A key life skill is the ability to see Beauty where it is and not where you want it to be, where you hoped it would be, or where your parents told you it would be. The same applies to Love, Truth and Joy.
I couldn't drive you insane, you were behind the wheel the whole time. In your life, I ride shotgun.
When there is a storm in your life, it is not the time to build. No creature on earth tries to build during a storm. Conserve your energy until the storm passes.
The dance floor of life is filled with joy for everyone except for those who forget that it is better to dance by yourself than to dance with a partner who always criticizes your step.
You would not go into an apple orchard and eat the weeds so why would you go into your day and feast on worries?
"You will do as you're told, and that's the end."
She thought about that for a split second, answered calmly, "No. I won't. What will you do?"
You're getting like an attitude. What you get put through for just wanting something more out of life. Makes you vulnerable. Inside, that tug of desperation, trying not to be excited, maybe this is it, and it's usually freaks and you want to shout I'm not like you.
Human beings "belong" to some minor comity or enclave of faith at the expense of the clarity and autarkia of their intelligence and conscience, of course. "Belonging" is another way of saying: "capitulating to."
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
“With these hands a life will spring-whose limbs will stretch to the limitless sky, whose leaves will grace the vastness of the universe”
"After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn that love doesn't mean security
and you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises
you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open, with
the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child
and you learn to build your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight
after a while you learn that even sunshine burns
if you get too much
so, you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone else to bring you flowers
and you learn you really can endure
that you really are strong
you really do have worth
and you learn and you learn
with every good-bye you learn"
Take note, ye honestly ambitious: we sing happily the praises of the righteous honest in our religious texts, but don't think we really believe that kind of "goodness" pays. The muses of the merry, happy "gooder" ones who rule us, George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Patrick Hamilton harmonize the tune we know speaks true truth. Liberty, freedom and independence are to be found by keeping the notes they grace us with -- the one, five and ten dollar bills -- close by the side. Disregard their song at your own pecuniary peril.
Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependant of creatures. On everything that has formed you, you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery….a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
You, the sons and daughters, the future of Turkiye, even under such circumstances and conditions, your duty is to save the Turkish independence and the Republic, you will find the power you need in the noble blood in your veins.
The proper posture for the creature is one of receptivity. In Perelandra we see several ways in which this posture could be corrupted or destroyed. First it is always possible to seek ways to assure ourselves of repeating the pleasure. This is what makes money so suspect in Lewis' eyes - it is a means by which we assure ourselves that we can have the pleasure whenever we want it. It provides a measure of independence. One no longer has to throw oneself into the wave. Second, even when one pleasure is given, it is (as the Lady discovered) possible to turn from what is given to something which is (thought to be) preferred. And this, in turn, is what makes a life oriented toward the future suspect for Lewis - to commit too much of one's hopes and happiness to the future will make impossible the posture of receptivity appropriate to a creature.
In either case-whether we try to secure means for repeating the pleasure at will or turn from what is given to something else which is desired - Lewis thinks that we will eventually lose the capacity for delighting in what is received. For to treat a created thing as something more than that is to destroy its true character. To seek in any created thing a complete fulfillment of the longing which moves us is to make of it an object of infinite desire and, because it is only a created thing, a false infinite. It may still be sweet, at least for a time, because it is intended by its Giver to be a source of delight. But in the end it will be poison for the person who gives his heart only to it. Hence the constant temptation: the lure of the sweet poison of the false infinite.
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without its nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.
Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgement won't wreck the group's collective judgement as long as those errors aren't systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people's judgements systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information. Second, independent individuals are more likely to have a new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.
Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent -- independence, diversity, private judgement--disappear.
The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.
In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment-independent will-that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.
Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. . . . These amusing mental acrobatics are all right to play with. They are perfectly harmless and perfectly useless. . . . I always rested on the following argument. . . We look up to the sky and see the sun. Our eyes are dazzled and our senses record the fact. So here is this great sun standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical senses. But happily there is a method, apart altogether from our physical senses, of testing the reality of the sun. It is by mathematics. By means of prolonged processes of mathematics, entirely separate from the senses, astronomers are able to calculate when an eclipse will occur. They predict by pure reason that a black spot will pass across the sun on a certain day. You go and look, and your sense of sight immediately tells you that their calculations are vindicated. So here you have the evidence of the senses reinforced by the entirely separate evidence of a vast independent process of mathematical reasoning. We have taken what is called in military map-making "a cross bearing." . . . When my metaphysical friends tell me that the data on which the astronomers made their calculations, were necessarily obtained originally through the evidence of the senses, I say, "no." They might, in theory at any rate, be obtained by automatic calculating-machines set in motion by the light falling upon them without admixture of the human senses at any stage. When it is persisted that we should have to be told about the calculations and use our ears for that purpose, I reply that the mathematical process has a reality and virtue in itself, and that once discovered it constitutes a new and independent factor. I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot - in fact hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see.
[Mathematics] is an independent world Created out of pure intelligence.
Referring to the Creed, Page said: It is the summary of the fundamental principles of the American political faith as set forth in its greatest documents, its worthiest traditions, and its greatest leaders. His wording of the Creed used passages and phrases from the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Daniel Webster's reply to Robert Y. Hayne in the Senate in 1830.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
