firms and leverage their reputation by raising monstrous amounts of outside money in order to collect large fees.) But such restraint requires some intuition, some self-knowledge. It is vastly less stressful to be independent—and one is never independent when involved in a large structure with powerful clients. It is hard enough to deal with the intricacies of probabilities, you need to avoid the vagaries of exposure to human moods. True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind. Thorp certainly learned a lesson: The most stressful job he ever had was running the math department of the University of California, Irvine. You can detect that the man is in control of his life.

Nor is it wise to entrust our schools to inexperienced teachers, principals, and superintendents. Education is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs. American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it is threatening to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

We'll drink tea and ponder the vagaries of love, the secrets of life, the mysteries of the universe...

God’s definition of going well is unique, distinct, almost eccentric. His definition of wellness is not about health, finances, or job security. It’s not about unfailing protection from the vagaries and dangers of a broken world. It’s not about life being fair. It’s about acceptance.

When Scripture says, "As a man thinks, so is he," it is raw truth. How we approach life and react to its vagaries determines the bulk of our character. How we love is locked into how we think about it. What angers us is triggered by how we think. It is between our ears that we decide how easily offended we will be. When it comes to harsh words from others, whether my skin absorbs like cotton or deflects like Teflon is a decision I make. All of that happens in a three-pound organ five-and-a-half inches across called my brain. In a very real sense, my world begins and ends between my ears. I don't have to be brain-dead to be brain-defeated.

It’s odd, then, that in my twenties, despite my devotion to urbanity, I often found myself wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one. I can’t explain this by way of any rational desire;

For as long as I can remember, I have been held hostage by the vagaries of mood. When my mood is good, I am cheerful, productive, and affectionate. I sparkle at parties, I write decent sentences, I have what the kids call swag. When my mood swings, however, I am beset by self-loathing and knotted with guilt and shame. I am overtaken by a pervasive sense of hopelessness, a grim pessimism about even the possibility of happiness. My symptoms have never been serious enough to require hospitalization, nor have they ever prevented me from functioning either personally or professionally, but they have made my life and the lives of the people whom I love much more difficult.

spent a lot of time on her back, pondering the mystery and vagaries of life. Positional prostitutional philosophy,

but we are still vulnerable to the vagaries of the global economic turbulence because of an excess of imports and reduced exports, leading to trade deficit, increased current account deficit—which leads to inflation—and the depreciation of the rupee to 60.49 per US dollar in June 2013.