Quotes about Relatives

When we say Mitakuye Oyasin - "All Our Relations" 
 But the word Mitakuye means relations and Oyasin means more than family, more than a Nation, more than all of humankind. Everything that has a spirit.

Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

The Art of Success . . . Success is ninety-nine percent mental attitude. It calls for love, joy, optimism, confidence, serenity, poise, faith, courage, cheerfulness, imagination, initiative, tolerance, honesty, humility, patience, and enthusiasm. . . . Success is having the courage to meet failure without being defeated. It is refusing to let present loss interfere with your long-range goal. . . . Success is relative and individual and personal. It is your answer to the problem of making your minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years add up to a great life.

God gives us relatives; thank God we can chose our friends.

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.

Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

I give to my friends the assurance that if they will recast their ideas and attitudes about the relative importance of the spiritual to the material, and bring themselves to participate in the mighty cause of establishing God's kingdom in the earth, they will find a satisfaction, a sureness of purpose, a peace and contentment, surpassing anything they have ever known. They will not be ashamed to say to themselves and to their fellows that God and his work come first. When they can develop the faith and the courage to make this acknowledgment, self-sufficiency and egotism will be replaced by humility of spirit. The brotherhood of man will become real to them. Their service will be ennobled, and they will lay the foundation for the attainment of the highest rewards and blessings vouchsafed to humanity.

More and more, I have come to realize how thoughts and concepts are all that block us from always being . . . in the absolute. . . . When the view is there, thoughts are seen for what they truly are: fleeting and transparent, and only relative. . . . You do not cling to thoughts and emotions or reject them, but welcome them all within the vast embrace of Rigpa.

In Japan, employees occasionally work themselves to death. It's called Karoshi. I don't want that to happen to anybody in my department. The trick is to take a break as soon as you see a bright light and hear dead relatives beckon.

Much has been said about the relative value of happiness; but write it on your heart that happiness is the cheapest thing in the world-when we buy it for someone else.

The subject of the poem was Bridget of Kildare (450-523), a Christian lass among the Druids in Ireland. Saint Bridget was A problem child. Although a lass Demure and mild, And one who strove To please her dad, Saint Bridget drove The family mad. For here's the fault in Bridget lay: She WOULD give everything away. To any soul Whose luck was out She'd give her bowl Of stirabout; She'd give her shawl, Divide her purse With one or all. And what was worse, When she ran out of things to give She'd borrow from a relative. Her father's gold, Her grandsire's dinner, She'd hand to cold and hungry sinner; Give wine, give meat, No matter whose; Take from her feet The very shoes, And when her shoes had gone to others, Fetch forth her sister's and her mother's. She could not quit. She had to share; Gave bit by bit The silverware, The barnyard geese, The parlor rug, Her little niece-'s christening mug, Even her bed to those in want, And then the mattress of her aunt. An easy touch For poor and lowly, She gave so much And grew so holy That when she died Of years and fame, The countryside Put on her name, And still the Isles of Erin fidget With generous girls named Bride or Bridget. Well, one must love her. Nonetheless, In thinking of her Givingness, There's no denial She must have been A sort of trial Unto her kin. The moral, too, seems rather quaint. WHO had the patience of a saint, From evidence presented here? Saint Bridget? Or her near and dear?

Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.

I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.

As soon as it was light, I started to see Mr. Benjamin L. Shaw and met him on his way to inquire as to my mother's condition. This gentleman was a relative, himself and my mother being first cousins, in consequence of which and being a man of great wealth, he had extended to the family much financial assistance. He asked if my mother had made any request before her death. I told him of her desire to be buried at Nauvoo. He said that her wishes must be complied with. We went together to the undertaker and he ordered a coffin, and a suitable strong box in which the casket containing her remains were to be placed. Some ladies came and she was suitably made ready for burial. The habiliments with which she was to be clothed were made and her body was invested with the robes for her final rest. She was placed in the coffin and then, O, how peaceful and pleasant seemed her rest! Then, my mother, your troubles were ended. The storms of life were passed and your spirit could soar to a world of peace and joy. No more shall you endure the tempests of mortal suffering or the winds of malevolence roar around your pathway, nor the clouds of adversity shut out the genial sunlight of connubial joys. Your career of sorrow now is over. Well and patiently you have endured the reverses attendant upon the mortal existence. You have accepted of God's revealed and redeeming truth, and the celestial consolations of the future life will heal the wounds inflicted along the dreary shores of this life.

It is true, we do not like to lose a good, kind companion, a wife, a husband, a child, a brother, a sister, or any of our near and dear friends or relatives; but we have to do it, and it is right and proper that we should. They go a little before us; when we get there they will receive and welcome us and say, "God bless you, you have come at last." That is the way I look at it. I ex pect to strike hands and embrace my friends who have gone before.

One of my favorite words is "miscommunication." Its meaning has become so broad as to justify everything from the Middle East crisis to why a relative missed the wedding. In the business world, vendors and clients alike use it to explain away huge mistakes and, best of all, without assigning responsibility to anyone. It is the verbal Get-Out-of-Jail card for the '90s.

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.

The Names . . . have existed from all eternity: these Names are designated as "Lords" (Arbab), who often have all the appearance of hypostases though they cannot strictly be defined as such. We know them only by our knowledge of ourselves (that is the basic maxim). God describes Himself to us through ourselves. Which means that the divine Names are essentially relative to the beings who name them, since these beings discover and experience them in their own mode of being. . . . Thus the divine Names have meaning and full reality only through and for beings . . . in which they are manifested. Likewise from all eternity, these forms, substrate of the divine Names, have existed in the divine Essence (A 'yan thabita). And it is these latent individualities who from all eternity have aspired to concrete being in actu. Their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. And this nostalgia of the divine Names is nothing other than the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occultation.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.

We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions,of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

[My mother] speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety.

Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister.

Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional. In E. T. Bell Men of Mathematics, New York: Simona and Schuster, 1937.

Get to Know Yourself Once you start getting acquainted with yourselves, finding out who you are and where you belong and who your relatives are, spiritually speaking as well as in the earthly frame of reference, you come to the astounding, overwhelming realization that you are a child of God-that you belong to Him, that He is your Father. He is our Father.

In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.

There was a young lady named Bright, Whose speed was far faster than light: She set out one day In a relative way, And returned home the previous night.

RANK, n. Relative elevation in the scale of human worth.

MAGNITUDE, n. Size [that is] purely relative. If everything in the universe were increased 1,000 diameters nothing would be any larger than it was before, but if one thing remain unchanged all the others would be larger than they had been.