Quotes about Story

Buddha’s Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader’s attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life.
-- Chitra Divakaruni, international best-selling author, whose books include Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart and Palace of Illusions.

If you want your life to be a magnificent story, then begin by realizing that you are the author and everyday you have the opportunity to write a new page.

It's all about letting the story take over.

Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with people's dreams - their visions, really - we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape.

In our human lives, we are often impatient, ill-tempered, inappropriate. We find it difficult to treat our intimates with the love we really hold for them. Despite this, they bear with us because of the larger, higher level of family that they honor even in our outbursts. This is their commitment.

As artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all. When we deal with one another, we are dealing not merely with our own human personalities but also with the unseen but ever-present throng of ideas, visions, stories, poems, songs, sculptures, art-as-facts that crowd the temple of consciousness waiting their turn to be born.

Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position--at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary pat in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.

The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries. Our story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future.

The world has continued to demonstrate the ridiculous attitude of men. There is the story of a man condemned as an "old fossil", and called crazy because he thought of planting a mango grove. No one helped him plant, in fact, all deserted him, scoffing and mocking him. Years rolled by, the mango trees grew and brought forth delicious fruit and all the sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters and great-greats ran to the grove and placed up a sign board saying, "This Mango grove belongs to us!"

That's the world. The world has never once thought how it has ill-treated its benefactor.

The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

Better than a meaningless story of a thousand words is a single word of deep meaning which, when heard, produces peace.

Poetry is the story of your life set to verse.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

"I believe that there is only one story in the world...Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil...A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?"

every story has an end,but in life every end is just a new begining.

I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

Over the course of the millennia, all these ancestors in your tree, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time-to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?

No story is devoid of meaning ... If you know how to look for it.

Often one of the stumbling blocks to living a simpler life is our inability or unwillingness to change how we play some of the games that got us into these complicated lives in the first place.

Telling a story without an obstacle for your hero to overcome is like watching paint dry. It's boring.

Your Story = Your Brand!

"In few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story."

Milarepa had searched everywhere for enlightenment, but could find no answer - until one day, he saw an old man walking slowly down a mountain path, carrying a heavy sack. Immediately, Milarepa sensed that this old man knew the secret he had been desperately seeking for many years.

'Old man, please tell me what you know. What is enlightenment?'

The old man smiled at hime for a moment, and swung the heavy burden off his shoulders, and stood straight.

'Yes, I see!' cried Milarepa. 'My everlasting gratitude. But please, one question more. What is after enlightenment?'

Smiling again, the old man picked up the sack once again, lunged it over his shoulders, steadied his burden, and continued on his way.

What shames us, what we most fear to tell, does not set us apart from others; it binds us together if only we can take the risk to speak it.

The quick and easy way to stop people from repeating themselves in any situation, especially in the workplace is to simply say You’ve told me that story before, and it’s an excellent story, and repeat the lesson or point you took from that story the first time you heard it.

"Stories are medicine.
They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -
we need only listen"